Six-Second Science Fair and color-changing Polly Pockets spark an eventful week of exploration and learning

Starting two weeks ago, I decided to try an idea gleaned from a local homeschoolers' email list, in a discussion about record keeping. One mom used a teacher's plan book to keep track of her kids' studies -- one column per kid. I used teacher plan books for four years as a secondary teacher (one column per class), and I'm comfortable with that format. The next day I saw a teacher plan book on the $1 rack at Target, so I bought it and gave it a try.

I set things up with one column per general subject area, so I could see how our activities and learning were balancing out across subjects. The first problem I noticed was that teacher plan books only go Monday-Friday! That's okay -- I had a column left over, so we use that for overflow: Saturday and Sunday activites, and anything I can't fit in the regular columns for the week.

I leave the plan book on a coffee table by the couch where I frequently take little rests during the day, so it's easy to jot down whatever's happened most recently. This is also nice because instead of being in front of my computer in the kitchen when I'm making notes, I'm closer to whatever the kids are doing, and off my feet!

So this week, my summary will be loosely organized by subject. Some things overlap -- we Read about Science or History, for example. It's all good.

Science

• One morning, P brought me a small Lego construction: a buoy with a flag on top, easily recognizable. We tried floating it in a bowl of water, and it floated on its side. Throughout the day, both kids and I tried different things to try to get it to float upright: adding more weight on the bottom, etc. P found that it would float upright if she removed the sideways-pointing part of the flag, which was making its weight distribution asymmetric.
• P asked me how her Polly Pocket's hair was able to turn pink when warm and purple when cold. I didn't know, so we looked it up online. We found two possible mechanisms: thermochromism and halochromism. P was game for an explanation, so I drew diagrams to talk about different colors of light having different wavelengths; constructive and destructive interference resulting in crystals looking the colors they do, and how a crystal whose plane spacing changes could look different colors as the path length difference for diffracted light changes. These were in ascending order of complexity, and I think P grasped about the first half. Then we looked at halochromism and looked up the materials typically used and their relevant stats, especially the melting point of dodecanol, which turns out to be very close to that of coconut oil! When the dodecanol is liquid, salts in the halochromic microcapsules are dissolved, which changes the pH of the package and results in the protonation (or loss of a proton) by a dye molecule, which changes color as a result. I put a small lump of solid-at-room-temperature coconut oil on P's fingertip, and we watched it quickly melt; so it was easy to see how a transition from ice water to warm breath could change the color of a doll's hair if it had halochromic microcapsules on board. Again, I think P grasped the melting point and solubility parts, but the finer points of pH-driven reactions are a bit beyond our current level.
• We all watched a great video, which we found on thekidshouldseethis.com, full of 6-second science fair videos. One bit showed putting eggs into vinegar and dissolving the shells, so the eggs end up squishy sacs of yolk and white. P and I decided to do that, and watched the bubbling surfaces of the eggs. I know calcium carbonate was a major constituent of eggshells, so we also put a Tums in some vinegar to see if it would behave similarly, which it did (until the reaction stopped, probably because there wasn't enough vinegar in the little bowl we were using -- this led to a little talk about limiting reagents in reactions). I looked up the chemical reaction between calcium chloride and acetic acid, and P and I talked some about that, drawing diagrams of the molecules and noting which parts would dissociate or connect. The partial charges on the ions in the reactions needed more explanation, so I drew some atomic-shell diagrams to talk about why an atom might be inclined to gain or give up an electron. I used the ionic bonding of NaCl as an extreme example of this, and we found a cool video showing NaCl dissolving. The shape of the NaCl crystal in the video as it dissolved, first becoming pitted and then coming apart more completely, was reminiscent of what we'd seen in the dissolving antacid.

• Meanwhile, we kept an eye on the eggs. They were brown eggs, and we were surprised to see that the brown color didn't go all the way through the shells, but was the first part to dissolve away, while there was still plenty of hard shell left. We wondered whether tasting the solution the eggs were in was okay, so we looked up the reaction products and researched the one that wasn't familiar, calcium acetate. Safe enough, we decided. The next day, when the eggshells were fully dissolved, I tasted them (we had one hard-boiled and one raw; I cooked the raw one first) and, based on my review of the experience (yuck; vinegary, but not in a pleasant way), P decided not to taste them.
• We all read some Magic School Bus chapter books this week, about insects (predation, digestion, spider webs, compound eyes, speedy motion, and more) and electric storms (T only for this: cloud formation, types, and evolution; buildup of charges at top and bottom of a storm cloud; formation of hail).
• P and T watched Magic School Bus videos about decomposition, eggs, and dinosaurs.
• One day when he tired of Minecraft, T sat down with me to look at our big anatomy book. He wanted to see the heart, then the brain. We looked at the cardiac cycle and at the brain's sensory, motor, and language functions. Each time we saw a brain region on a diagram, I'd touch T's head in the corresponding place. He was telling me about some of the areas himself before we were done, so he was clearly engaged.
• In conjunction with our atomic-shell diagrams, P and I looked at the Periodic Table of the Elements and talked about why it has the shape it does (outer electron shells accommodate more electrons, so more different elements go by as you fill them) and what it would look like if it didn't have to fit on a standard-shape piece of paper (lanthanide and actinide series inserted, making the table much wider).
• Inspired by another 6-second science fair bit, P drew an arrow and wrote her name backwards (mirror-image) on a small piece of paper, and we held it behind a glass full of water, seeing how at short distance it magnified, while at greater distances the images were reversed. That called to P's prior experience with magnifying glasses.

Math and Spatial Skills

• Both kids did a lot of building in Minecraft this week. One day I went to the basement for maybe half an hour to deal with laundry, and when I came back, both kids had built rather impressive roller coasters with mine carts! They spent hours over the next few days embellishing these, adding new shapes and underground sections, adding powered track sections to boost speed, playing with block foundations to adjust slope, and so on.
• Both kids have also been experimenting with TNT in Minecraft. Simple experiments result in near-simultaneous explosions of multiple blocks, leaving a very satisfying hole in the ground. After watching a video about TNT cannons, P built one, using redstone wiring to produce a simultaneous explosion of a ring of TNT blocks, propelling her character (on a stone block in the center of the ring) straight up, well above the clouds. They do these tricks in Creative mode, so their characters don't get hurt by the explosions and so they'd have a ready supply of TNT.
• T asked me one evening, while I was reading to him, to say what the page number said. It was 79, and he seemed amazed it was so high. In the days since, I've asked him about a few two-digit page numbers, and he has interpreted them correctly. For 41, he also thought about what it would be if the digits were reversed, but he needed me to tell him that 14 was fourteen.
• P and I made a number line for T from string and construction-paper rectangles. It goes up to 21, which is his favorite number. We used paper color and other markings to facilitate skip-counting of evens, odds, fives, and tens. T likes it and has gone to it spontaneously a couple of times to count out loud and look at the numbers. We hope this will help him through the teens, which are a little hard to remember how to write, and where he usually skips a number or two when counting out loud.
• When P and I were talking about constructive and destructive interference of light waves, we discovered she didn't really know what negative numbers were. So I drew a number line that went both ways and showed her how to add positive and negative numbers on it. She quickly grasped this, so I also showed her subtraction of positive and negative numbers, both on the number line and in algebraic notation. She got it easily. We also looked a bit at algebraic notation for variables (e.g., the many ways to write multiplication), and how to write and evaluate simple expressions with variables. During this whole process, I could see P getting excited about these concepts in the same way I remember doing when I first learned them. It was so much fun to share concepts I love and have P share the feeling! 

