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...

Can We Do Some Math? Pleeeease?

I've been continuing my efforts to help P with tidying and organizing her room in the evenings. She likes having things clean, but hates cleaning by herself. If I'm in there, either cleaning with her or reading to her as she cleans, she has a pretty easy time getting the job done. Lately, a few times, as we finish up and it's time for her to go to bed, she's been asking to "do math" with me. Sometimes it's late enough that I ask her to go to bed anyway, since she doesn't sleep in much, so late nights mean a grumpy kid the next day. Last night, though, we finished up early, so P asked to add up some large (multi-digit) numbers. We decided to figure out how many days were left until (and including) Christmas; 118 was our answer. Then we played with a couple of related problems.

I noticed P was still counting on her fingers for some under-20 addition facts. On a trip to Target recently, I had picked up some addition flash cards for a buck, figuring a dollar wasn't a big loss if they never became interesting. Last night I got them out and showed them to P. We played with a few ways of using them, setting on practicing a few until those facts came faster. Looking back at how P was doing things, I think we should have picked out some under-10 facts to do first -- next time I'll suggest that. P had fun trying to get faster, but not having facts like 3+5 memorized made things like 7+8 harder. Of course, not memorizing math facts this way is always a choice -- P is getting some of them down even with very minimal practice, and I expect more would come in time -- but my own experience is that big numbers get a lot easier when addition to 20 is close to automatic. We'll see what is motivating going forward. P is having fun working  through a second-grade workbook she chose at a going-out-of-business bookstore sale last spring. I think both of us like getting a look at what second-graders in school are doing, though I don't ever push using the workbook. I look over her shoulder sometimes and suggest a retry when answers are awry, or show her another way to do something if it looks like that would help and she's willing to listen, which is usually.

Recently, as we were walking to the bank to make a deposit, P initiated some mental arithmetic about how much she could save if she didn't spend her allowance for a few weeks. She's good at holding several numbers in her head while she works with them; she did well with minimal support. She decided to deposit some of her money into her savings account, and she filled out her own deposit slip for the first time, getting some nice feedback from the bank teller who handled the deposit. P sometimes claims it doesn't matter if her numbers are backwards. This was one situation where a backwards 2 was demonstrably a problem, and her resistance to learning to make numbers forwards has decreased since then. P's savings account is a kids' account for which a deposit of $5 or more earns a small prize; this time, P decided to get something for T, since he doesn't yet have a bank account and can't get prizes of his own. Hooray, generosity!

A bit of research and writing has come out of the desire to make a gift for UnschoolerDad. It's a surprise, however, so I won't say much more about that here. We did notice, experimenting with writing media, that P's handwriting is far more legible on lined paper than on unlined paper.

Gymnastics lessons have started for both kids now. T is thrilled with his new activity and likes his teacher a lot. P still seems to be having fun, though she was disappointed still to be in group 1. I think I can see what she needs to do to move to group 2, but so far she is very resistant to working on it with me. I'm trying to follow a portion of Sandra Dodd's recommendation, "Try a little, wait, watch," with respect to this. It's frustrating to me to see her seemingly wasting her time. I know she'd like to be working on the skills group 2 gets to try, but some simple things are holding her back. One of her stumbling blocks in class ties in with a recent conversation we had about balance as a matter of having your center of gravity over your base of support. Perhaps that's where we can connect. Breathe, Mama.

Gymnastics is not something I've ever been particularly good at. Singing, though, I know lots more about. P has decided to audition for a local children's chorale. This is a total about-face from the last time I mentioned it to her, in the spring, when she didn't even want to think about it. I think she probably has the tone and ear to get in. She has a tendency to freeze in new situations that might make things hard. It's a big unknown, and I'm trying not to put any pressure on with my own hopes or expectations. I do know what they do in an audition, so I've been trying to run through some of it with P, in ways that are playful rather than stressful for her, when she's willing, so there might be less tendency to freeze. We've been playing with tone and breath support as well, in some very close and playful times together. P also has pottery lessons starting soon, so if she gets into the choir, it will be a fuller schedule than we've had for a while. Keep breathing, Mama.

