Embodied Learning

We've been learning a lot with and about bodies, including our own bodies, this week. One day I took P roller skating at a nearby rink. We got great exercise, and my skills from when I last roller skated 25 years ago came back pretty well. P didn't make it away from the wall on her own this time, but she determinedly worked her way around the edges, getting faster and faster, and when I took her hand to help her away from the wall and around obstacles, she got steadier each time. She loved it and would like to go back. The rink has a "pixie class" for 2-6 year olds on Thursday mornings (I wonder if they'd let P participate?), so we might get T into the act as well, if he's interested.

Then P and I were invited to Buddy Week at the martial arts dojo where P and T's cousin and his mom (my sister-in-law) train. P and I went to two classes. P had a blast and wants to join up right away. She's unfazed by the homework requirements (kids must do at-home chore lists, logged reading, and other things designed to improve their discipline at home, and most of all in school, in order to qualify for their next belt test), and even wanted to practice "Yes, sir/ma'am!" at home! I had fun and a couple of good workouts, but I have some misgivings about whether the dojo is a good match for our family's values or unschooling philosophy. While all dojos I've experienced require respect for those of greater rank and courtesy toward everyone, the "respect" at this dojo takes the form of a lot of "yes, sir/ma'am," which is expected immediately, without time to think or digest the information or instructions. I've heard from my sister-in-law about some great things that are happening with her son's confidence there, and P would love to take a class with her cousin -- but he's due for a belt promotion, and then they'd be in different classes for at least a few months, and probably longer. Plus the place is quite expensive, money is very tight for us now, and they require months of notice to get out of the monthly payments if you decide to quit. All this has me looking for other options. Our current plan is to try the introductory week at a dojo much closer to us, which is probably less expensive (finding mat fees on a dojo's web site is harder than getting car prices from a dealership over the phone!) and sounds more agreeable in general philosophy, based on their web page. There are so many variables! When is sparring required? How much does it cost? How easy will it be for us to get to classes? How do they handle the balance among fun, challenge, discipline, and safety? And so much more. We'll see where it all leads. We might still end up at the cousin's dojo (I won't let my philosophy stop me if P is still enjoying it after a 30-day free trial -- I know that people can learn to move among home and other places with different expectations, and benefit from the experience), but at least we'll have an idea of what another place is like first. T is still on the young side for local dojos, but he'll be four in a couple of months, and if we're still at it, maybe he'll want in.

One night this week, the kids wanted to sleep together on the fold-out couch in our living room. We made it up with bed linens and they bedded down willingly, excited about  a new thing to try. P ended up going back to her room after a couple of hours, though -- she learned that she is a light sleeper, and even though UnschoolerDad and I were holed up in other parts of the house, there were too many little noises in the house for her to get good sleep. (When she was about two, she was having trouble getting to sleep in our shared bedroom, and after she chose to move to her own room, she slept much more soundly.) T was surprised, but not upset, to wake up without P in the morning. There hasn't been another request for that sleeping arrangement, which is okay with me -- it's hard for us adults to stay out of the living/dining/kitchen space that is the core of our house after the kids are in bed. We did have a very productive evening focusing on our paid work, though!

This morning, I was trying to decide whether T was over his cold enough to go to church with me and not give all the other kids colds. I asked if I could look inside his nose, and it seemed pretty clear. Then he wanted to look in my nose. He said I had a lot of yucky stuff in there. I asked if it was liquidy and shiny, or solid and boogery, and he said, "It's a lot of hair." I told him he had hair in his nose, too, and that it was to keep us from breathing in things like sand or bugs. He promptly went to P and asked to look in her nose, extending his data set.

Besides those first-person body learnings, we did lots of learning about bodies this week. One day T and I were reading about the lymph system in the anatomy book we still have from the library. That evening I was alone with P, and how the body deals with infection came up in conversation. I asked if she wanted to know what I'd learned about the lymph system, and she listened with interest. She's encountered the idea of swollen lymph nodes before, when we were checking her out and deciding whether to treat an illness at home or see a doctor. A couple of days later she told UnschoolerDad something about white blood cells helping to clean out   invaders from the body, as they do in the lymph system and elsewhere.