Reading and Writing

• We finished reading out loud the Olympian Gods section of D'Aulaire's Greek Mythology. Both kids still listen closely to this.
• We checked out an e-book version of Theodosia and the Serpents of Chaos from our local library. P was delighted that we could do this late in the evening, when the library was closed, and without going anywhere. It's a book about the daughter of two Egyptologists who own a museum of antiquities in London, around 1900. We get snapshots of life in that period, bits of the political scene in Europe, bits of Egyptian history and mythology, and some British slang along with this interesting story. P was also delighted to see that my new Kindle has a built-in dictionary lookup function, so if a word is in its downloaded dictionary, we can just look it up as we're reading. There's a lot of good vocabulary in this book, so I pause to check if I think a word is unfamiliar to the kids, and give them a definition or explanation if they need it. Sometimes they ask, too, about unfamiliar words. Interestingly, Theodosia does not go to school -- her parents don't pay much attention to her, and when she didn't return to boarding school after a dreadful term there, they didn't force the issue. She is now an autodidact, well versed in Egyptian writing and magic from her readings in the museum library, and learning as she goes about Egyptian history.
• P read quite a bit of Theodosia out loud as I was giving T a bath this week. I haven't heard her read out loud much recently (though she does read to T beyond my hearing sometimes), and I was pleased to hear her fluency and expression as she read.
• UnschoolerDad has been reading more of The Burning Bridge to P.
• See Science for Magic School Bus reading this week.
• A local unschooler, considering buying tablets for her kids, asked about the differences between Minecraft versions for PC and tablet. P knows a lot about this, so she helped me write an email about the most important differences. The information was very useful to the person asking the question.
• When we were having sandwiches for lunch with my parents visiting, and I was dealing with dietary differences for many people, P wrote a list of what she would like on her sandwich so I wouldn't get confused.

Social Studies: History/Geography/Civics/Economics

• See Reading for what some of what we learned this week in history.
• UnschoolerDad was on a business trip this week, so T and I took a look at our world map to see where he was compared to where we were.
• One one longish drive home, P asserted that she already knew the rules of the road and just needed to learn how to drive when it was time. I asked if she would like for me to quiz her on that, and she said sure. So I did, and it turned out she still had some learning to do, though she has absorbed quite a bit. She enthusiastically talked laws and defensive driving with me the rest of the way home.
• On the 50th anniversary of MLK's famous speech at the March on Washington, I didn't get it together to show them the speech, but at bedtime we talked some about what people were fighting for, and I sang them "We Shall Overcome" as one of their bedtime songs.
• In connection with checking out e-books, P wondered why only one person could check out a given copy of an e-book at one time. We talked about the economics of publishing, and how publishers who have been making money on printed books still want to make money on library books (which they do, since the books can be lent to only one person at a time and eventually wear out and require replacement), and how those publishers have made e-book deals with libraries that mirror those for print books, because they're afraid they'll lose their revenue stream otherwise. We also talked about how, technically, e-books could be much more widely available, and how this would be desirable from the consumer's point of view, but might lead to problems for publishers.

Everything Else: Art, Music, PE, and Miscellaneous Learning and Exploration

• With UnschoolerDad out of town and calling us most evenings, both kids have finally learned how to carry on a conversation on the phone! It's easy to forget how weird this situation is for little kids. It requires not only thinking about a person they can't see, but also thinking a little about that person's perspective: what would they be interested to hear about? What can they sense, and not, about your surroundings as you talk with them? P was pretty good at it already, but she's getting better, too.
• P started a new weekly gymnastics class and is enjoying it.
• T has been making good use of our mini-trampoline, jumping often when he has excess energy to burn.
• I've been playing guitar and singing at bedtime most nights. P has been joining in as she learns songs, and also starting to harmonize a bit.
• With my parents visiting, we rented a canoe and a paddleboat at a nearby lake and went boating for an hour. We saw little trees that had grown in the spring and early summer while the lake was empty, some of them now far out in the lake. We saw fish jumping and speculated about why there are many bubbly places in the lake -- oxygenation for the fish, perhaps, or maybe that's where the lake gets filled? P learned a little about how to cooperate in paddling a canoe.
• P did some nice drawings while I read to her, working on shading to produce some three-dimensional effects in drawing hair in particular.
• T came up with an original (I think) idea in Minecraft. Since some blocks stick to others sideways while others fall when unsupported beneath, he built a tall shaft for crushing things (chickens, mostly). It has windows on one side for putting in whatever he wants to crush. He puts a sticky stone block with some sand blocks on top of it near the top of the shaft, and then he destroys the stone block so the sand falls all the way down.

Spanning a Summer

Whew! It's been a long and mostly pretty lazy summer. I have not been keeping notes. When the local schools started back in, I bought a teacher plan book and have been using it to keep a diary of what kinds of things we're up to. So this entry will be an experimental amalgam of a few notes left over from May and my first-week-of-the-school-year notes. Enjoy!

Reading

• T is doing an interesting thing with Scribblenauts. He doesn't know how to spell many words, so he asks for us to spell them or type them in for him. But the memory holds the last 5 items typed in, and I think, from watching him play, that he can read at least some of those words, from seeing them and using them repeatedly. He'll scroll through to SHOVEL, for example, and say, "I'll delete SHOVEL" (to type in the word he now wants). Something I thought odd until now about the game is that while the keyboard is labeled in capital letters, what you type shows up in lowercase letters unless you capitalize it. So there's a subtle nudge to identify capital with lowercase letters, which seems to be working out for T.
• I was looking at the Union for Concerned Scientists' top 12 political cartoons for the past year. P saw them and was curious about what they meant, so we talked about the issues they covered: global warming, climate change deniers, and the tendency for politicians to deny climate change or move slowly to do anything about it. We talked about what kinds of things cause climate change, and P decided on the spot to bike instead of driving to her gymnastics lesson, which required a speedy departure to be on time! I jogged alongside and got a nice workout, and we both enjoyed it.
• Both kids and I signed up for our local library's summer reading program. A lot of our reading has been out loud, though P does some reading on her own. We're powering through the end of the Little House series together. I've also been reading Barbara Kingsolver's latest and some Neal Stephenson -- the latter mostly out loud to UnschoolerDad, who also loves Stephenson. He and I learn new words frequently, as Stephenson never skimps on the vocabulary he uses in his writing. Even my downloaded dictionary doesn't go far enough, so we search the web and ask friends in relevant fields to try to track down what the heck we're reading about.
• We finished the summer reading program, all of us reaching the top goals for the program. We read the rest of the Little House series, several American Girl books about history around WWII, a book called Willow Chase (a fictional diary of two days in a journey by wagon train from Ohio to Kansas in the 1860s), and much more. The kids, in exchange for logging 1,440 minutes of reading time, got some cool prizes, like books to keep, passes to a local amusement park and free frozen yogurt. I, in exchange for reading at least 1,440 pages and writing three book reviews, got my name entered in a drawing for a Kindle, which I won! That was a good day. I've been reading a book about the history of Islam on my Kindle.
• UnschoolerDad has been reading the Ranger's Apprentice series to P. Having finished The Ruins of Gorlan, they're now on to the second book, The Burning Bridge.
• I read the kids a poem about vultures after we watched a great video about vultures -- see Watching below.
• T continues to show signs of reading. When he asked what RUSSIA said on the map and I told him, he immediately spotted the other RUSSIA at the other side of the map. He also read a sign in Minecraft that said, inexplicably, "PLEASE ENJOY YOUR FOOD." His self-expression is also getting very precise. I asked him the other day if he was all dressed to go out. He said clearly, "I have on night-time underwear, but I can handle that." 
• We've read some Magic School Bus books recently, covering fish (coral reefs, camouflage, defenses, ecosystems, damages from fishing, coral reproduction, global warming, cleaner fish); sharks; and insects (exoskeletons, predator/prey relationships, coloring as warning and as camouflage, the differences between insects and arachnids).
• We've read about half of D'Aulaire's book of Greek Mythology, which I found very strong recommendations for on homeschooling sites and then on Amazon. The book is in accessible language, but it's not dumbed down; it's a rich text for kids and adults both. Both kids seem to enjoy it quite a bit. We've read about all the Olympian gods now, and some of the stories connected with them. We still have minor gods, nymphs, satyrs, and so on to read about.
• T and I enjoyed the book The Moonlight Kite from the library together. 
• With P, we also read First Day in Grapes, about the child of Latino migrant fruit pickers, how life was for him in school, and how he dealt with bullying from kids making fun of his ethnicity and food. We talked about how, during the Great Depression, some of my grandparents worked picking fruit.