As I write, both kids are playing with the PBS Kids app on an iPad. P loves the show Word Girl, in which a 10-year-old girl superhero fights nefarious plans and incorrect word usage. Some words highlighted in episodes she's watched include recreation, dismayed, enraged, contrary, exquisite, badger, nemesis, and contemplative. P enjoys the superhero dynamic, and it's become a new part of her pretend play.

On a recent evening when we had no plans, I got out some disposable cups, baking soda, food coloring, and vinegar, and made a quickie volcano. P had seen this at school, but both kids enjoyed it. I was trying to remember what the end products of the reaction were so I could tell the kids (it wasn't as simple as I thought I remembered, so we didn't go into it much except to note that carbon dioxide was released), and looking that up led to a more bomb-like way to play with baking soda, vinegar, and ziploc bags. We took the experimentation out to the back deck and had some fun with that. We also tried the bomb experiment with a balloon, failing to achieve an explosion but having fun watching the already-tied balloon expand with the release of carbon dioxide inside. Both kids wanted to play with balloons more, so we moved back inside and played with Newton's third law in the form of, "the air comes out this way, so which way will the balloon go?" After much sputtering about of balloons, we set up a fishing line across the room and taped a balloon to a section of drinking straw, getting a much straighter- and faster-flying rocket. That was a lot of fun. Now we need to buy more balloons!

Other fun bits lately:

• On that same walk to the bank, we saw a bee sipping nectar from a flower. We've seen butterflies doing this up close at the Butterfly Pavilion, but this was our first up-close look at a bee drinking. P knew just what to look for, and we saw the proboscis at work.
• We made lemonade for a neighborhood party, and P and I talked about what would happen to the water line as the ice melted. It was a good start on the basic principles of buoyancy -- the ice doesn't change weight when it melts, so it displaces the same amount of water before and after melting. We should follow this up with an actual experiment; the need to get the lemonade ready quickly meant we didn't have time to watch the melting process this time.
• I was reading a book (Ida B) to P in which the main character's mother is bald due to cancer treatment. P asked why her hair fell out, so we talked about radiation, chemotherapy, and the idea that killing cancer cells can entail making other parts of the body pretty sick.
• We've been continuing to raid the library like crazed Vikings, and P is reading like mad, still finding Magic Tree House books that are new to her, and also dabbling in other genres beyond MTH and fairies.
• Play dates with friends from school are a little harder to come by, now that school's in, but we're trying to keep a steady stream of contact, both with those friends and with local unschoolers at park days.

Do Unto Others

I got a whack on the head the other evening. I was reading Kim Stanley Robinson's book, Forty Signs of Rain, and one of the characters noted that being a good person to work for was possibly the ultimate test of a man. I don't even remember anymore, exactly, how this led me to the realization about parenting that it did, but the upshot of my train of thought was that if I wanted P to be helping out more willingly around the house, it made sense to help her first, to show how a loving family member can just help, without it being a big tit-for-tat deal.

So the next evening, when P was cleaning her room before bed, I offered to help, without putting any conditions on it except that T needed to be allowed to come in, since I was in charge of him at the time. And the next day, she helped me in the kitchen without being asked. She still doesn't want to help every time it's needed or every time I ask (I'm experimenting with not insisting unless I actually need her help, which occasionally happens but isn't super-frequent), but I seem to be building up a slush fund of goodwill by helping her when I can and not expecting my requests to jump to be answered with, "How high?" Sometimes, when she's been no help to me during the day and I have more to do in the evening as a result, I don't end up helping her with her room; but more often than not, I help at least a little.

So far the resulting trend is good. P went from resisting helping clean up one morning, to sweeping and scrubbing floors later in the day. Today I asked P if she'd clear the table for dinner, since I was cooking a more elaborate dinner than usual and expected to be working on it until the moment we sat down to eat. At first she said no, and I expressed mild frustration about that but let it go without trying to force the issue. Very soon after that, she said that if I'd let her set the table with things in the order she wanted (yesterday I tried to show her a standard place setting arrangement, but she wasn't interested), she would clear and set everything. And she did a very nonstandard but thorough job of it, even finding a candle for a centerpiece and dressing in a fancy dress for dinner. We'll keep trying to find our way, as I try to be a better person to work for, in a mom sort of way.