We found a great Doring-Kindersley book on bugs at the library book sale (more on the sale below),and T has been asking for bedtime reading from it every night. It's too long to read in one sitting, but we covered most of it in a few evenings, and now we're going back to T's favorite parts. He's fascinated with the detailed photos and models, he has lots of questions, and he was troubled that several of the ladybugs in the mass of ladybugs on one page have no spots. Today we looked that up and found that while they may be a different species (one source called them Asian beetles, in contrast to native ladybugs), they eat aphids and other pest insects, so they have the same garden benefits as ladybugs. T is fascinated with cicadas and the noises they make (below is one of the YouTube videos we watched), and he learned to make the R-rolling sound, unvoiced, as the best way we could come up with of imitating them.

Both kids have been watching a Magic School Bus video on the human body a lot this week. They love the episodes, which cover the digestive system, immune response, and the musculoskeletal system. They've seen them before, but they get new things out of them each time. As I write, they're watching a sports-themed Magic School Bus DVD, learning about friction.

We made it to our local library's annual children's book sale this week, and it was wonderful. We walked out with 19 books for $4, and some of them are large volumes that would cost $30 or more new. Some are encyclopedic volumes on countries in different regions of the world, that should be fun to browse or perhaps reference. Some are volumes of fables, medieval tales, and tales of mythical creatures (one of P's strong interests). There's a book with photos and stories about kids during the Great Depression -- we browsed the photos and found one of a California tent camp for migrant fruit-pickers that could have been where my maternal grandparents spent parts of their childhoods. There's a book of first-person stories from young people living with physical disabilities. We found a book on string games (P and I have tried a few), The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes, the bug book that T's been enjoying, a book on world religions that P wanted, plus some picture books the kids picked out and more. Now a bookshelf for the living room is on our wish list; I'm looking forward to having these easily available for anyone to enjoy.

The Great Depression has been an ongoing theme. P doesn't want to hear The Friendship Doll, which I really thought she'd enjoy, but after we looked at the photos from the Depression, she started some more pretend play about that time. She's absorbed enough information that she could tell us our pretend family was somewhat rich before the Depression, but most of our money was in the stock market, so our circumstances changed a lot after the  market crashed. She tried to put together an outfit from her closet that might fit the game, and it was interesting to talk about how things are different when you have only a few things to wear (if you're lucky enough to have more than one set of clothes) and they are mostly made, or at least washed and repaired, entirely by hand. Her things are also made from fabrics and yarns that would have been difficult or impossible to find 80 years ago -- cotton/synthetic blends, space-dyed knitting yarns, etc. -- so it was a tough dress-up challenge.

Other highlights from this week:

• P's been listening to UnschoolerDad read The Hobbit most nights, enjoying the story and learning lots of new and archaic words.
• We watched an old favorite movie, My Neighbor Totoro, again, and together noticed elements of life in the country near Tokyo, including large family baths, tatami mats and their shoe-related customs, rolling out futons to sleep instead of having separate bedrooms, rice-planting days off from school, getting around without cars, the abundance of small shrines around the countryside, and more.
• P and T were building things with an Erector set, and P noticed that one of their creations looked like a chariot, though she needed help remembering that word. Once we figured out what she was talking about, she wanted to know more about chariots, We found lots of images online that helped us pick out the common features of chariots and see how they were drawn and driven. P asked to use one line drawing we found as a coloring page, and she put a lot of thought into what materials it might have been made of as she chose her colors.
• P learned a little about the term "baker's dozen" from an adult she spoke with at UnschoolerDad's badminton gym. She told me about it, and we looked it up in the encyclopedia of phrase origins we have checked out from the library and learned even more. Apparently the penalties for selling underweight loaves have been so draconian in some places and times (in Ancient Egypt, a baker caught short-weighting his customers would be nailed to his shop door by the ear!), and it could be so difficult to make sure loaves met the expected sizes, that bakers included an extra loaf in each order of a dozen to make sure their customers received their due.
• Today P brought me an iguana grabber toy of T's and told me she'd figured out how it worked. She was right on target. 