• We all read One Hen, a story about microfinance in West Africa and how a small loan allowed a family to grow an egg business into the largest in Africa.
• One morning when UnschoolerDad was out of town, I woke up before the kids and wanted to run on the treadmill in the basement. I wasn't sure they'd realize where I was, so I wrote a note and put it where they'd see it. P read it easily of course. T didn't think he could, but he figured out some of the words when we looked at it together. I had added a couple of drawings to help him figure it out if he woke up before P. He liked that -- I think I'll be leaving more notes.

Doing 

• P and T have been playing with Marble Math on the iPad, the multiplication version. T is still learning to recognize all the numbers, so he needs someone to tell him what numbers to find and roll his marble over. P is learning some multiplication facts through playing the game. She asks for lots of answers, but not all of them. They also play Rocket Math together, with P doing most of the math, T entering the answers, and me supplying the rapid-fire answers in one stage of the game.
• P went to a week-long Girl Scout day camp with a focus on things related to the movie Brave. She's been having fun with archery in particular, but also on offer have been Irish dance, rock climbing, needlework, cooking, and more. This is her first time at Girl Scout camp, so she's also learning songs, customs, etc. related to scouting.
• P got a generous birthday check from a grandparent. Without any prompting, she decided she wanted to spend a good deal of it on a Heifer International donation. We perused their online catalog, and she decided on a flock of chicks. Then she spent the rest on a Lego set for herself and was happy.
• There's been lots of Minecraft playing here. P and T figured out they could play in the same world if they used their iPads on the same wireless network. UnschoolerDad also set up a Minecraft server so they could play together (and be joined by their cousin) on the PC version of the game. P has been a fast and prolific Minecraft builder for some time, and now T has joined her. I'm awed by what he comes up with and executes. It's creative, beautiful, and large! And there's some reading going on; he can tell me what many of his building materials are, partly based on the names that appear when he mouses over them in his inventory in the game.
• P and T are both playing Dragonvale on their iPads. They are getting some experience with reading large numbers (into the tens of millions) as they keep track of their gold and gems and what they can buy with them.
• T went to the rec center for badminton with UnschoolerDad a couple of weekends, and T helped look for the right locker number when they were done. Locker numbers there are three-digit numbers. T doesn't really understand three-digit numbers yet, but he's working on it. He's been asking about two-digit numbers in his Lego instructions, and I think those are starting to make some sense to him. P and I made him a number line to hang on the wall so he could see what the numbers look like in order, with odd and even numbers on different-colored paper rectangles, and special markings on multiples of 5 and 10 so we can start skip-counting when he's ready. 
• Both kids are doing a lot of building with Lego, and buying Lego when their allowance builds up high enough. They are thinking about numbers in terms of what they can afford. Sometimes I pay half the cost of an item, such as something I might have bought them anyway, but it happens that they want a fancier, more expensive version. P easily figured out that her share of a $5 headband would be $2.50 plus tax.
• P and T have each ridden their bikes to church with me at least once this summer. It's about 1.5 miles one way.
• Both kids, but especially P, have enjoyed hitting badminton birds around with UnschoolerDad at home and sometimes at the badminton gym.
• We now have a mini-trampoline in our living room, and I often see T jump on it for a while, when bouncing would feel good or when he has some excess energy to burn off. P uses it too, though less frequently.
• I've been paying more attention to the kids' pretend games, especially when I know I will soon need to ask something of them. Often we can accomplish things like cleaning the living room or brushing and flossing teeth by incorporating them into the games. We had a particularly successful living-room cleaning session as peregrine falcon fledglings tidying up our nest.
• P continued her aerial gymnastics classes through the summer. For the fall, she's switching to more traditional gymnastics, because the aerial program is moving several miles farther away, and P likes riding her bike to the gym, which is less than a mile away. 

Making 

• Inspired by our Lego store visit (see Visiting below) and her new door acquired there, P made a Lego house for her Lego Friends figures. It's quite a creation. Some of the furnishings are made in the same ways as in kits she has built, but others are quite original. 

The house, with sleeping mat upstairs, new front door from the Lego store parts wall,
jewel used as front porch light, and tree trunks forming one corner of the building. That's a bit of a
dojo-kit wall by the sleeping mat. P tells me that she is pretending the Chinese characters say "Sleep Tight."

The back of the house, showing the flower doorknob and
salvaged cafe-kit parts for window and wall portions.

• T has created a small Lego wheeled creature he calls Speedster. Speedster "helps" T when things need to be put away. Speedster's form changes from one day to another, but he always comprises a small Lego platform or chassis of some kind with a single wheel.

Writing

• P has been writing little stories in books in Minecraft, populating the libraries of the grand homes and churches and schools and hotels she's building. She's also been playing Scribblenauts a lot, and helping T write words when he's playing the game.

Watching 

• We enjoy the YouTube channel SciShow. Especially wonderful recently was a video about vultures' defenses: acid, poop, and vomit. We watched it together a few times and greatly enjoyed the parallels between vulture poop (which they poop down their legs on purpose, so its low pH can kill germs on their feet and the ground) and hand sanitizer, as well as mental images of acid projectile vomit.
• P and I watched a TedEd video on gas laws (Boyle, Charles, and Avogadro). We talked afterward about some scenarios with balloons, and she understood the majority of what the videos were saying. I was fascinated to realize that hot air balloons are inflated not by blowing air into them, but by heating the small amount of air in them so that it expands and draws more air inside to be heated, etc. P actually realized that before I did, from the video.
• The kids watched several Magic School Bus videos on photosynthesis, rain forest ecology, erosion, recycling, air pressure, cells, wetlands and their positive contributions to human well-being, and the types and life cycles of stars.

Listening

• I bought a new guitar recently, and so along with lots of reading out loud, bedtimes now usually include some guitar music. We had done this before, but the new instrument is very motivating for me to keep it up. We have a couple of songbooks we've been referring to, and P is reading along with some of the music. Both kids are learning lyrics and tunes and sometimes singing along, which is how I learned to sing and harmonize, so I love to see that happen. When I play a new song T likes, he often asks the title so he can ask for it again. He's been requesting songs in Spanish a lot. He also asks questions about the songs. In John Prine's "Paradise," Mr. Peabody's coal train keeps getting mentioned. T wanted to know where Mr. Peabody got his name. He was thinking of peeing. I said I thought that probably wasn't what it meant, and I'd look it up and get back to him (since it was late and I wanted him to be able to get to sleep). I found a good web page with some probable etymologies, and we talked about them the next day.

Talking 

• When I have one-on-one time with either kid, it often turns into a good opportunity to talk. T is much more voluble when P is at camp, and he asks lots of questions and tells me about things he sees and his thoughts about them. He's a pretty insightful guy -- often he has things pretty well figured out when he tells me what he's thinking. Sometimes I can offer more information that makes the situation clearer, and he listens and incorporates the new information, sometimes taking the same subject farther the next day.
• After hearing a radio report about the implementation of Obamacare, P and I talked about how health insurance works.