School starts Monday at P's former elementary. Our notice of intent to homeschool didn't get processed before class lists came out, so P was placed in a class with several friends, and she had a brief change of heart, but soon decided again to continue unschooling with me. Play dates for long stretches on weekdays will be a thing of the past soon, but some of her friends are available for after-school play dates, and we live very near the school, so it should be pretty easy to keep seeing them.

UnschoolerDad strewed a copy of the Calvin and Hobbes book, Scientific Progress Goes "Boink," in P's path recently. As with many things, she wasn't interested at first, but a few hours later she was buried in it. That evening I ran across, and showed P, a web site focused on photos from around 100 years ago. Of course nearly all the photos are black and white. P remarked on the Calvin and Hobbes strip where Calvin asks his dad why all the old photos are black and white. This is a classic strip, so I did remember, and simply replied, "And his dad gave him a pretty bad answer, huh?" She laughed and agreed.

Both kids still enjoy watching old Pink Panther shorts, but I get tired of that being what they always ask for, so I look for new things to suggest. Recently I ran across the series, The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That. This discovery has been a mixed blessing. The show's aimed at a pretty young, unsophisticated audience -- more appropriate to T's level of knowledge about the world than P's -- but they enjoy it, and it feels better to me than watching the Pink Panther and Inspector Clouseau chase each other around with guns and bombs yet again. The Cat has mostly eclipsed the Panther in the kids' requests for videos, and they've watched episodes about bees, bird nests, desert oases, whale songs, and other topics. Onward and upward.

I keep trying to make more sophisticated media available, and sometimes the kids are interested. P really got into a BBC science web site, where she enjoyed interactive games on classifying materials, the parts of flowering plants, marine and land-based food chains, and many other interesting topics. I was impressed with the quality of the activities, compared to some other "educational" web sites I've seen. The BBC site's not everything I could hope for, but it's far more engaging than many, and P's enjoying it a lot. Today I found a made-for-IMAX film about beavers, which have been a recurring theme with both kids lately, and they watched it with me, with stops to explain things and talk about what was going on. There are several similar films on different topics, so we'll probably get back to that thread soon.

I've been on a Grey's Anatomy kick for a while, and sometimes P ends up watching part of an episode with me. Recently this has led to good questions from her and ensuing discussions about the relationships between brain function, heart function, life and death; the fact that hypothermia can allow drowning victims' brains to recover from long periods with no heartbeat; the existence of crystal methamphetamine and its hazards to users and manufacturers; and more generally the phenomenon of drug addiction and the harm it can do to the body and to lives and relationships.

On the literature side of things, we had a great trip to the central library this week, shortly after P announced that she is done with all her Magic Tree House books and is ready to give them away (I'll keep them for T to read when he's ready). I figured we'd better start looking for other books she'd enjoy, and the library didn't disappoint. P came home with a few different flavors of chapter books about fairies, and we found some DVDs we're looking forward to watching together. T also found lots of books he wanted to bring home, and I added some to the bag for further strewing.

T continues to blossom into early reading. He's noticing and looking for rhymes and other similarities between words, actively learning letters and numerals, and asking to play and enjoying a phonics game on my phone that used to go frustratingly over his head. Getting to play games on my phone is something he always enjoys, but it's great to see him enjoying and understanding the content, rather than just wanting phone games because they are phone games. He's also eagerly absorbing just about anything I'll tell him about the letters and words in books we're looking at together. Today when I popped in to keep an eye on him in the bath while UnschoolerDad went to get something, he pointed out and identified a foam letter X that had been stuck to his back, and then asked me questions about how dolphins sing and swim (Dolphins IMAX film on deck!). It will be fun to see where he aims his curiosity next, and how reading develops for him.

...Aaaand then it got rich again.

We go along and have these lazy days and weeks, and then things take off again. Here we go!

The kids and I watched a couple of TED talks online together this week. One was about flowers and the tricks they've evolved to play on their pollinators. P, who is beginning to understand the role sex plays in reproduction with humans and animals, was ready to enjoy this and has mentioned it to me unprompted since then; she remembered the flowers that smell like carrion, enticing blowflies to come in and lay their eggs there, meanwhile getting coated with pollen for other such plants. The other was about a new ultralight robot that flies like a bird, flapping its wings. That had the whole family grinning from ear to ear, probably all for different reasons, but it was delightful and memorable nonetheless.