The iguana in question

• On a recent trip to the bank, both kids wanted to know more about what banks are for and how they work. We talked about how ATMs work (and all the money that has to change hands electronically when you use an ATM that isn't at your own bank!) and what savings and checking accounts are for.
• P used subtraction and division out loud to figure out how many apple pieces she'd eaten based on how many she started with and how many were left, and then to decide how many more she could have without eating T's share. She did some more division out loud, thinking about how to divide eight pieces of apple fairly among two or four people.
• Since P had enjoyed reading Sideways Stories from the Wayside School, I grabbed its two sequels and another book called Sideways Arithmetic from the Wayside School on this week's library stop. I read a problem from the latter to P -- about eleven kids deciding whether they wanted to play basketball or freeze tag at recess, based on how many people each kid thought would make each game fun. P's intuition that they would all play freeze tag turned out to be correct, and we had fun with follow-up problems about how things would change if one kid changes his or her mind. We read some other problems, but P found them contrived, and I agreed.

Mastermind, Maps, and Mandalas

Since I got back from the Always Learning Live unschooling symposium, I've been trying to get more deliberate about what I put into unschooling, proactively, and not just reacting to what I see in the kids. I was doing that before, but now I'm doing it better. One part of that is being on the lookout for interesting stuff to strew in the kids' paths. A sale notification for Barnes and Noble came across my email some days back, and I ordered some deeply discounted stuff: a puzzle of North America with pictures and labels in English and Spanish, a "Super Why" board game (based on the PBS series of the same name, which is for pre-readers like T and early readers), a coloring book of mandalas meant to be put in a window like stained glass, and the game Mastermind. I first encountered Mastermind in my elementary school library, perhaps a year after it first came out in the seventies. I never had it at home, but I loved it in the library. Its usability design has improved since then:

When the package arrived, I got out the Mastermind game and showed it to P, who was sick with the flu and lounging in an armchair in her room. She didn't want to play at first, so I played a game against myself, talking about it a little so she could see how it went. Her interest piqued, we tried a game with her guessing, which quickly became too frustrating, so we switched to her making the code and me guessing. We played for hours! P quickly understood the system of using mini-pegs to give feedback (so many pegs correct in color and position, so many correct in color but not position), and I thought out loud a lot (I'm not very good at the game without doing so!), so she got a look at my thinking and strategy. At first P claimed she was playing because I wanted to and it would make me happy -- sweet in itself -- but when I said I'd be happy to stop if she wanted to do something else, she owned up to an intense interest of her own, so we kept playing. The next day I got UnschoolerDad to play her a few games, so she got to see a different strategy of guessing and hear a lot of kibitzing between him and me about the advantages of one strategy vs. another. I learned something that day, which is that my usual set of starting guesses has unexpected results if the code I'm trying to guess has more than two pegs of the same color! P has tried guessing a few more times and gotten frustrated quickly. I remember guessing being really hard when I was her age -- there's a lot of abstraction involved in guessing the code quickly. I think she's at a great place for her developmental level in math and logic.

In breaks between games, P and I each colored a page from the Mandalas coloring book, enjoying talking about color combinations, why we chose them, and the effects they created. P also initiated a conversation about methods of getting the desired results from the felt-tip pens we were using. I told her what an art teacher had taught me about that, and P had already figured it out for herself. We also talked about the extreme symmetry of some of the images, and how a computer might be useful for creating such exact symmetry.

With T and P both having had the flu in the last couple of weeks, P is learning about various ways of managing illness -- antipyretics like ibuprofen and acetaminophen for fevers over 102 F or so; expectorants for when coughs become problematic (but not for kids T's age; he has a vaporizer running in his room); the need for lots of fluids and sleep and enough food for energy to fight the infection. The three of us also used a stethoscope to listen to each other's hearts and lungs; I was listening for signs of pneumonia, and the kids were having a good game of doctor's appointment.

Another bit of strewing this week was checking out the book Mistakes That Worked from the library: here's Amazon's cover image for it.