Visiting

• One night, I learned of the existence of Lego stores. We found one in our area, and the next evening we went to check it out. The salesperson I spoke with was a Lego enthusiast herself and told us all kinds of things about the store and activities there. P and T had spent most of their allowances already, so we didn't buy anything, but they had fun window-shopping and building wish lists from the huge inventory -- much more complete than anything we've seen in toy stores. Since we were using my Amazon app to build the wish list, it was easy to notice which products were more or less expensive in the Lego store than online. P asked to buy a single part from the Pick-a-Brick wall, but the salesperson gave it to her, choosing to interpret the reason P said she wanted it as "missing part" and invoking their policy of replacing missing parts for free. P is sensitive these days to the idea that she is getting stuff free or at a discount "because I'm cute," and she doesn't like that idea. She told the salesperson she would feel guilty about taking the part without paying anything for it. Fortunately the salesperson had given me the same answer earlier about buying individual parts, so we could both corroborate that as the general policy, not just a favor to P in particular -- and the salesperson added that she didn't have any way to scan individual parts into her register, so even if she wanted to charge for it, there wasn't really a way to do that (except by requiring P to purchase an $8 container of bricks, she graciously omitted to say, though I had told P that earlier). We talked a little on the way home about how stores use such policies to build loyalty among potential customers, so even if it costs them a little money, they usually gain from it in the long run.
• The mall in which we found the Lego store was also pretty fun. There was a carousel, a train that carried people around the mall, a food court, and stores and kiosks with lots of fun things to look at and get demonstrations of. There's an RC helicopter kiosk we might well revisit when more money is available! The indoor mall near us doesn't work nearly as hard to attract kids, so that was a pretty new experience for P and T. P asked why they would have a carousel in a mall, and we talked about what kinds of things could get people to come to the mall often and spend money -- such as kids wanting to ride the carousel or train, or eat ice cream or other food-court food, or parents liking to have a place they could rest their feet while their kids had fun. We never found out if the train was free or a paid ride, but T took off after it, and when he caught up, he walked purposefully behind it all the way to the Lego store, which was enough of a draw for him to give up the chase. Next time maybe we'll find out more. (We did -- it's a paid ride.)
• On the way home from errands in the next town, we saw a sign at a fire station about an open house that was just about to begin. We turned around and went to the open house. T and P loved sitting in all the fire trucks (two wildland trucks and one city truck; the ambulance was absent). We looked around the station inside and saw the kitchen and dining area, the computers where firefighters write up their reports after each call, and more. T said he wanted to be a firefighter when he grew up, so we asked one of the firefighters what kinds of things one needed to know or be able to do to be a firefighter. There were quite a few: chemistry (for types of fires and how to fight them), math (for budgeting and such), building construction, medicine (they're all EMTs), how to use all the equipment, and to be in excellent physical condition. We learned that the firefighters are 48 hours on and then four days off, year round, though they can trade shifts if they need a specific day off. We also asked why we so often see fire trucks at the grocery store, and we learned that firefighters often make one grocery trip per shift to get what they need, and they take along the truck and the equipment they would need to drop everything and go on a call if necessary. The firefighter who told us this said she'd had ice cream melt in the truck more than once because a call came before they got back from a shopping trip.
• We've been helping out a nearby relative who is going through breast cancer treatment. One afternoon when her son X was already playing at our house, she called me, stressed because some friends had decided to visit for dinner that evening and the house was a mess. After checking it out with her, I talked to the kids and said we were going to go over and help. I helped clean, and after a little while, P and X got involved, scrubbing floors and cleaning glass furniture. (I had offered to pay them a little if they'd help out.) They earned their negotiated pay, and my kids and I split before the company came. P said afterward that she hoped we could do that again soon. I said, "So you want to earn some more money cleaning?" She replied, "No, I'd be glad just to get paid in fun. That was a lot of fun!" T wasn't an active helper with cleaning, but he did keep track of what he played with while there, so we could make sure all of it got put away before we left.
• The kids and I have had some really pleasant, spontaneous outings. One day I took a wrong turn on the way home from the chiropractor, and we ended up pointing toward a different town than I'd meant to drive to. The kids really wanted to go there, so we did, and had lunch out and a little toy-shopping trip. They were very resilient and willing to change plans as the situation evolved; they even decided not to stop for frozen yogurt on the way home, which I'd promised we could do if they did an errand I wanted to run; they wanted to get home and weren't that hungry.

Thinking, Asking Questions, Planning...

• Scribblenauts is the source for interesting exploration sometimes. Recently T looked at the word "UFO," which was in his Scribblenauts cache, and said, "That's like F-F-O, off." I said that off was actually O-F-F, but he wanted to try typing in FFO, so he did. We were offered "did you mean?" options, including TAHO, which I'd never heard of. So while T tried out the other options (FOE and TEA, I think), I looked up "Taho," and we found out about a Philippine snack made of silken tofu, brown rice syrup, and sago pearls, which, to judge from a search on Amazon, are often confused with tapioca pearls, or perhaps are considered the same thing depending on where you live. It might be fun to make this at home, though I suspect P and T would like the taste and abhor the texture.
• As homeschoolers and night owls, we usually sleep until everyone wakes up naturally in the morning. I try to keep bedtime happening at a time that will allow me to get enough rest before morning; letting it go as late as anyone likes turns out with me very grumpy and underfunctioning as a mom. But that can still be pretty late compared to many schooled kids' bedtimes. P's camp week was an exception -- we needed to be up about 7:30 a.m. to get her there on time, which meant bedtime around 8:00 (before dark, as T reminds me every evening) to allow for reading, music, and enough sleep. Both kids have made progress over the week in getting up and doing what needs to be done to get going, and also in understanding that getting to bed on time is helpful for making early mornings more pleasant! One morning T was dragging his feet more than usual, and I said that this kind of trouble getting ready was why I had not yet signed him up for a Lego camp this summer that meets in the morning. He perked up and took notice; he would like to try that Lego camp! I guess it makes complete sense -- both kids are more focused when they're preparing for something they're really interested in doing. As it turned out, I offered T a different option instead of morning Lego camp: I would set a budget and he could pick out Lego kits at the Lego store, which he and I could build during the afternoons when P was at Lego camp. This worked beautifully, it cost less than camp, we didn't have to do early mornings, and T got to keep his Lego kits, which would not have been the case at camp: win-win-win.

A Complex, but Robust, Balance

A little over a week ago, I was waiting during P's gymnastics class and sitting next to a parent I know and his daughter, who's in third or fourth grade. She was working on a school assignment, and he was clearly anxious for her to make as much progress as possible during her sister's gymnastics class. He was pushing hard, and when she resisted (she seemed tired and not interested in the assignment), he moved on to belittling statements and questions. I was feeling really awkward, since I don't know this family well enough to have a good defusing intervention ready. I was glad when a relative of his came along, saw the stress, and talked to him long enough to give his daughter a break. But during that interaction, a funny thing was happening. I had an unschooler's voice in my head with an answer to every word out of his mouth. A lot of the answers had to do with this assignment being too involved for its purpose. She was supposed to draw several pictures representing events in a chapter book she'd read, then write several sentences about each picture. And he was having her do a rough draft, in preparation for a more perfected final draft later. This project, taking hours of her life, would probably have an audience of one -- a teacher, probably bored with grading 25 similar assignments. This girl was tired and in no way primed to be doing creative work, especially on a project not of her own choosing. Oh my gosh, I could go on and on.

But the other thing happening was that I could hear myself, a year ago (before I started thinking about unschooling our kids) and in some cases more recently, saying many things similar to what this dad was saying. It was painful to hear, both that way and in the moment for the daughter's sake. But it helped me see how far my thinking had come on what was useful for learning. It made me intensely glad I wasn't having to flog my own kids through long, involved school assignments in which they had no interest -- this seems like the surest way to produce adults with no interest in reading, writing, creativity, or whatever is being forced. And for the first time, I felt a deep sense that we were on the right path. I was high for days, and it was hard to tell anyone, since most of the non-parents I know wouldn't get it, and most of the parents with kids in school would feel bad. I finally got to tell it a week later at an unschooling park day, where it made no splash -- these parents already know this stuff -- but it felt good. I feel I'm finally starting to find my balance and stride as an unschooling mom. And as the rest of this entry will reflect, it's a balance with a million little parts, like a huge Alexander Calder mobile. It looks like it shouldn't work sometimes, but it's actually quite sturdy, and the whole picture created is so beautiful.