P and I also watched some old TV together online. We watched the first few episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which has always been my favorite Trek series (though the first season is a little hard to take!). P referred to some of the technology in the show (e.g., transporters) as magic, so we talked about the nature of science/speculative fiction as the creator's idea of where science and technology could go in the future, and how that might change the world and the ways people interact. Of course it also reminded me of the Arthur C. Clarke quote, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," and I shared that idea with P as well. 

A library book, Twelve Snails to One Lizard, was a fun story about the nature of measurement and why measurement tools are so useful; and it repeated some key numbers for the English system and some arithmetic enough to let them sink in a bit.

We watched The Secret Garden on DVD and talked a bit about the British empire (the movie is set near the time of its greatest extent and begins in colonial India, and a map puzzle the children assemble in the movie provides a great visual for that). A day later, P asked me if it was a real story. I said no, I thought it came from a novel. She asked me how you could make a movie that wasn't a real story. In hindsight, maybe she thought that true-story movies were actually filmed in real time -- I'll have to ask her. But it led to a great exploration on YouTube of making-of videos, particularly for a Transformers movie that we haven't seen, but that was beautifully documented on YouTube. We saw an outdoor set, complete with beautiful building facades and plain-as-dirt, unfilmed backsides with security guards keeping folks off the street during takes. We saw cameras on cranes, cameras on go-karts, and cameras on trucks outfitted with cages to protect them from flying cars in chase scenes. We learned how a scene in which a giant robot ripped a bus in two was filmed -- not in miniature, but with exploding bolts and air cannons to blow the bus apart, and CGI robots inserted later. We saw gas flames turn on near destroyed cars just before "Action!" in a street scene. We also saw some stop-motion videos that Transformers fans had made themselves. Maybe we'll talk more another time about screenwriting, acting, directing, editing, and more. Maybe we'll go to Universal Studios sometime. It was a lovely trip behind the curtain today, though.

In the car on the way to the science museum today (more on that below), P started writing a get-well-soon card to a relative. I've explained that this relative may have a harder time than most folks with unconventional spelling or messy (or overly fancy) handwriting, so P was careful to check her spellings with me.

And the museum. I could write pages and pages just about the 5.5 hours we spent there today. Here are some highlights:

• A "Real Pirates" exhibit documented the history of the Whydah, discovered off Cape Cod after a maiden voyage as a slave ship and, following her capture, a short career as flagship of Sam Bellamy's pirate fleet. We learned about the trans-Atlantic trades in slaves, gold, coffee, sugar, tobacco, ivory, etc., and how those markets depended on each other, as well as a bit about what life was like for African captives in slave forts, on the Middle Passage, and on Caribbean plantations. We learned why sailors wanted to become pirates -- greed played a part, yes, but what I hadn't known was that pirate crews were so democratic. Sailors who had experienced the duress of navy or merchant service, often having been press-ganged into it, could trade that for an equal share of the booty and an equal vote on a pirate crew, regardless of their race or social station, if they didn't mind the danger of battle or the death penalty for piracy following possible capture. Big "if," yes. But still. P recognized scurvy and its cure from a Magic Tree House book. We learned that Vitamin C gets its scientific name, ascorbic acid, from Greek and Latin words meaning "no scurvy." And to cap it off, P got to figure out how many fake doubloons she could buy at $1.49 a pop with her $5 cash on hand. (I think I need to be more patient with P's incessant shopping and desire to spend ALL her money when she hits a great shop. She gets so much good math/money/value education by figuring out whether she can afford this? Or this? Or this? Even if I sometimes want just to cut her short with, "No, you can't afford that, either!" or "No, it's really not necessary for you to find something to spend that last dollar on!" She still hears enough from me to know that I value spending money on things you actually want or need as opposed to whatever in the store is cheap enough, and maybe she'll soak that up someday. But in the meantime, I think it's valuable that she learn arithmetic and the value of money herself through using her own money according to her own choices.)
• From an exhibit on mummies, we learned the story of Osiris, which is why mummies got made. We scrutinized a model of the temple of Ramses II, including tiny depictions of animal sacrifice. We learned about how CT scans of mummies can be used to reconstruct the appearance of the person in life; this came up with concretions discovered on the Whydah as well.
• In the Prehistoric Journey exhibit, which is a perennial favorite, today the take-aways were about how bone ridges facilitate the reconstruction from fossils of animals' appearance and behavior; the emergence of camel-like mammals in the Americas, and how they evolved into llamas, alpacas, and the like in South America; the differences between mammoths (ate grass and had finely ridged teeth) and mastodons (ate branches and had coarsely ridged teeth); the movement of continents and where the inland sea was in North America compared to Colorado; P noticing the similarities (general shape) and differences (size and proportions) of the vertebrae in different parts of a sauropod skeleton; and early humans' appearance and adaptations compared to other primates. I'm probably missing a lot here. This is an incredibly rich exhibit.
• In the little kids' area, both kids danced and jumped around a lot in an area intended and well designed for just that. T got to play with magnets, attraction and repulsion. P, while playing with some magnet blocks, got to make sense of the different-shaped triangles on their faces (scalene right, isosceles right, and isosceles acute; matching the same shapes made the blocks stick together better). P and T both decided to give their cardboard souvenir pirate hats to two younger boys who hadn't gotten to go to the Real Pirates exhibit. T got to brush "dirt" off "fossils" in a nice little excavation-play-pit. Both kids had fun with funny-shaped mirrors, noticing how things looked different in them. It was one of the best kid-friendly museum areas I have experienced.
• And we didn't even enter the exhibits on Space, or Gems and Minerals, or natural history sections. We'll be back!