The text is a little dense to hold the kids' interest for long, and the cartoons in the book unfortunately don't correspond to what the book is describing, but some of them are funny. We read about the invention of Coca-Cola, chocolate chip cookies, Post-It notes (I'd heard the story of the adhesive's discovery before, but not how it came to be applied to paper), potato chips, and several other accidental or unintentional discoveries that led to hugely popular products. There's more to browse in the weeks before the book is due.

The North America puzzle led to some cool connections. T and I had fun putting it together, and then we spent some time looking at the pictures on the map. Which areas had cacti? Where were there oil wells? T wanted to know what the oil wells were, so I explained a bit about plants and animals like the dinosaurs turning into oil over millions of years. We looked at the Gulf of Mexico and talked about hurricanes and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which P remembers because UnschoolerDad and I talked about it a lot at the time, and then again later after I heard a talk from a former physics mentor of mine who was head of the US Geological Survey during the spill. P and T linked this to a tanker oil spill in an episode of Go, Diego, Go! I talked a little about the Exxon Valdez oil spill and the problems it caused for animals and birds. P wished there were real-life oil vacuums that worked as well as the ones in the Diego episode.

Other strewing this week included:

• Bananagrams, which we've had but not played with for a while: T kept cleaning up the tiles and putting them away, but then he had fun spelling some words with me. He's been doing spontaneous bits of cleaning lately; it's nice to see.
• A jigsaw puzzle meant for families to work together, with pieces of three different sizes in different parts of the puzzle: T put together the big pieces and I did the rest.
• A pile of kids' library books that were due back soon: No one even looked at them this time, but T enjoyed it when I offered to read him a book on the history of aircraft. He had lots of good questions, especially about where the people would go in each craft (he picked up quickly on the oddity of an unmanned craft) and how you would pilot it.
• The iPad game Where's My Water?, in which players route water to a crocodile waiting for a bath, negotiating various obstacles and difficulties: both kids are having fun with this, as am I. There are lots of opportunities for looking at fun and/or bizarre cause-and-effect relationships and thinking about some of the physics of fluids.
• Writing thank-you notes for Christmas presents: Okay, not exactly strewing. But P got to think some more about social conventions and what people might like to read in a thank-you note.

Much of the rest of the learning I noticed this week was initiated by the kids. They made some great connections and found interesting things to notice in objects that have been around the house a long time -- a good case for leaving stuff around where it can be seen or found! Here are some of the highlights:

• T went downstairs with me when I went to clean the cat litter boxes one day. He had lots of questions, never having taken a good look at them before. The idea of cat pee causing the litter to clump was fascinating. I've brought some clean litter upstairs in a big bowl to experiment with when it seems like the right moment; we could also try mixing water with other things, like flour, cornstarch, oats, baking soda, salt, sugar...
• I was mending a sweater one evening, sitting next to T while he played with trains on the floor. I said, "Ouch!" and he asked why; I'd poked myself with the needle, I explained. He asked what a needle was, so I showed him -- pointy on one end, with an eye on the other for putting thread through, and here's how you use it. It's easy to forget, sometimes, what little kids haven't yet learned. I'm so glad mine are asking!
• T has been building lots of fancy train-track layouts, sometimes asking for help with them. After watching me mess with some sticky situations where I needed a piece with two male or two female ends to complete a layout, he made one himself where he used a dual-ended female connector to get a bridge in place. He came to me, excited, to tell me about it.
• P and T both asked about how airplanes steer. I showed them the control surfaces on some of their toy planes and talked a little about what each kind could do. We also talked about how both propellers and jet engines work. I'm realizing as I write this that we might do well to follow up with some video. The kids saw both kinds of engines in person at the aircraft museum in my last entry.
• P noticed out loud that if she drools and sucks it back in, or spits in her hand and licks it back up, it's cooler already. Ew, but good stuff -- she thought out loud and accurately about why it got cool quickly (cooler air surrounding), and I talked about the idea of the saliva losing heat to the air by evaporation, which has come up before.
• I was trying to learn the lyrics of the Phineas and Ferb theme song from P, who knows them pretty well. She noticed aloud that there were lots of rhymes, and wondered if all songs and poems rhyme. I mentioned and described haiku as a non-rhyming form. She did something with haiku in kindergarten, and she has the book Zen Ties, which has a character named Ku who always speaks in haiku. (When he is greeted on his arrival in the story, the greeting is of course, "Hi, Ku!") She also said "nanobots" was a weird word and asked what it meant -- robots whose size would be measured in nanometers -- and we compared a nanometer to the smallest thing you could see close up and to the size of a hydrogen atom.
• P noticed again that there seemed to be two Russias on our large world map. She wanted to know why, so I explained that the map had been done as if wrapping a big piece of paper around a globe and overlapping the edges, so both Russia and Alaska could be shown whole. We noticed several other places that appear on both map edges. P asked if Colorado were really a rectangle; this followed on an earlier conversation about how states and countries get their shapes (mostly straight lines from surveys and wiggly lines from rivers) and how some boundaries, including one between Texas and New Mexico, have come into dispute as surveying and GPS technologies have improved. I talked a bit about the difference between a rectangle on a flat piece of paper and the warped, curved rectangle that Colorado really is on the surface of the Earth. P said she wanted to learn lots of things from the map and write them down. More ensued:
• P noticed the equator was well below the center of our map. We noticed there was more land, and more population centers, in the Northern Hemisphere, and that Antarctica was quite truncated, and chalked this up to the map being a political map, and there being no national boundaries and not many people in Antarctica. (We can talk another time about Eurocentrism and other political biases.) We noticed some areas, like the area north of the Arctic Circle and the Sahara desert, where there were very few cities, and those small; and we talked about why not many people would live there.
• Both kids noticed some interesting things about the national flags, many of which appear at the bottom of our map. Liberia's flag is a lot like the U.S. flag. We talked about why: Liberia was founded as a nation by freed U.S. slaves, who took a lot of the details of government, their flag design, and their capital's name from U.S. sources. And they governed even though they were a small minority vs. a large indigenous population -- also arguably a page from U.S. and other colonial history. We noticed the flags of Australia, New Zealand, and Tuvalu were very similar, each having a Union Jack in the upper left and a different pattern of stars in the remainder of the flag. We looked up the patterns and found that Australia's and New Zealand's were each a different version of the Southern Cross, while Tuvalu's was a map of its nine islands, with East on the top and North to the left. I wondered why, but things moved on too quickly to investigate this time.
• P asked me to tell her stories from my childhood. We got through moving when I was two weeks old (with reflections on the recent development of car seats and cat carriers), my first three memories (with links to experiences of tarantulas, spiders, bees, and wasps), and moving to the house where my parents still live and we've visited them, before things moved on to...
• T noticing the "adjustment screw" detail on his non-adjustable plastic wrench from his Erector set and asking what it was for. We got out P's toolkit, including a real adjustable wrench, to show him. They played together with P's set of real tools -- hand-cranked drill, little wooden workbench, screwdriver, etc. -- for a little while before crankiness scuttled that bit of cooperation. Nap and bath time.
• P asked more about Tuvalu while she was in the bath, so I looked things up and we talked more. Their main crop, pulaka, led to talking about what water table means and the drilling of wells. We learned a bit about atolls and how they form. We read about how Tuvalu is threatened by sea-level rise, since its highest point is only 15 feet above sea level. We learned that Tuvalans play a game like cricket, which led to a brief discussion about Britain's influence on its many colonies. P asked if the U.S. had been a British colony, and whether people played cricket here, so we talked about baseball as an offshoot of cricket and the relative unpopularity of cricket in the U.S. compared to baseball. We learned that Tuvalu has few roads, no railroads, 10 square miles of land over 9 islands, one primary school for each island and one boarding secondary school for the entire country of just over 10,000 people, along with an adult literacy rate of 99%, about the same as the U.S. We did the math for how many adults in Tuvalu can''t read, and P noted that she'd never (to her knowledge) met an adult who couldn't read.

This has gotten long enough, so I'll leave my internal insights of this week for another entry: in which UnschoolerMom learns to love housework and refereeing kids' fights? Hmm...