Today I read a John Taylor Gatto essay, "The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher," in which Gatto enumerates the soul-crushing, conformity-enforcing lessons of school that make it an efficient way of producing interchangeable parts of a permanent underclass. The essay built on the feelings of that gymnastics-class episode, and added the feeling that my evolving beliefs about how learning happens have ruined me as a future classroom teacher in any conventionally structured school. This is probably fine. But if I'm looking at going back into education (I taught public and private school for a few years here and there), I'll be interested to read more about Gatto's free school, and whether what he does there reflects a very different vision of school.

In other school-related thoughts, I read something this week on my favorite unschooling email list (AlwaysLearning) about how kids in school often learn to bluff their way through, appearing as though they know more than they really do -- and that this translates into being reluctant to ask questions. This resonates with my own experience of school (though I also sat near the front and asked lots of questions by the time I got to grad school, having decided there was something I wanted from school other than looking good to my instructors), and it totally fits with my observation that P has become more willing to ask questions -- about all kinds of things -- the longer she's been away from school. I love that she asks questions, and it shows; I'm sure that helps. Now the value in bluffing by avoiding questions is gone, unless she's so engrossed in something (a good story, say) that she doesn't want to interrupt it with a question and answer. When I listen to the rhythms as UnschoolerDad reads to P from the Song of the Lioness series, which they are both enjoying and have almost finished, I hear lots of pauses for questions about unfamiliar words or about why the story is unfolding the way it is.

These last two weeks have been curiously lean on notes to add to this blog, and yet I have the feeling that learning is happening at a terrific pace. It's an odd feeling, probably rooted partly in the fact that both kids have sources of information beyond my direct knowledge and control, including books, videos and games they're experiencing without me right by their sides. Sometimes that learning surfaces, as when P spotted the title of a sci-fi novel I'd just picked out from the library (Galileo's Dream) and asked about it -- it turned out that the PBS Kids show Martha Speaks (note: this link makes noise!) had included a segment on Galileo, from the apocryphal point of view of his dog, who'd inadvertently inspired some of his discoveries about physics. We talked a little on the walk from the library back to the car about Galileo's contributions to science, and also his heresy trial, and we talked about how the Galilean moons (the biggest four moons of Jupiter) were all eventually named for people Zeus (aka Jupiter) had abducted or otherwise misappropriated -- we looked them up later at home to find the story of each. Unlike P's knowledge about Galileo, some of what the kids are learning may never become obvious to me. Still, though, there's been a lot of learning I could observe and participate in.

On a car ride somewhere, UnschoolerDad was saying something about Sputnik, and T asked what a satellite is. We talked a little about natural and human-made satellites, and about how some satellites send pictures of the earth from above. In a short internet search for information about satellites, I ran across a photo of an infrared astronomical satellite whose data I had crunched a bit during a summer astronomy internship in college! Later, the kids and I used Google Maps' satellite view to look at a lake nearby where we've played, at our house, and at the houses of some family and friends. We followed our walking routes on streets on the map, from our house to places nearby that we knew, using what we knew about each place to find exactly the right houses -- a beautiful way to relate maps to reality. Then, at T's request, we followed the railroad tracks from where we usually see them to the southeast until we found a train. That took a while! T has continued asking where things are on maps -- he now has Colorado located on the huge world map that was a gift from grandparents this year, and several times a week he asks what something on that map or some other map is. P has asked fewer questions about geography so far (though as I edit this post, she is poring over maps and asking me questions about places she sees on them), but she follows along, and sometimes she and T make up adventures in which they sail or fly between distant points on the world map, following tortured routes. I think I'd like to find some maps at different scales showing where we live, from the city level to the region, so we can trace our travels together on a finer scale than a world map provides.

While we were mousing around Google Maps, we were also building a matchbox-like container from cardboard to be a dresser drawer for a doll (this involved drawing patterns on graph paper and estimating how much extra size the outer layer would need -- we estimated a little tight, but P adapted the technology to make many doll-size treasure chests and wastebaskets with lever-action lids, which T gleefully filled with tiny bits and bobs) and letting white glue dry on the pad of my finger so the kids could see the fingerprint after it was peeled off. They liked seeing the stages of drying and feeling the roughness of the fingerprint-impression. This mixed-up day was one of the best in my memory for following the kids' desires where they led.

Last night we spent the evening at the library, as P read the last third of a chapter book she really wanted to finish that was due that day, and T played with the puzzles and looked at board books in the kids' area. I got more time than usual to browse the kids' books for interesting stuff, and came up with three books I thought would catch P's interest. They were all quite successful; P was engaged, making links to prior knowledge and taking in new information, even pointing out inconsistencies between text and illustrations that were relevant to the stories.

• Giants in the Land is about the giant pine trees that used to grow in New England, and how they were harvested to make masts for the British navy. At the end of the story, 1775 brought the end to the shipping of American mast trees to England; this meshed with Revolutionary War on Wednesday, a Magic Tree House book P recently read on her own.
• Shibumi and the Kitemaker is a wonderful view of the class disparity in an imaginary feudal society similar to imperial Japan, and how the emperor's daughter decided to change the squalor and suffering in the city surrounding her walled garden. P and I talked briefly while reading it, about how feudal society was structured, and how there is still class disparity and concentration of wealth under capitalist systems. 
• Songs from the Loom: A Navajo Girl Learns to Weave gave a culturally-grounded view of some of my favorite crafts, spinning and weaving. It included some of the Navajo stories related to weaving and described the processes at a perfect level for P to absorb (though I, as a weaver, wanted more detail about how the loom worked -- but that's information I can find!). It also included a brief history of the Navajos' being expelled from and later regaining the rights to their ancestral lands in the Four Corners region, with associated information on Navajo-U.S. relations and tribal governance. In several more years, P may have a chance to go on a yearly trip to tribal lands in this region with youth and adults from our church. I hope that some grounding in Navajo and Hopi culture will make that a welcome and rich experience for her. [Note Oct. 15: just noticed and corrected some sloppy editing in this paragraph. Sorry about that!]

In my previous post I wrote about P wanting to set up in the driveway and sell stuff. One Saturday morning recently, she decided she wanted to set up a free face-painting booth in the driveway. We were in good shape to hang out, so she did. I showed her how to clean the face crayons with alcohol between faces to prevent passing germs; she made a sign and gathered her materials, and then she went out to sit. I took a book out to her to pass the time on our oh-so-out-of-the-way street, though mostly she looked around at squirrels and such so she wouldn't get too absorbed in her book (her phrasing! I love this kid!) and miss a person going by. T went out to sit with her after a while. As no one continued to come by, they got interested in crushing rocks to powder with harder rocks, and drawing on the driveway with rocks, to see what kinds of colors they could get. After a couple of hours and zero potential customers, P decided to close up shop. She'd had a good time, and she hasn't yet asked again to set up a garage sale. It felt good to me to support what she wanted to do without trying to reshape it too much (but after being her ally by telling her what information I could about what it might take to succeed). And the little geology lesson was an unexpected bonus. We tried mixing the rock powders with water and found the resulting paints unsatisfactory. We may try making milk paints or oil paints from crushed rock at some point.