But wait; there's more!

I forgot some things from last week, and there are some new things from today. (Blogger was down for maintenance when I finished this post, so today isn't today anymore, but there you go.)

P and I have been talking a lot about metaphors. I point them out from time to time when one of us is reading aloud to the other. On the way back from the zoo, P mentioned that the sunlight was spilling into her lap. I said I liked that metaphor, since it made the sunlight sound like a liquid. P pointed out that foods, as well as liquids, can be said to spill. I agreed and said, "The sunlight spilled into my lap like a pile of hot scrambled eggs," which got a laugh. That reminded me of an article UnschoolerDad and I read, in which the author said all successful humor was some form of benign violation. I told P that, explaining that a benign violation is a situation where a rule gets broken, but nobody really gets hurt. P thought a moment and then pointed out that when you say a rule gets broken, that is itself a metaphor (a rule being a noncorporeal thing). Don't look now, but I think she's getting it.

I recently stumbled across a video simulation of the formation of a human fetus's face, which among other things showed how the front of the lip and palate are just about the last things to get joined up properly. The video narrator said, "This happens in the womb between about two and three months, and if it doesn't happen then, it never will." 

I showed this to P and explained that this meant some babies' faces didn't quite get finished, so they'd end up with a cleft lip and/or cleft palate, which could be connected up with surgery. P surprised me by asking if we could watch a video of a cleft repair surgery. I told her I was willing to look for one, but I wanted her to think about whether it would be disturbing to see a surgeon cut into a person's face, because that bothered some people, though I didn't mind it much. (I used to watch surgery videos back when we had satellite and TiVo, and once when I taught seventh-grade life science, I gave an after-school showing of one of them for interested students, after showing them in class the lead-up in which the surgeon used a model to explain the surgery. The after-school surgery video was well attended.) She said, "No, of course not." So we looked. We found diagrams that explained the steps of the surgery and a video that showed just a tiny portion of the actual surgery. She seemed satisfied with that. She didn't show any hint of being upset by seeing the surgery, though she was confused about what body parts we were seeing because the surgical setup hid so much of the face from view.

Today, after going to park day, all of us watched The Miracle Worker together. T wasn't riveted, but he was content to play nearby. P was spellbound. We stopped the film to talk about plot points, the rat-infested asylums (described in the movie) that used to pass for mental-health care and a bit about how things have changed, and the spectrum of vision impairment along which one might find a normally sighted person, Anne Sullivan with her weak vision, and Helen Keller with her total blindness.

Around dinnertime, I was holding P, and I flipped her over, as we often do, so she was doing a handstand on the ground and I was holding her legs. Since she's been working on her arm strength, I suggested she try lowering herself to a headstand and then pushing back up to a handstand. I supported part of her weight by holding her ankles, and she did it easily. Then she asked me to keep balancing her feet upright, but stop pulling up on them so she could try the pushup without help. To my utter astonishment, she was able to do two or three pushups that way! I tried having UnschoolerDad hold my legs while I tried the same thing, and I couldn't even come close to getting off the ground. I told P so, and while she was pleased with herself, she said, "It's probably because I'm lighter." Three cheers for physics intuition!