Play Dough, Park Day, and Passover

It's been a pretty fun few days. Tuesday morning we made homemade play dough. P and T each got to choose the color for half the recipe and help cook it. They played happily for a while. I tried making some snakes all the same length and making them into different shapes. P and I compared the areas of the different same-perimeter shapes and found the circle "held the most space." Then I laid several circles next to each other and asked P what she thought of dividing up land that way -- what would happen with the little spaces in between the circles? Now, I meant to head for a little bit about tesselations, but P's answer was so cool I didn't have the heart. She gently took the circles and overlapped them so there were no spaces between but small shared areas. She said, "Those are where they get together for parties and dances and meetings. These [the unshared areas] are where they go when they want to be alone."

We'll find another way to do tesselations! It'll make a fun collage project sometime.

P's overlapping circles reminded me of Venn diagrams, so I drew some overlapping circles and labeled them girls, people with brown hair, and children. We proceeded to put a bunch of people we know in their proper areas on the diagram. Then I asked what set would include everything we'd written, and P came up with People We Know, and then wanted to enclose that within Things We Know About. She had a ball brainstorming things to put in that outer set, and when I got tired of writing them down, she picked up the pencil and wrote another dozen or two. When she showed them to me, I pronounced them as they appeared, which led to some spelling corrections with good humor.

The play dough play continued with experimentation with different building and shaping techniques, and addition of a garlic press spiced things up some more.

Wednesday morning, UnschoolerDad and I needed to do some work together, so the kids watched a video P found at the library called Shalom Sesame, a Sesame-Street gloss on Passover. I didn't see much of it, but heard a familiar song or two.

That afternoon we went to our local unschooling Park Day, which was good fun. I helped P and T get to know a couple of dogs that are usually there; T in particular is pretty scared of big dogs, but he came away willing to be licked a bit rather than crying and wanting to be picked up whenever he saw the dogs. P learned from experience (with the dog owner's blessing) that while dogs can get very excited about kids tossing them sticks and twigs to chew up, they eventually learn that nothing tasty is coming and get less interested.

At the park we were at this week, there was a curious slide, with no way that I could see of approaching the top without climbing over fences. I finally saw some other kids climbing the artificial rock face next to the slide and realized it was designed to be climbed. After trying it myself, I encouraged P to climb up. She was very anxious the first time, but then she climbed a few more times on her own and enjoyed the accomplishment. Then, to my astonishment, T (he's not quite three yet!) not only wanted to climb too, but accomplished it with no physical help from me (though I did spot him in case of mishap). He was totally unfazed by the height (8 or 9 feet), the need to find finger- and toe-holds, and so on. The kid's a natural. Now to find places where a three-year-old can climb! I'm a rank beginner myself, but rock climbing is really popular around here, and I'll bet I can find some good spots to try.

On the way home from Park Day, the napless T passed out immediately in his car seat. I asked P how she liked the Passover video. We got to talking about the Passover story: what the elements of the story are, the gratitude expressed in the Seder and the song Daiyeinu, how a person who doesn't take the story literally might understand things like the ten plagues, and how Passover is celebrated by modern Jews. I am a Unitarian Universalist (a non-creedal religion that draws on many sources of inspiration but does not see any one religious text as paramount in understanding the world or the right way to live), and so it's important to me that my kids learn the basics of the key beliefs and celebrations of major world religions. P has enjoyed learning some of this already from a kids' book on world religions that I bought her last year. She often brings it out and asks to be read parts of it.

P wanted to play Set with me last night. Last time we played she got frustrated and burned out on it, but this time she had a good time with it. It's fun to stretch those mental muscles.

Something I've learned this week: That the missing 7 tons or so of oxygen in Biosphere 2 were absorbed by the concrete of which the enclosure was built. I watched a great TED talk by Jane Poynter, one of the scientists who lived in Biosphere 2 for "two years and twenty minutes." P is starting to recognize the sound of a TED talk and come over to look when I play one on my computer. Good stuff.