Other recent highlights:

• P spotted an articulated bus and tried to point it out, but she ended up saying "crenellated" instead. I said "articulated" so she could remember the word she wanted, but then it led to a discussion of medieval fortifications, with photos on the Web when we got home. In an unusual moment, P said of crenellated, "Thanks for teaching me that word, mama!"
• P asked for some big paper to put up on the wall so she could write down word families to show T. She misspelled some of them, but she let me write the correct spelling of one word per family so she could correct them all. It was fun brainstorming words in each family and noting some homonyms (e.g., code doesn't belong in the family with toad and road.)
• T continues to ask lots of questions about what sounds letters make, what words say, how to spell words, and how to write letters. I gave him a composition book with big triple lines for writing. He can't use the lines very well yet, but he likes it when I take story dictation from him and write it down, and sometimes he asks me to guide his fingers to write a letter. Today as we settled down for a nap together, I was reading a novel, and T asked me to read it out loud to him. He seemed to enjoy it even though I was pretty sure he didn't understand much of it. At a couple of points he pointed with his finger, following along as if pointing at what I was reading, though he was on the opposite page. I took his cue and pointed where I was actually reading. He asked about the page numbers and how to say them (e.g., 63 is sixty-three), and also about how to pronounce combinations of letters he could see on the page. He also loves Super Why (noisy link), a PBS Kids series about letters, spelling, and reading.
• Both kids are enjoying watching Word Girl on Amazon video. Recently P watched several episodes while I folded laundry and watched with her. After some episodes we'd check and reinforce the meanings of the words emphasized. Some of these check-ins also led to discussions of civics concepts like candidates and elections (one episode included a student council election and a local election for District Attorney) or literary contexts like a school Shakespeare play.
• Both kids are also enjoying Sid the Science Kid (another noisy link), which we find on Netflix. It's very schooly, but they find the information interesting, and some of it (the importance of brushing teeth and balanced nutrition, for example) is helpful in the family.
• UnschoolerDad found the Toontastic app for iPad, and P has been making some of her own cartoons with it. It prompts for different parts of the story arc and provides music choices authors can pair with their cartoon scenes. It's fun to see the kids becoming multi-literate in different computer platforms -- touch-screen tablets, laptops, iOS, Windows, Android -- I get the feeling they'll be more comfortable than I am with a lot of technology before long.
• P and I did the experiment of filling a bowl to the brim with ice and water, and then watching the water level as the ice melted. It stayed the same -- water really expands a lot when it freezes. We'll see more of that in our environment as winter comes; yesterday I winterized the swamp cooler, and P asked why, so I talked about water pipes bursting or the swamp cooler reservoir cracking if we leave water in them during freezing weather.
• P and I found about four different ways to think about the question, "How many cups are in six quarter cups?" (we've done this before, but we found more ways this time) as I was cooking some quinoa recently. She's doing these little math-storms with me much more willingly than she used to, with almost no anxiety. It's good to see.

And then there's daydreaming. P recently said she'd like to have a whole room full of cool stuff she could use to learn. With a gate on it to keep T out. T has mastered baby gates, so that's not going to happen, but I sympathize with the desire to have more stuff -- electrical parts, microscopes, Cuisenaire rods (whether they use them for math or not, these were great fun for me as a kid for their catapult-building potential, and I still think of short distances in centimeters easily because of them), more kinds of building toys, and whatever else we can think of. It's fun to daydream of what we can do when we have an income again. Until then, there are bargains, libraries, free museums, and many possibilities afforded by our existing possessions. T's current favorite is a hand-cranked popcorn popper with conical gears on top for turning the stirring rod. Good stuff.

...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!

Still Waters Run Deep

It's been a quiet week at our house, mostly. The rain just keeps coming down most days, so we've mostly been at home. Although we're doing some reading, playing, cooking, and watching and listening to interesting things, the days feel slow and not very full. But that reading, in particular, really accounts for a lot of time, knowledge, and reading practice! Looking back on our library records and my notes for the week, it hasn't been as uneventful as it seemed.

We are becoming prodigious library consumers. I feel like an extravagant thief, walking out of the library each time with those huge piles of books, CDs, and DVDs, all with no money changing hands! We use the hold-and-pickup-at-our-branch system extensively, as well as visiting the main library every few weeks. We are good about getting things back on time or early, but our library doesn't charge late fees on items from the children's section, so even the occasional late item is free, as long as we don't lose it. This sort of thing is worth the sales and parcel taxes for the libraries, I tell you.

Some borrowed items we've read, watched, or listened to recently:

• The Way Things Work animated episodes on Wheels and Axles and on Sound
• An animated version of the Greek myth of Jason's quest for the Golden Fleece
• Singin' in the Rain, which provided interesting side conversations about how movies are often made on sets, even when the action appears to take place outdoors; the difference between silent films and talkies; sorting out all the movies-within-the-movie; and suspension of disbelief in movies and musicals ("Why is he not using his umbrella?")
• A DVD on beginning Spanish for kids. I was singularly unimpressed with the attempts at teaching, especially if they're aiming at kids who aren't great readers yet. But P and T watched with interest and picked up a few things.
• A music and story CD called Mr. Beethoven Lives Upstairs, about Beethoven's life, his music, and the odd habits he had while composing
• Other classical CDs from the library, which unfortunately were in the wrong cases, so we didn't have much information on the pieces or composers
• LOTS of books in P's favorite series: Magic Tree House, Magic School Bus chapter books, Fairy Realm, and the Rainbow Magic fairy books. Here's a sampling of topics in Magic Tree House books P's read recently: Leonardo da Vinci, the Great Depression, Carnival in Venice circa 1750, the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, ocean life, the arctic, the Old West, and Ireland in the early Middle Ages (monks preserving written documents, Viking invasion, and a bit about the older Celtic culture). P also has been listening to The Children of Green Knowe on CD while cleaning her room, and she says she likes it. I like it when a new author squeezes in among the series monopolists, though one could really pick worse series than Magic Tree House!

We've also had chances to learn through everyday experience and curiosity:

• We replaced some batteries in a toy, so both kids got a look at battery-placement diagrams, how to recognize the plus and minus terminals on a battery, and how to get batteries to fit in their spots.
• Today when P had a lot of her folded laundry to put away and T kept following her into her room and slowing her down, P had the idea to bring out her toy cash register and play "store" with T. She was buying her clothes from him in the living room, one small pile at a time, then sorting them out into her dresser drawers and coming back for more. T would type a number on the register and P would read it to him (she's getting pretty good at place value up to 3 or 4 digits) and pretend to pay him appropriately. After the laundry was put away, they sorted out the play money, and P showed T what all the different kinds of coins were. Since P just recently got that worked out herself, it reminded me of the medical school mantra, "See one, do one, teach one." I also noticed when I was a tutor, and then a teacher, of physics and high school math, that nothing solidified a piece of knowledge for me like having to teach it to others, especially others with learning styles different from my own. So you can imagine the silent applause for this sibling-initiated game!
• P noticed moisture on the outside of her cup of ice water and asked about it. I explained condensation (relating it to relative humidity and molecular energy through phase changes, though not in those words), and she got it. Later we made toasted-cheese sandwiches, and P commented that the cheese became a liquid. We talked about observations that would validate that idea (e.g., the cheese flowing downhill or re-solidifying as it cooled), and she was right on. P commented after assembling another sandwich for toasting, "I used my quesadilla skills too." There's nothing like a little metacognition to go with your learning.
• On our one sunny day, we went to a nearby park where there are paddleboats. P and I went for a ride with her aunt and cousin, and we got a chance to do same pedaling, see the rudder and paddle wheel at work on other boats, and talk a little about how they worked. 
• T keeps working at his jigsaw puzzles, with and without help, and his spoken syntax is really shaping up beautifully.

And just now, P brought me the cash register with a decimal number on its screen, wanting to read it to me and find out what the numbers after the decimal point meant. Mama like.

Mysteries, Music, Myths, and More

P recently told me she was enjoying reading for a little while after she went to bed. She was doing this by the overhead light because her flimsy bedside lamp had finally taken one bump too many and broken. I gave her the sturdier clamp light from beside my bed so she wouldn't have to climb down from her loft to turn off the overhead light before sleeping. She really appreciated that! A few days later, P started sleeping until 10 a.m. instead of her usual 8 or so. After a couple of days of that, I put two and two together and thought to ask whether she was reading late into the night. Yes, she said, on some recent nights she'd read entire chapter books -- A to Z Mysteries in these cases -- after going to bed. Mystery solved! We talked about the wisdom of going to bed a little earlier if she wanted to read a lot, and of turning off the light earlier if we had something scheduled early the next day. She's continued devouring books at night, but wake-up is getting a  little more consistent. I used to read voraciously at bedtime, too, though I paid the price the next day in fatigue at school on nights when my parents didn't come to tell me to turn off the light. I'm so glad P can sleep in a little and have whole books and good days, too!