Tonight I read aloud from A Cricket in Times Square while P cleaned her room and T drew pictures. We got to the part where Tucker mouse gave Chester cricket some of his life savings to get him out of a jam. The book listed off his savings as two half-dollars, five quarters, two dimes, six nickels, and 18 pennies. I asked P if she wanted to add all that up and see how much money it was. She did (money is very salient to her these days, with her newly increased allowance and the expectation that she buy more of the non-necessities that she wants!), so we proceeded to do a bunch of coin-value multiplication and then some three-column addition with carrying. I started off showing her how to do it, but I turned the process more and more over to P as we went along, and she caught on quickly. I showed her how to figure out how many dollars you get from large numbers of quarters by counting out the number of quarters while drawing dots in lines of four and then counting the lines -- this made a lot of sense to her -- so now we've set the stage for learning multiplication and division visually. She wanted to do some more math before bed, so we made up more similar problems about found money, and this time we added them as decimals (e.g., $2.93 rather than 293 cents). She clearly has the basics now, and she had fun learning them. She doesn't have many basic addition facts memorized yet, but I see them slowly accumulating (and her enjoying that) as we do this sort of thing and she gets to use them more, and in the meantime she's learning tricks to make what she knows go further, such as adding 9 by instead adding 10 and subtracting 1. I hate to memorize things if I don't have to, so I've stored up many such tricks to share; and I still learn new ones from time to time. I will say that I did memorize my addition and multiplication facts in school, that they are still firmly in place, and that I'm glad I know them; so I'll be on the lookout for opportunities for P to learn them in a way that brings her joy along with her knowledge.

Just today, at park day, I found myself talking to another mom who was not part of the homeschooling group, but was at the  park with her preschool-age son. When she learned we were homeschooling, she said it must be a lot of work. I said that if we did worksheets at the kitchen table all day, it probably would be, but that since we were instead watching for and creating learning opportunities guided by what attracted the kids' interests (and our interests, where they overlap), it was a lot easier. I gave the example that a child who is interested and ready to learn a basic math technique could learn it in one sitting -- maybe even with one good problem -- whereas in a schoolroom, you might have to do the same thing 30 times before most of the students would find themselves in the right mental state, at least one of those times, to learn it. That's a big reason why things some might call "busywork" or "drill and kill" happen in classrooms. But if you can watch just one child for the right moment, you don't need all the repetition. Don't get me wrong; I'm sure we'll see three-column addition again. It's a useful skill, the need for which comes up repeatedly. But I'll bet P will be able to hold the pencil from the beginning next time.

Park Day and Potluck

Two days, so many things... here goes!

Yesterday P asked to watch Happy Feet, so we did. I hadn't seen it before, and found it a little distressing how much of the movie is about mating (this doesn't come across in the Commonsense review), with associated raunchiness. I mean, yes, animals spend a lot of energy on attracting mates, but the movie really played it up in anthopomorphic style, with macho guys bragging about how much the girls wanted them. But most of that seemed to blow right by P and T, and there was a lot of cuteness and some good messages about self-respect and valuing differences. The kids got their first exposures to elephant seals, an icebreaker ship, and the fact that there are penguins in South America. Since the icebreaker in the movie comes through in a confused blur, we looked up photos of real icebreakers afterward.

Later, P was busy and T was asleep, so I decided to watch an episode of Grey's Anatomy and fold laundry. Lots of laundry. P gravitated to the TV episode, which I should have predicted. In this particular episode, the sexual content was fortunately well-veiled, so instead P learned the definitions and some symptoms of stroke and heart attack, what a defibrillator is for, the location and function of the aorta, what a cardiopulmonary bypass machine is for in open-heart surgery, and what a surgeon has to do when she loses a patient (call the family and break the news). Most of this was brief first exposures (I stopped the show a few times to help her understand what was going on), but hey, everything needs a first exposure, right?