Ducks, Dad Time, and (just a little) Deconstruction

She is gentle! She is wild!
She's a riddle! She's a child!
She's a headache! She's an angel!
She's a girl!
     -- Rodgers and Hammerstein, from "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria," The Sound of Music

It's been nearly a week since I posted, so of course I probably have forgotten 60% or more of what we've done. But here is a nice sampling!

I'm continuing to volunteer in P's former classroom most weeks, since there was not another parent prepared to take my place. I've been a teacher, and I know what it's like to be left in the lurch! Last time I was in, I was assigned to play a homonym game with the students, putting together mini puzzles with pictures of homonyms. We had fun with the game and finished a little early. Normally the students are supposed to do independent reading when they finish early, but some of them wanted to draw instead, and I said they could. Two of the girls drew nearly identical scenes of a flower with a sun overhead. I whispered to them, "Can you think of a homonym for your drawing?" Both could, and one tried drawing it. I brought that story home to P, who grooved on it. She's really starting to enjoy puns, and she immediately recognized the link between homonyms and pun humor and proceeded delightedly to make new puns for quite a while.

On our trip to the science museum last Monday, I bought a field guide to Colorado birds. Tuesday we tried going to another local home schoolers' park day, but no one else showed up (good thing we have our more active unschoolers' park day!). P spent a good deal of our time at the park watching some mallard ducks. First she told me her observations of their size, posture, coloring, setting, and activities, which were some of the suggested observations in the field guide's introduction. Then the ducks settled down to sleep on the creek bank. P wanted to go sit by them, so I coached her a bit on birdwatching ethics -- that if her presence was changing their behavior, she was too close -- and she was able to settle down and watch them from about six feet away for perhaps half an hour until a less quiet child disturbed them and they left. She's had great focus since she was a baby, but I felt proud nonetheless.

This past weekend we took a weekend trip as a family so that I could attend a physics symposium at my alma mater. I loved having the chance to hear talks (on Saturn's magnetosphere, radiation oncology, scientific contributions to ending the Macondo gusher caused by the Deepwater Horizon failure last year, and recent developments in the hot-spot theory of island formation and the forecasting of volcanic eruptions) by my fellow alumni who had gone on to research careers, stretching my physics muscles again to take it all in. I also connected with some folks who live near us and work in local scientific facilities where they can help us find appropriate tours and other learning resources and opportunities. I think it speaks well of my physics department's focus on learning (and not just the knowledge gained thereby) that everyone who learned I had begun home schooling my kids was glad to hear it. Those who also learned that I was using an interest-led approach rather than a standard curriculum were even more pleased.

While I was at the talks and receptions, UnschoolerDad was hanging out with the kids. They enjoyed some new foods that they were skeptical about at first (some Ethiopian dishes and smoked gouda spread), saw Pike's Peak, and learned how mesas form (we drove through a lot of meseta-rich terrain, and I shared what I remembered from college geology about their formation). Dad also taught P to play checkers and how to set up and make the basic moves in chess. After we returned from our trip, I got out my chess set, which was my dad's when I was little. I've never been much of a chess player, but I know the basics, and as a child I adored setting up the chess pieces in standard and fanciful arrangements. It turns out that P and T also love doing this. Even T is starting to pick up the names of the pieces and parts of how to set them up and move them. We also used the chess pieces as props to try a logic problem I suggested. P enjoyed thinking about it, but she needed some help to figure it out. P loves checkers and has asked to play again several times.

Finally, we had a great time yesterday and today watching The Sound of Music. The kids had never seen it before, and it had been a long time for me. Several times when I looked to see how P was reacting, I saw her face positively aglow with enjoyment, much more so than with most movies. She watched the entire 3-hour movie with rapt attention, and then watched part of it again today, with commentary turned on. T was not quite so spellbound, but he also really enjoyed it. We took opportunities to pause the movie and talk about metaphor ("She's a headache!" from "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?" was a great example), sex roles ("Sixteen Going on Seventeen" is pretty cringe-worthy by today's standards, but it's a great illustration of some of the things that have changed about the world, and the choreographers clearly understood some of the irony of the song in 1964), history (Hitler and the expansion of his power in Europe before World War II), nuns (convent life, dress, etc.), and other tidbits of interest.

On to more. Stay tuned.