We've done some kitchen observations this week. There was a glass, previously full of water with lemon, that was being used to dissolve some Alka-Seltzer. P noticed there were two lemon seeds in the glass, and that they were slowly rising and falling. We watched them for a while, looking for the causes of both. A seed would sink to the bottom of the glass, get bubbles stuck to it, float to the surface, get most of its bubbles popped when they broke the surface of the water, and sink again.

Also, there was some celery that had gone limp in the refrigerator. I wrapped the bottom of the bunch in a wet paper towel to try to revive it, and then thought of trying a couple of stalks in glasses of water with food coloring. P and T each chose a color (red and blue), and we put the stalks in to soak. After a couple of hours, not much was happening, so I tried trimming the bottom ends of the stalks, as you might with cut flowers. A short while later, we could see colored dots along the bottoms of the stalks, but no color seemed to be making it up higher. We decided to cut off the top ends to see if there was color inside that we couldn't see, and lo and behold, the color had made it all the way up!

We talked about this in terms of plants bringing up water from their roots to supply the rest of the plant (and transporting sugars from the leaves downward to the rest of the plant, though I don't think that part was demonstrated by our food-coloring trick). We also talked about why the celery stalks looked different colors (yellowish-green vs. bright, cool bluish-green) on the outside in terms of P's color mixing experience with paints and crayons.

Our movie-watching recently has taken a social-learning turn, though there are still things to learn from the content of the films as well. P and I watched The Music Man (the 1962 version) in a few stints over a few days. P wanted to know why Marian fell in love with Harold Hill, and I had to admit it was a bit of a stretch given her original, strait-laced character, but we talked about the various reasons someone might like another person; for example, agreeing with their life choices (no in Marian's case, though she eventually helped Harold choose a more honest life), having a lot in common (maybe, especially music), or enjoying the way being around a person makes you feel (yes!). Then P wanted to know why Marian had originally rebuffed Harold. I talked a little bit about the idea that women, especially 50 years ago, were not expected to give in easily to a man's efforts to make friends or get close, and also the fact that Marian had seen a lot about Harold's life choices but not much yet about what they had in common or how he made her feel. I should tie this in with Kiki's Delivery Service, a movie P knows well, in which Kiki refuses even to speak with Tombo because she comes from an old-fashioned village where it's expected a boy and girl should have a proper introduction before he speaks to her.

P had a lot of fun with the musical aspects of The Music Man, especially how two songs could be sung at the same time, as the film did with "Lida Rose" and "Will I Ever Tell You," and also with "76 Trombones" and "Goodnight my Someone." She read an interaction into the alternating singing of those last two by Harold and Marian -- a turning point in Harold's change of heart -- that I thought was pretty insightful. The Music Man has already provided some interesting musical exploration here: I discovered recently that "Till There Was You" wasn't original with the Beatles as I had assumed, and we played the Shirley Jones, Kristen Chenoweth, and Beatles versions for comparison. Then we went on a Beatles listening spree, which led to Chuck Berry, since the Beatles had also covered some of his songs. It was fun to look at how rock musicians could borrow both from earlier strands of rock music and from Broadway!

We also watched the Jim Henson: The Storyteller version of "Theseus and the Minotaur" recently. There were plenty of opportunities to talk about ideas like human sacrifice, tribute from one country to another, the Greek propensity to include human/divine and human/animal interbreeding in their mythology, and other more mundane ideas along the way. When the story ended, P wanted to know why Ariadne had encouraged Theseus to kill the Minotaur, her brother, whom she loved. This telling had shown her turning from trying to make the Minotaur's existence meaningful and bearable, to believing the Minotaur could never be happy, so I talked about the idea of putting a person or animal out of their misery when their existence has become too horrible to continue. For some real-life context, we talked about euthanasia for pets. And I brought up the opposing view that even a miserable existence can be worth continuing, either because one values life too much to end it, or because there is hope that things might improve. Ariadne seemed to hold all these ideas as she changed her mind back and forth about whether she wanted Theseus to kill the Minotaur. We also talked about how, when Ariadne fell for Theseus, her loyalty became divided. (Theseus, apparently loyal only to his own ambitions, apparently had no such problem.) P also wanted to know why Theseus had abandoned Ariadne on Naxos. Bacchus/Dionysus did not come along within the scope of this telling, so there was no happy ending for Ariadne. That led to a discussion of tragic flaws -- problems that can lead to a person making the same mistakes over and over -- and how Theseus's tragic flaw seemed to be that he made promises too easily and had a hard time keeping them. He promised Aegeus he would raise a white sail on his return, but he didn't, and Aegeus killed himself in despair. He promised Ariadne he would take her with him when he left Crete, but he abandoned her. He promised his mother he would return to her, but he never did, doubtless leaving her heartbroken after her earlier abandonment by Aegeus.

Today we went to our local unschooling park day and enjoyed learning first-hand about irrigation ditches, culverts, miniature cattails, skate park etiquette, and angular momentum, as well as just having a good time playing with other kids and moms. T had a first, as he moves from parallel, structure-centered play to beginning to have some pretend and other play with other kids his age (that is, without an older child leading the way). He told me about an interaction with another child his size, who he called a baby when he described her to me. I told him her name, and he said, "I like she. She my best friend." I think that's the first time he's described anyone as a friend, without an adult prompt. Hooray! Now to conquer the objective case, third-person, singular, feminine pronoun. Hey, a week ago I don't think he had she, so it's all good.

The Science, Myth, and Music of Rebirth

Lots of little things have been happening here. P, who has been trying for weeks or months to learn to snap her fingers, came to me a few days ago and announced that she'd done it! Sure enough, she can snap left-handed, but not right-handed yet. I remember a similar process when I was learning. P has also started reading before bed, on nights when she's not too tired. She's working her way through Charlotte's Web. Today she picked up a booklet she'd been creating at school on the seasons, and she added some text and pictures to it about winter.

Recently P came to me, asking if I knew where the little cheat-strip for her toy piano was -- the strip that identifies the notes, so she can play specially coded music without actually being able to read musical notation. I had no idea what had happened to it, so I offered to teach her the basics of reading music. She said no, thanks. I just sat down and started drawing a basic key to treble-clef piano music: A keyboard diagram labeled with note names, a scale labeled with note names, and the full tune and words for "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star," because I know she can play it by ear. I didn't ask her to look at it or do anything with it, but P was sucked in and watched the process of scoring the song with interest, and now it's in her room by the piano. I've been doing that a fair amount lately. I'll offer to show her something, and if she says no but I really believe she would like whatever it is, I'll just start doing it independently. She almost always ends up interested. A part of this can feel wrong -- as if I'm ignoring what she says. But so far it's working out well. She doesn't complain about any of this as long as I'm not coercing her participation, and often something fun comes out of my little diversions. It's one of my current ways of strewing the kids' paths with interesting stuff. I've considered not asking, just starting the thing on my own -- but for some things the questions help draw attention to something P might never otherwise notice was happening.

Yesterday a lot of little things came together into a big thing -- the day took on a spring theme. We were planning to go to a homeschoolers' park day, but the weather was chilly and damp, so we decided to stay in. T and P were both excited about dyeing eggs, so we did that. I dyed one by wrapping it in yellow onion skins and then in aluminum foil before boiling it, and P asked why that made it turn colors, which led to other good questions like, "If someone were dying cloth orange, would they wrap the cloth up with onion skins and foil?" I've been learning about natural dyes for fiber from guild presentations and magazines recently, so although I haven't tried it yet, I was able to answer her questions.

After the eggs were all dyed and put away, I gave the kids some lunch. As they were winding up eating, I pulled up some animations on YouTube about why the Earth has seasons. The ones I found were either aimed at adults (but with lots of good information), or aimed at kids and almost totally lacking in understandable content, but fortunately this is a topic I know well, so we stopped the video a lot so I could explain things in a more helpful way. P asked why the Tropic of Cancer was named that, and since I had no idea, we looked it up. It turns out that the precession of the equinoxes has made the name inaccurate, since it was originally named for the constellation in which the Sun was located at the June solstice, when the Sun is directly overhead at that Tropic (were it named using the same rule today, it would be called the Tropic of Taurus or the Tropic of Gemini, depending on whether you like to listen to astronomers or astrologers about where the Sun is), but P's giggle at the idea of the Earth wobbling like a top in extremely slow motion was priceless. Later last night, as I was writing this, I learned more about what causes axial precession: gravity from the Sun and Moon pulling on Earth's equatorial bulge. I also learned that the orbits themselves precess, so that the longer-term diagram of planetary orbits might look more like a flower-petal design than an ellipse.