Later, the whole family went to the hardware store because we wanted to have a magnetic wall board that we could also write on. Magnetic white boards are expensive, so we looked at various DIY ideas before settling on buying a piece of sheet steel and painting it with chalkboard paint. My goal is to use this for magnetic poetry, with the option to write notes or additional poetry bits. Our fridge doors are more than fully committed already! While we were at the store, P found a trinket she wanted to buy for $2.75, but she didn't have her allowance money with her (she's decided against buying binoculars for now), so she got a loan from UnschoolerDad. This morning she paid him back. She gave him two dollars and went to get three quarters, but he suggested she give him another dollar and he give her one quarter back. P found that confusing, so we did some more money math, with a little hundreds-digit action and a first exposure to borrowing in subtraction. P was game. We also talked about why the dollar sign looks like it does. Apparently I got that wrong (there's what I learned while writing this post!). Ah, well -- more learning opportunities later, if we like.

Off to the grocery store this morning, where we learned what whole papayas look like. They didn't smell like fruit, though, so we didn't buy one to try this time. Anyone know how to choose a good papaya?

This afternoon we went to the weekly park day for a group of unschoolers in our county. T has gone with me twice before, but this was P's first time to be out of school for a park day. On the way there we slowly passed a freight train and I talked to P and T about shipping containers and what they're for. We read the labels on them to see if we could see where they originated. Tonight we looked up some of the companies; we saw lots of photos of container ships and online tracking systems for container numbers. Maybe next time we can write down a number or two and see where those containers go!

At Park Day T played mostly independently as usual -- he's a little young yet for really engaging with playmates, but he loves playgrounds. P was shy and played on her own until I facilitated a couple of introductions to other kids. She was still hanging back, so the three of us went down to take a look at the stream bordering the park. We fished out some trash and looked at how the grasses growing around the stream were holding up the stream bank, and how one tree, apparently quite healthy, was growing in a J shape from an overhanging edge of stream bank. Then we saw some other unschoolers making their way to a nearby footbridge and car bridge to play, and we joined them. They were trying, unsuccessfully as it happened, to capture a "gardener" snake (I'm guessing garter; I never saw it, though P caught a glimpse). Having given up on the snake, one of the boys started climbing up a storm-drain pipe that emptied into the stream. (Another adult and I checked for the origin to make sure there wouldn't be unexpected flow in the pipe.) Several others followed. P opted out of the tunnel crawl, but thoroughly enjoyed tracking their progress and looking and listening for them at the streetside origin of the drain. I was nervous about all the potential falls and other injuries, but I didn't see a lot of serious hazards, so I just kept watch for any more seriously foolhardy behavior. At school P usually played with girls, mostly doing less active forms of play, so I was glad to see her climbing around with a mixed group and getting a little dirty. My favorite place to play when I was her age was also a creek at a park near my house, where it went under a footbridge and a railroad bridge -- and the large pipes where it went under the neighboring road. This felt like sharing a happy piece of my childhood with P. T tromped around under the bridge a bit, too, with me helping him on the steep parts.

On the way home we talked a little about pagodas (we saw one near the park), car transport trucks (ditto), what happens when you run out of gas on the highway (didn't happen, but it came up when P guessed that was what the car transport truck was for), and the meanings of a couple of road-sign symbols.

And then we cooked amaranth for the first time, as part of dinner. It makes a nice porridge, which T is now enjoying, having awakened (after the rest of us ate) from the nap that started on the way home from the park. Everyone else liked it, too, so it was lucky there was enough left for T!

Could P have encountered all this in a couple of days while enrolled in school? Perhaps, if we'd had an active weekend and encountered some interesting playmates. But not likely. The park days help me move a little beyond my comfort zone. (My own upbringing did not include being allowed to play in storm drains, at least once my parents found out that's what I was doing!) Also, I'm being more liberal with access to video  than I was before. That's partly because there's more time in a day when most of it isn't filled with school, so using a couple of hours for a movie feels like less of a loss to family time and more active play. It's partly because I'm approaching video as a learning tool and not just entertainment or babysitting. And it's partly because I'm trying to let greater access deprive it of its privileged place in many kids' lives (here's a little bit by Pam Sorooshian on TV and the economic theory of marginal utility), so video can take what I see as its rightful place, as just one of many potentially interesting things a person can choose to do with her time.