Having discussed the science behind spring, I offered to tell P the Greek myth about why we have seasons -- the story of Persephone. "No, thanks." "Okay." I sat down and found a web site where the story was told in brief, kid-friendly language, and which also linked to a 4-minute video depicting a modernized version of the myth. T, and then P, got sucked into that video. I read P the story, since the video told it differently. P asked for another Greek myth, and I thought Orpheus and Eurydice might be a good segue, also being about an attempt to get a soul back from the Underworld. The web site with the Persephone story didn't offer Orpheus, so we went looking and stumbled across YouTube clips of the series, Jim Henson: The Storyteller. These Greek-myth episodes are dark and somewhat stylized -- not what I would have expected to draw P in -- but we were all three mesmerized. The storytelling is much more Grimm than Disney, and I've been thinking that was a direction we should be exploring. P was eager for more, so we also watched the Storyteller version of Icarus and Daedalus. We're looking forward to checking the full series out from the library and seeing more. Over dinner, I told UnschoolerDad that we'd been checking out some Greek mythology today, and P asked why it was called mythology. That led to a brief discussion that tied up today's explorations with each other nicely -- the idea that myths are what the people of a culture use to explain what they see in the world, which is what science has been increasingly able to do with the passage of time.

Out of the blue, P found Pike's Peak (which we recently visited) on the world map hanging in our hallway, a freebie from Doctors Without Borders that happens to use the Mercator projection. I showed her Greece and Crete on the map, since those were the settings of the myth-based videos we'd watched earlier. P remarked that Greenland was the biggest island she had ever heard of. She has a globe, so I pointed out Greenland there and P learned a little about how flat maps, especially Mercator projections, tend to exaggerate the size of high-latitude features.

Finally, P and T were playing with some bird calls yesterday afternoon. T was playing a duck call, and P was trying to describe what he sounded like in terms of animals -- duck, cow, etc. I said I thought he sounded like a crumhorn. P wanted to know about crumhorns, so we found a photo of some and a video of two musicians playing a duet on crumhorns.

P loved the musical style, so we went looking for more Renaissance music to listen to. P noticed that the church in which one of the videos was set had no pews, so we talked a bit about the Catholic and Eastern churches and their histories. (As it turns out, the church in the video is a Protestant church with removable seating!) We mostly found motets rather than madrigals, so the content wasn't specifically Spring-y, but the idea of Renaissance as rebirth tied the day together nicely.

All the Time in the World

I have no time for heedless hurry
I have no time for the hustler's bluff
I have no time for restless worry
I have all the time in the world for love
     -Fred Small, from "All the Time in the World"

Two things in the last two days have stood out as fun learning experiences. First, P and I watched Fly Away Home together. T joined in when he woke up from his nap. It's a movie rich in information unfamiliar but accessible (with a few explanations) to many kids: how birds imprint on the first living thing they see, how geese learn to migrate, how government "wildlife services" juggle protecting animals and catering to the preferences of humans, how the U.S. protects its borders, how land developers and environmentalists often come into conflict over wildlife habitat, and a bit about how ultralight aircraft are built and flown. P was horrified when she saw the bulldozer tearing up trees near the main character's home in Canada. I hadn't expected that level of reaction, but in hindsight, when you haven't grown up with the fight against clear-cutting, it really is horrifying to see healthy trees in a beautiful area torn apart and pulled up by their roots!

Yesterday all three of us spent the day at a local nature and science museum. I briefly debated whether to buy a year's membership, and I'm so glad I did. Beyond saving us money if we go more than a few times per year, it allowed me to be completely unfazed by the idea of taking an hour to go the first 50 feet into the museum. When you're trying to "do" a large part of a museum in a day, you miss so much! This way, I figured, if we only saw 1% of what the museum had to offer, that was just fine -- we could come back anytime, and the kids would get a chance to drill down to what was fascinating for them. We had all the time in the world.

Here are some of the things they found interesting:

• A collection of insect specimens, showing representative sizes and types for a dozen different classification groups
• A display on the life cycle of butterflies (To look up: what's the difference between a chrysalis, a pupa, and a cocoon in other metamorphosing animals? The display didn't have the level of detail we wanted on that.)
• A display of a few local animals, stuffed and beautifully displayed with artists' depictions of them alongside
• A window into the workings of the escalator -- We could see signs of past repair work and make guesses about how the parts we couldn't see might work.
• A display, with helpful explanations by a museum volunteer, of meteorites (The partial melting of the meteorites tied into what we learned about atmospheric re-entry from Apollo 13.)
• A machine that demonstrated impact crater formation, with some great photos of craters on the Earth and elsewhere
• A demonstration with a bell jar on how liquids boil in near-vacuum and actually cool off a bit in the process -- the demo was intended to show the effects on a human of a leaky space suit ("Space can really make your blood boil!"), and the presenter was a retired Lockheed engineer who worked on equipment that was used on the space shuttle. We had fun talking shop a bit after he finished his demonstration.
• That there used to be an ocean where we are now (just east of the Rocky Mountains)
• How the continents moved from a clustered shape (Pangaea) to their present locations
• How wood gets petrified
• That you can match up rock/fossil strata from different, nearby locations to form a more extensive regional fossil record
• That rocks have a low level of natural radioactivity (display with geiger counter)
• How natural selection works (We discussed this while watching a video loop of mudskippers and other fish who can move over land from one puddle to another if theirs is drying up or food is scarce, and who thus survive and reproduce more successfully than other fish who can't get around as well. The first fish who had the beginnings of that ability would have had a serious advantage over their less able kin, leading eventually to speciation.)
• That animals need oxygen and produce carbon dioxide, and plants do the opposite, so they can live together in closed systems (There was a model of an experiment with a mouse and a green plant.)
• How the formation of the ozone layer allowed for the development of life more complex than the original microbes that generated the oxygen that reacted to form ozone in the first place
• Handling some samples of dried peat -- these were on display with some mammoth fossils, because the fossils were found in wet peat. (This tied into the harvesting and use of peat as fuel, which we saw recently in The Secret of Roan Inish. We do watch fanciful movies sometimes, but even in them we usually find something to learn!)

I learned some of the arguments scientists have made to support dinosaurs having been warm-blooded: they lived in groupings typical of modern warm-blooded animals; they traveled pretty quickly and were quite active compared to modern cold-blooded animals; they cared for their young; and they grew quickly during their juvenile periods, like modern warm-blooded animals. The kids, to be honest, weren't that interested in this bit yet, but they were fascinated by the stegosaurus fossils found in Colorado when I was finishing college nearby. Who knew?

We stopped in the museum shop before leaving. P bought a necklace with color-changing "mood" beads. T picked out a bundle of rubber snakes. It will be fun to learn how the mood beads work and what kinds of snakes we are now harboring! I picked out a field guide to Colorado birds and The Big Book of Brain Games, a book of puzzles at many levels and in many areas including art, math, and science. We had a good time with the puzzle book after dinner last night. I think P has a knack for topology puzzles. A sidebar in the book quipped that a topologist is a person who can't tell the difference between a donut and a coffee cup. Can you see how they are the same? It took me a moment. UnschoolerDad pointed out that a human would also fall in that group of objects. We've both had fun playing with topology -- I heard about it from classmates in college and brainteaser books in high school, but I don't remember it being covered in any courses.

As I write, both kids are painting with watercolors. T just created a stunning, boldly-colored piece, very different from his recent all-linear color studies. I can't quite capture the full depth of color with my point-and-shoot, but here's my best effort: