How the World Works

Aaaand we're back! There's been a lot going on, so how about a really huge list of what I actually remembered to write down at the time?

How the World Works (Science)

• T asked about how long ago Pangaea was. We looked up some maps, still and animated, to get him some answers. We also looked at how plate tectonics works, with spreading centers, subduction zones, and places where two plates abut forcefully and make mountains. We found places on the world map where each of these had happened or is still happening. Now both kids ask questions about how various features formed, often mountains or islands, and we can talk about volcanic hot spots (e.g., Hawaii) vs. volcanoes in subduction zones (e.g., the Ring of Fire around the Pacific) or spreading centers (East Pacific Rise, Mid-Atlantic Ridge) vs. mountains getting pushed up by plate impacts or compression (Rocky Mountains, Himalayas).
• We watched a video about how natural selection works. This led to another video by the same creators, about how fracking works and its risks to climate and human health. There is an anti-fracking initiative coming up for a vote in our city, so this was highly relevant to current events in our area.

• T and I read together a Magic School Bus book about butterflies, covering the differences between butterflies and moths, metamorphosis, molting, hazards to butterflies, what they eat, and how to help them. (P has read this book on her own in the past.)
• We watched a video about Jellyfish Lake. We wanted to know what kinds of jellyfish those were, so we looked it up and learned that the golden jellyfish, which have evolved there in isolation after drifting in from the ocean when sea levels were higher, host algal symbiotes that feed them, so the jellyfish follow the sun back and forth every day. Divers aren't allowed to use scuba gear in Jellyfish Lake because there's so much hydrogen sulfide dissolved in the water in the anoxic layer below 15 meters deep that it could kill them by absorption through the skin.

• Another video showed us two of the world's largest organisms: one nicknamed the humongous fungus, and the Pando aspen grove, which is roughly the size of Vatican City.

• T and I read another Magic School Bus book about microbes -- different kinds, their functions in the environment, how they spread, and more.
• We watched a video about gravity and how the orbits of satellites work, including geosynchronous orbits.
• A great video covered the life cycle of salmon, with a special focus on what eats them after they die following spawning. Although the main scavengers shown were ravens, eagles, bears, and maggots, this also tied in well with our reading about microbes.
• Other videos showed how trash is burned to produce energy in Norway (where they have to import trash from other countries to meet their energy needs!), and showed the relative sizes of the planets in our solar system by picturing them in our sky as if they were the same distance away as our moon.
• We talked about how seeds get dispersed. This came from watching birds eating berries off the vines in our backyard, and from seeing lots of milkweed fluff in our yard from milkweed plants in the neighbor's yard. I brought one of the milkweed pods inside and put it in a bowl on the counter, so anyone could pet it when passing by, or build small structures with it. I loved feeling it and noticing that it was so soft, it was difficult to tell whether you were touching it.
• We read a library book about the water cycle, including how water gets purified naturally by filtering through soil or swamps, problems caused by pollution, and how to conserve and protect water supplies.
• We watched some videos about octopuses. Both kids watch some of these, but T is especially fascinated. T spotted an octopus puppet at a store where we were shopping, but decided not to buy it. Later we saw more videos: an octopus stealing a video camera while it was recording, and octopuses going through very small openings (T has asked several questions about whether we could do that sort of thing if we had no bones, and made comments about how our bones make us different from octopuses).

• T chose a very fancy dinosaur pop-up book on a Costco trip and has been having me read parts of it to him. P also reads it with him.
• T enjoyed a video of Grover doing some science experiments.
• A question about how fireworks are made led to some good videos about firework production, safety measures during production, (some steps are done in concrete bunkers, and tools are chosen for their anti-static properties), and how fireworks shows are choreographed.

• We read a very basic library book about fire, which led to some discussions about fire safety.
• We watched a video on how to start a fire with a bow drill.
• P and T found a crawdad in the creek one day at our local unschoolers' park day. They were so excited!
• P and I watched SciShow videos on what happens when you stop eating (stages of starvation), on sleep deprivation, and on why pigeons bob their heads back and forth as they walk (they're actually holding their heads still as their bodies move, which gives them better ability to detect motion of predators or prey).
• I was singing some folk songs to P one day, and one of them was about the bomb in Hiroshima ("Cranes Over Hiroshima" by Fred Small, covered here by Jim Couza). She asked about what a nuclear bomb is, and we talked about nuclear fission and how it's used in a controlled way for power, and in an uncontrolled way in bombs. We also talked about how things go wrong at power plants sometimes (e.g., Fukushima), and how that can lead to uncontrolled reactions at power plants (meltdowns). The kids bring nuclear ideas into their pretend play as well.
• T was playing with a cardboard tube, stuffing socks and other objects into it with a pen for a ramrod, then blowing them out with his breath or by pushing them back out with the pen. I drew him some pictures about how that relates to the loading of old-fashioned rifles (as described in the Little House books, which we read some time ago). He wanted to know whether cannons were loaded the same way, and how a fuse could set off a cannon as he'd seen in cartoons, so we talked about those, too, with pictures, and the difference between how gunpowder burns in the open and how it burns in enclosed spaces (these related back to our fireworks videos).

How the World Works (Math, Spatial Reasoning, Logic)

• T spent some hours in Minecraft, seemingly trying to do everything one could possibly do with mine carts and tracks. He'd do very deliberate experiments, building a setup with powered tracks, for example, and then replacing one block at a time of track with unpowered track and testing the results each time. One such experiment involved a dip in the track, how much momentum the cars needed to make it back up the other side of the dip, and how this varied when the number of cars was changed.
• We watched a video about impossible objects and were tickled to see that most of the letter in the logo for The Kid Should See This were impossible objects.

• P mentioned one evening that she knew how to count by 25s. I asked if she learned that by thinking about money (which is how I think about it), and she said she learned from Plants vs. Zombies! (You get sun power in increments of 25 in that game.)
• P and I played with finding places on the world map by latitude and longitude (finally, a way into coordinate systems!) We tried plugging our rough estimate of our home's location into Google Maps, and found it was actually quite close, at a location we drive past regularly. Then we played with the numbers until we found the exact location of our house, just a few minutes/seconds from our original rough estimate.
• The kids found a video showing how to build a toilet in Minecraft that could actually flush and wasn't super-sized. It exploits one of the less-realistic aspects of how water and lava behave in the Minecraft world. P quickly built one in her Minecraft world and one for T in his world. T has since built his own version. Both kids have had fun with lighting their toilet areas to take advantage of the glow that comes from the lava, through the water, when the flush valve is open. P arranged it so that the flush lever turned off the room lights!
• We've made a few short stop-motion videos using iPad software. One day, on the way home from buying some new Lego sets, we worked up an estimate of how long it would take to make a stop-motion video of a Lego minifigure building one of the new sets from beginning to end. Our estimate of the least amount of time that could take was about 5 hours, based on the number of seconds it would take to set up and shoot each frame, and the likely number of frames per brick in the Lego set. We knew it would probably take much longer than that, because of time for planning sequences, fixing mistakes, and so on.
• Both kids, but especially T, have gotten really interested in Minecraft mods and the content packs that go with them. UnschoolerDad installed one mod they really wanted, but then he was busy, so I had to learn how to install additional content packs. It's not that hard, but the documentation available for how to do it is very spotty. I had to get help from UD for one obscure step. It's good for me to keep exercising the technical parts of my intelligence -- it's easy to let UD take care of it because he's so much faster at most such things, but when I figure it out, I can help the kids better, and they see me in the process of learning challenging things, rather than relying on experts all the time. That's important, I think.
• P continues to work on her empire in Dragonvale. She is amassing huge amounts of money in the game, and a few weeks ago I heard her reading out the amount to T. It was $12,192,691, and I asked to see what she was reading and verified that she was reading it out completely correctly. She has mastered place value (at least in the whole-number range) without much instruction from me -- I've spent a total of about five or ten minutes over the last couple of years, answering questions and providing brief explanations when she asked for them.
• T asked me recently if infinity really exists. We talked about the idea that the universe may be bounded, and thus not infinite in size. That might mean there's no actual, physical infinity out there. But we talked about how infinity is still an interesting and useful idea in mathematics -- the fact that there's no number so large that you can't produce a bigger number, and also the fact that you can imagine an infinity of fractions between any two numbers on a number line (density property of rational numbers).
• P has been building things on quite grand scales in Minecraft. Occasionally she takes me on a tour. Sometimes I have questions, like "How can the people get to the different animal stalls in the petting zoo?" P sometimes responds by remodeling to fix the issue. She builds quickly, seeming to have a plan in her head sometimes (e.g., how many floors, and thus how tall the exterior walls should be), and other times seeming to improvise and embellish on a simple original idea. T likes to see her creations, and sometimes he emulates them in addition to coming up with his own ideas.

How the Written World Works, What's Fun About It and What We Can Learn From It (Reading/Writing)

• T asked what the word "lizard" means. I gave him a quick description and some examples, but he seemed unsatisfied. So I tried giving him an etymology, since I often explain words in terms of what their parts mean. That was more satisfying, though it didn't have multiple roots or affixes to disassemble, which seemed to disappoint him. I like that he's in the habit of wondering why words mean what they do!
• We read the third and fourth books in the Theodosia series, Theodosia and the Eyes of Horus and Theodosia and the Last Pharaoh. The latter gave a glimpse into class divisions and conflicts in Egypt while the British were there in a colonial role.
• UnschoolerDad and P have read another two books in the Ranger's Apprentice series. There was an extended sequence in The Icebound Land about drug addiction (a drug was used to control one of the main characters when he was made a slave) and the process of detoxification. The Battle for Skandia gets into aspects of military strategy, including nuisance raids, choice of terrain for battle, and an ingenious method for the rapid training of a large force of archers.
• P wrote a brief pamphlet about fairies, asking for the spellings of some words. It turned out it was brief because she didn't have much to say about fairies! I've noticed her spelling has taken a turn for the better recently. She's remembering more spellings that she's asked about in the past, and she seems more aware of when she doesn't know the correct spelling for a word.
• The three of us read a bunch of picture books from the library, including two Jan Brett books (The Umbrella and The Three Snow Bears), another bilingual book (Mamá and Me), and an alphabet book with a different kind of boat for each letter. We had fun talking about nuclear submarines (a relative used to serve aboard one) and about why lightships and lighthouses are less essential now than before GPS came into broad use. Later we read another bilingual book about monarch butterflies, their life cycle, and their annual migration to Mexico. T likes to hear the Spanish first and then the English.
• T has been having us read the same few books over and over again. He seems to be working on reading some of the words himself. He can supply missing words from memory if I pause for some reason while reading.
• One of T's repeat books is Fox in Socks, which P also likes. P, UnschoolerDad, and I spent some time the other day thinking about what makes tongue-twisters hard, and trying to construct our own.
• T, who so far doesn't pronounce L or R sounds, tried L for the first time recently. He was trying to say something about a ladder, and I was hearing "rattle." I showed him how I said "ladder," with my tongue showing a little at the beginning, and he tried it! He's not been willing to try this before, so this was a nice step. He seemed pleased with himself. It hasn't translated to clearer speech in general yet, but the door is open. I think it was not a coincidence that this happened at a time when we were cuddling and feeling quite close and relaxed.
• P and I read Holes together. She loved it and is interested in the sequel, but the sequel is written for somewhat more mature audiences, so she agrees maybe we should wait a while and read other things in the meantime. I read most of the book out loud to her, but sometimes when I was busy she'd read to me, and sometimes when we were both eating, we'd read silently side by side. Holes addresses racism pretty directly, and has black and white characters relating to each other in both friendly and unfriendly ways.
• P and I are in the middle of Ella: Enchanted and enjoying it a lot.
• P has powered through the first couple of Geronimo Stilton books. These came as hand-me-downs from a neighbor. I started reading one out loud, but T and I were enjoying it much less than P, so I begged off reading it for a couple of days, and finally P dived in independently and read the first two books in a couple of hours one day.

How the World Works (History, Civics, Geography)

• See above for latitude and longitude, Egypt, fracking and its politics, and race issues.
• Prompted by Theodosia, we read a bit about the fire at the library in Alexandria, and also about hieroglyphic writing works.
• T asked whether there were real ninjas, so we did some reading and looking at pictures about real ninjas in Japanese history. It was interesting to find out that ninjas didn't dress in any particular way -- they dressed to blend in with the populace, since their purpose was to achieve their objectives without being noticed.
• We watched an animation of how political boundaries in Europe changed from the seventh century to the present. It was fascinating to watch the empires grow, shrink, and sometimes recover again; and to see the huge number of city-states in some periods of history.

• The government shutdown happened. I was watching and reading a lot of news about it, and P and I talked about why it was happening, what it meant (we had some relatives and friends furloughed), how Republicans in Congress were resisting the health care law, and how we expected the health care reforms to benefit us and others.
• We watched a video about what money is and what makes it money (stored value, accepted medium of exchange, divisible unit of account). 
• When UnschoolerDad traveled to Iceland for work, we talked about great circle routes, comparing where it looked like his plane would go (using yarn to mark "straight" routes on the world map) to where it would actually go (using yarn to mark great circle routes on the globe).
• When UD got home from Iceland, we saw some photos of the terrain there, which is pretty young volcanic soil and rock. We talked about what kinds of plants get into an area like that first, and how later succession leads to the kinds of terrain we're used to.
• While UD was in Iceland, we Skyped with him a few times, when it was afternoon for us and night for him. That led to some talk about time zones and why we have them.
• We used a web site that shows you a random point in the world. Most of those we landed in were in the ocean. One on land was near Ekimovichi in Russia. We looked up how many people live there and found out their principal industries: flax refining, cheese making, and a fruit combine. We had to look up "fruit combine," not an easy phrase to find on the Web, and then try just "combine," to figure out that probably meant a collective business of fruit producers and sellers. Another random place was in the ocean near Reunion, and the undersea terrain to the south of it looked like a spreading center, so we looked it up and found it was, at the edge of the African Plate. Hooray for connections!
• In our book about boats, the description of Viking Ship mentioned Scandinavia, and P figured out that this was what Skandia (in The Battle for Skandia) referred to. We talked about the other place names in that book -- Gallica is clearly France/Gaul, with a French-sounding language. Araluen and Tomujai are harder to peg, but I noticed another language sounds German-derived. UnschoolerDad and I spent some time with a real map and P half-listening, thinking about whether the actions in the series mapped onto the real-world map of France, Germany, Denmark, and perhaps some other nearby places. We decided it probably wasn't exact, but certainly drew inspiration from that region.
• We read about the foster-care system. Some friends of mine recently adopted a son who came to them through the foster-care system, and P and T have been curious about why kids end up in foster care and how that works. The book we found didn't get into the problems with the system, but described it in a way that would be helpful to kids involved in it themselves.
• I watched Ken Burns' The Civil War over several days while working on a knitting project. P listened in to some of it. I noticed that something like the battle maps used in the series popped up in her pretend play.
• After we went to buy the kids some new shoes (their old ones had gotten tight, and we thought P had grown three sizes until we realized that youth and adult sizes overlap by a couple of sizes), we talked a little about footbinding. The discussion didn't go far because I realized how difficult it is to answer P's "why?" questions in a way she can understand. It gets into eroticism, patriarchy, class structure, and other things that we can touch on, but that are hard to reach a good understanding of from her present point of view. That's one to keep working on.
• T enjoyed some videos on the days of the week and the months of the year.

Other Things About How the World Works

• One of our cats died. She had been in a slow decline for a couple of years, with a great number of physical problems, and things started getting worse more quickly. Last time we put a cat down, P was mad at me for a long time. I wanted to avoid that this time, so she and I had a long conversation about what to do, and we came to an agreement that if the vet didn't see a possibility for a good recovery (which she didn't, on a house call the next day), we would give our cat the best few days we could, and then have the vet come to our house to put the cat down. P stayed with me and the cat for the euthanasia,while UnschoolerDad hung out with T in another room. We both cried a lot during that week (T seemed to understand what was going on, but not to be distressed about it, as he's not much interested in the cats), but it was a good chance to say goodbye, come to terms with what was happening, and have some concentrated quality time with the cat before she died. P and I also got to think together about what the considerations are for the end of a pet's life. Does the pet understand what's going on? How much pain or distress are they in? Are there ways we can help them with those? Are those actions sustainable in our lives for the long term? Is a good recovery possible? With what probability, and at what cost in time and energy? Might things get worse soon? Considering all that, what's the kindest thing we can do for the animal, within our abilities in the short term and the longer term?
• Both kids, but especially P, are noticing that while their default preference is usually to stay at home and inside, they do have lots of fun when they get outside. When the leaves started falling, we left a restaurant one evening to find its deck unoccupied by people but full of fallen leaves. The kids started kicking them into piles. I was enjoying watching them very much, when it occurred to me I might have even more fun if I joined them. I was right, and the kids were energized by my participating, too. We made a big pile of leaves and lay down in it. This was one step in a process I've gone through recently, of relearning how to play in the ways the kids enjoy. Sometimes it seems so hard, but when I just make myself try, it's usually not so hard, and we have a lot of fun and sometimes hit some great learning places in our games.
• We made it to Park Day after being absent for many weeks. The kids both enjoyed how much running, climbing, and other hard play with friends they could do there. I think we'll be back for more Park Days in the future, especially now that we've re-outfitted for winter play at the kids' new sizes. (We bought some warm stuff when we thought we'd be doing a camping trip in October with snow on the ground; we missed the trip because of illness, but now we have really warm things!)
• Seemingly out of nowhere, T has started talking again about foods "joining the party" in his stomach -- something he picked up a couple of years ago from the only episode of Yo Gabba Gabba we ever watched. He uses the phrase when he's eating something different from what he ate previously, especially something healthy. Recently he asked for carrots with no prompting and made most of a meal of them. 
• P is picking up melodies easily. I was listening to several versions of a choir piece on YouTube, looking for a good one to share, and she picked up the piano introduction that went with the piece in each clip. She's also getting better at holding her own with harmonies. She likes singing rounds ("Make New Friends" and "Row Your Boat" are two favorites) and is getting better at holding her part in them. T doesn't sing as much as P did at his age, but I'm noticing him occasionally picking up tunes as well, and he hears the words of songs -- sometimes if I pause in a song because I'm having a hard time with the guitar chord, he supplies the next few words to remind me!

Floods, Egypt, and Good Questions

It's been an eventful couple of weeks here. The Front Range just got about a year's worth of rain in about four days. We were fortunately dry and warm in our house, but the roads were dangerous, so we holed up at home for the duration -- glad to have electricity, clean water, and enough food on hand -- and kept up with friends and acquaintances who were evacuating, digging out, and drying out.

I think this is in central Boulder. Here's the original, but be aware -- it will start a video automatically.

The flooding led to some interesting learning around here. T and I played an imaginary game in which he accidentally dropped a magical bucket of water that flooded the whole world. We played at being, and talked about, squid, sea snakes, some of the smallest sea creatures (plankton and coral), some of the fastest sea creatures (tuna), and how we'd be better off breathing with gills. T also asked where the ocean was deepest, and where in the world giant squid lived. We found the Mariana Trench and the Challenger Deep on our world map. We looked up giant squid and found out about where they've been seen (all over the world, pretty much) and how they swim. We also found the first video captured of a giant squid in its own habitat. The scientists in the video were hugely excited, and so was T!

When we were able to drive around again, we were at a Park Day, talking with friends displaced by the floods and seeking interim housing, when another thunderstorm rolled in. We quickly got to the car and started home. On the way home, as we had on the way, we watched for areas that were still flooded or showed signs of flooding (P spotted so much debris caught on one barbed-wire fence that it looked as if it were made of hay bales!), and we talked a little hydrology -- what runoff is, and how it starts to happen faster when the ground is already saturated from previous rains, which was why we were driving home instead of waiting the storm out at the park. We also talked about what to do in a flash flood situation -- getting to higher ground as quickly as possible, which for some people in the canyons meant grabbing only their shoes and each other and climbing a hill in their pajamas before their houses washed away.

We've been reading a lot from the Theodosia series of books about Egyptologists and Egyptian magic in Edwardian London. In those books and online, we read some details about how the ancient Egyptians made mummies of their dead. We talked about the concept of desecration, as we read a part of the story in which a mummy was unwrapped for the entertainment of guests at a party. The story compared this to digging up and undressing one's deceased grandfather. Perhaps the richest thing about the Theodosia books has been their unstinting vocabulary. In the past two weeks, P has learned an enormous number of words from context and from my explaining them as we read. Here's a small sampling, from the times when my notebook was nearby to jot down the juicy words and phrases (while most of these are from Theodosia, a few are from the Ranger's Apprentice series, which P is reading with UnschoolerDad):

* fete * champagne * desecration * lorgnette * ensorcelled * wreak/reek * codger * scrutiny * wrath * stroke * apoplexy * frippery * poltroon * stevedore * treason * sherry * sarcophagus * lavatory * comportment * contravention * impertinent * loathe * glower * discern * simper * disabuse * attributed * grimoire * understatement * mortification * dudgeon * rue the day * tumult * charlatan * wizened * calling card * score (20) * macabre * lumbered * gin * listed * ajar * nonplussed * supercilious * demur * dressed above his station * spats *

I had to look up a few of these myself! Fortunately we're reading library e-books on a Kindle, so definitions for most of them are as easy to find as pushing a few buttons, and the flow of the story is hardly interrupted.

Here's a sampling of what else we've been up to, by general subject areas:

Math, Spatial Learning, and Logic (and a little Reading)

• Both kids have been playing a lot with Minecraft. UnschoolerDad (UD) had some time during the floods to set up a server where they could play together, and he included the ComputerCraft mod, so they can also program "turtles" (like almost everything else in Minecraft, they're cubical) to dig, farm, tunnel, or do other tasks. So far they've mostly seen what UD could make the turtles do. The kids themselves have been continuing to experiment with roller coasters made from mine carts and mine-cart tracks, including ordinary tracks, powered tracks (which can accelerate or brake the carts depending on whether they're on or off), and detector tracks (which are nice for setting off huge piles of TNT blocks and creating new valleys in which to build coasters!). T in particular has been experimenting in very detailed ways. I watched him build a stretch of track between two stops (blocks placed across the track) that used a dip in the tracks to accelerate carts toward and away from one of the stopping blocks. When he had a train of mine carts behaving one way, he'd replace one section of track at a time with a different type of track and see how it affected their behavior. This investigation is completely self-driven. When I watch him I'm reminded of some research I recently read about regarding toys and how kids use them. Apparently when researchers instruct kids in the proper way to use a toy, the kids play with it less and rate it as less enjoyable than when the approach is more discovery-based and open-ended. Minecraft is an incredibly open-ended set of tools and toys, and T is enjoying it and using it a lot! 
• On the reading side of things, T found out about using slash commands to change his game mode mid-game (from survival to creative and back again), and he's learning to recognize and type the appropriate commands. I tell him the letters to type when he asks, describing their position on the  keyboard if he doesn't already know where to find them -- so he's getting some right-left practice here, along with letter recognition and learning some written words. He's asking me a lot to read him the names of items in his inventory so he can find the specific items (often potions, which mostly look alike) he wants to use, and he seems gradually to be recognizing some of the words himself. 
• T has been asking a lot of questions about adding small numbers, and also about doubling numbers again and again. I think many of these are motivated by watching the numbers of items change as he crafts items in Minecraft or organizes his inventory. P answers some of his questions, and seems to enjoy doing so.
• T has also been enjoying making his character in Minecraft invisible (so only his armor shows) and then watching himself in third person while he builds things. This new point of view seemed a little challenging at first, but he's taken to it quickly and now gets around almost as easily with the third-person, varying-angle point of view as he does in first-person view.
• P is building a lot in Minecraft, too. Recently she designed a cruise ship (grounded). It's very large and includes a secret door to a secret-agent office. She used sticky pistons to open the door.
• Once or twice recently, P asked me for some practice at adding 2-digit numbers in her head. She did well, including with carrying (e.g., 68+17).
• P was looking over my shoulder when I saw a friend's Facebook post of a 5-pointed star drawn using an equation in polar coordinates. She asked about it. I started explaining Cartesian and polar coordinate systems. She moved on quickly to other things, so she doesn't really get it yet, but we sowed a seed, I think.
• Both kids played Robo Rally, a board game, with UnschoolerDad. I have not played this game personally, but he says it involves skills in common with programming (and since he makes his living programming and was largely self-taught, he should know). T asked to play it again a few days later.

Science

• T has been asking for Magic School Bus chapter books pretty regularly for bedtime reading. He likes to interrupt with his own ideas and questions about the story and the real-life things it tells about. His recent reading has included books about food chains and food webs, and about dinosaurs and fossils.
• With all the recent thunderstorms, we've had some good conversations about lightning. P and I talked at length about lightning rods (how they're constructed and why they work), and about why being inside a house or car is pretty safe in a lightning storm, as long as you're not in contact with the conductive elements of either. I talked about how both houses (because of their plumbing and wiring) and cars (because of their metal frames and body parts) act like metal cages, and how people have used metal cages (I couldn't think of the term Faraday cage at the time) to isolate people or objects from electrical hazards.
• The kids and I watched a video about skeletal preservations (for museums and such). This included using dermestid beetles to clean all the flesh off the bones. This came up in a book I was reading, in a conversation with a taxidermist about how flesh-removal has progressed from boiling to beetles, so I told the kids about that too. I know all this made an impression on T, because he asked me to remind him of the name of the group of beetles, days later.

• Another video showed us a blue button jelly which, though it acts a lot like a jellyfish, is actually a community of small animals serving specialized purposes. We compared this to coral colonies. And we enjoyed a video about basking sharks, the second-largest fish. This one blew me away -- their mouths are so big, you could almost fit a piano inside!

• Another video was about the nature of pain: nociceptors, plus a lot of variables, including subjective ones like mood and previous experience.
• We also watched a video about optical illusions, specifically those that make things of the same color appear to have very different hues or values.
• A SciShow video told us about Evolutionary Life History Theory, which says that we have limited energy to spend on reproduction, and each species or individual must strike a balance between spending that energy on courtship and mating, and spending it on caring for young. Apparently a recent study has showed an inverse correlation in male humans between the size of a man's testes and the energy he spends caring for his children. SciShow's often on the colorful side with the terms used, so be warned if you're watching this with kids around:

• Another SciShow video described three inventions or discoveries growing from work done on the International Space Station. One of these had to do with microbeads, which related back to my exploration with P of how color-changing Polly Pocket hair works!
• And, of course, see above for science related to flooding.

History, Civics, Geography

• We read a right about the Civil Rights movement in the United States, emphasizing cooperation between African-Americans and Jews. We talked about some of the things that were being protested, such as poll taxes and literacy tests, and about how new Voter ID laws can have a similar effect on the ability of people of color and poor people to vote.
• P perked up when Syria was mentioned in our Theodosia reading (in an ancient context, there) and immediately identified it as a place with current conflict. We talked a little about why everyone is talking about Syria -- the regime's apparent use of chemical weapons, especially against civilians, and why chemical and biological weapons are taboo.
• P and I had a brief conversation about the custom of wearing white at weddings. I mentioned that traditionally, wearing white was a symbol of purity or virginity for the bride. We went on to define virgin, and to talk a little about why virginity has been valued more for women than for men (because without modern paternity testing, it's much harder to determine who the father of a child is than who its mother is, because her having only one sex partner makes this simple, and because this becomes important if a man is expected to care and/or provide for his children but not for the children of other men). 
• And of course Theodosia gives us nice tidbits of English and Egyptian history and customs, sometimes explicity, and sometimes more implicitly, in the ways that characters treat each other.

Reading, Language

Lots of reading has been described above. Here's what's left over:

• T ended up with a copy of Diary of a Spider as a prize from the library summer reading program. We enjoyed reading it, and his appreciation of it was enhanced by our recent reading of a Magic School Bus book about insects and spiders. He enjoyed the pictures -- there's something funny or interesting to notice in them on every page, independent of the text, so the book is very engaging.
• One day T asked how to say "two" in Spanish, and P answered him correctly. That evening I read him a library book called Gracias, Thanks in both Spanish and English. He asked me to point at the words I was reading so he could see the Spanish and English text. He liked it more than he has liked bilingual books in the past. He also picked up on the theme of being thankful for everyday things small and large, and we talked about people and things we appreciate.

Other Things

• T continues using the mini-trampoline a lot, especially on days when are stuck inside or otherwise not exercising in other ways. 
• We've had a couple of big pillow fights between me and the kids: we have a bag of small, light pillows that are great for throwing, and this gets us running around to pick them up as well. Sometimes I start a pillow fight when the kids are crabbing at each other, because I can usually get them to team up against me, and this shifts their interaction with each other positively.
• P is taking a new (to her) recreational gymnastics class. It was touch-and-go at first in her new class, which takes place at a much noisier time in the gym than her previous aerial dance class. She's sensitive to very noisy environments and is more easily upset in them, and the first and second classes were emotionally very stormy for her. But after crying with me through most of the second class time, she had a good conversation with me about what was going on for her. I hadn't been aware that noise was such a big part of the problem. We talked about what would help, and now we try to make sure she's well rested and recently fed when she goes to gymnastics, and that she has some quiet time in the hour or two before the class, so she isn't already fed up with noise before she gets there. So far, so good -- after her most recent class she was very excited to have made a leap forward with her cartwheel skills. She's also looking much more confident on the beam than I've seen her in the past.

All of It Has Always Been Big Stuff

Another monthly sampler of what we've been up to! For the past week, I've been trying to get a new housecleaning regimen in place, so I haven't been taking notes. Here is what made it through that process in my memory or previous notes:

Reading

• On a recent library trip, we picked up a book about Leonardo da Vinci. It's a picture book, but with lots of words on every page, so it took a good half hour or more to read aloud. It's written from the point of view of an apprentice in Leonardo's studio in Naples. We learned how apprenticeship worked, got a glimpse of the artist-patron relationship, saw things that connected to our visit to the Da Vinci Machines exhibit a couple of months ago, learned about the city-states that once comprised present-day Italy, and enjoyed a good story.

• We've been reading Little Women out loud as a bedtime book, interspersed with more from the Little House books. P is enjoying Little Women a lot. It connects with fantasy play she's been doing for years about living in long-ago times, being poor, having sisters, and more.
• We just read the part in On the Banks of Plum Creek in which the grasshoppers come and eat every green thing for a hundred miles around. Coincidentally, we also have a book out from the library about the Passover story, which mentions the plague of locusts among the others. UnschoolerDad was around while I was reading the grasshopper chapters, and we took a break to hear about grasshoppers and locusts (different phases of the same thing). We're hoping to talk to my mom, next time we have a chance, about her experiences with locusts in the Middle East when she was a child.
• P has been reading more in the American Girl books about Molly, set during World War II. She's finished two books and launched into the third in the series.
• Anatomy books continue capturing both kids' interest. T asks a lot about the diagrams in one that show the effects of asthma. Fetal development and birth pictures are a perennial favorite. Sometimes we look at photos of P and T shortly after birth and talk about why they looked the way they did, compared to the photos in the books. One of them was frank breech and stayed folded in two for many days after arriving by C-section, whereas I was able to convince the other to go head-down and arrive in the more traditional way, so they looked pretty different as newborns!
• We recently started subscribing to National Geographic and National Geographic Kids. P enjoys the world records page in the latter, and it provided a chance to learn how to parse some large numbers (5 and 6 digits) as she told me about some of the records that caught her eye.
• We've been reading a Sherlock Holmes book written for young readers. We're learning about accents as I try to get some of them right (I watched a few voice-coaching videos to get a start, and my Cockney accent as I read is beginning to sound like something other than a U.S.er imitating an Aussie), and bits about Victorian England via the setting and circumstances of the story (it includes a scrivener's apprentice and several orphaned street children as major characters, the "Baker Street Irregulars" who help Holmes in gathering information and sometimes reach valuable deductions of their own). I like it when the kids get exposed to different accents (via videos mostly, though I play with them sometimes) and learn to understand them. I've run into people who have a really hard time with that, I would imagine from lack of exposure to varying accents. I also think accents become an interesting part of the study of language, when you look at the features of Languages A and B that will cause native A speakers to have a certain accent when speaking B.

Doing

• The day after P and I built a snow fort, T wanted to try his hand. The snow had gotten wetter and stickier, and together we built quite a wall. I piled snow on with a small shovel, and T patted it into place to make it stronger. It melted just in time for the next snowstorm. Both kids and I had conversations about why the snow was sticking better or worse, in terms of the ambient temperature and how it, as well as our actions, affected melting and refreezing.
• P and T have greatly increased their attention span for playing with each other. Sometimes they can play peacefully for hours on end. They've both noticed their relationship is going better than it used to, and it spills over into treating each other better in other ways, though they still have their moments, especially when hungry or tired. P is also noticing my work for the house and family and my feelings more than she used to, so she's more liable to volunteer to help by making some food, getting T dressed, or in other ways. 
• P has done work recently to earn several badges in her Girl Scout troop. Most recently, she learned to make change (for cookie purchases); role-played customer interactions (and had a number of real ones); and researched the needs of cats and fish for food, human contact, and healthy living spaces, including making a budget for their care. We've been considering starting a fish tank, so that was useful information to find generally. (We found that starting up with fish would cost about $200-250 for the 20-gallon tank recommended for beginners, and monthly costs would be about $20-25 per month. That's a lot, but it's cheaper than $40 or more per month for one healthy cat -- or much more for our two ailing ones!)

Making

• We bought a kit for making recycled paper at our local botanic garden's shop. We're looking forward to some playful and/or beautiful crafting with that.
• Yarn is getting used in fun ways here. The kids tie it to stuffed animals or baskets and lower them over the balcony into the living room, transporting things back and forth and playing games and tricks thus. They make harnesses so their tiny dolls and stuffies can ride larger stuffies.
• We bought a bunch of same-sized plastic boxes to organize small toys (Polly Pockets, cars, Lego, etc.) in the kids' rooms. Several of them have been pressed into service as habitats for small dolls and stuffies, elaborately furnished to scale with available objects from dollhouse furniture to Lego-built furniture and fabric scraps, as well as bits and pieces of nature from outside. These are transient playthings, but the care and thought that goes into them is apparent.

Writing

• P has been making notes about things she wants to remember (like the name of a movie we saw most of, so she can finish it another time) in a notebook she carries with her. She's also working on her cursive writing; she likes the aesthetic. I honestly think I don't see most of her writing when it happens. Whenever I help her clean up her room, there are papers with writing that we recycle or save -- house plans with labeled rooms, board games with instructions, and so on. Her writing is resourceful and useful. I can deal with that!

Watching

• P has started enjoying Cosmic Journeys, an astronomy show we discovered accidentally on YouTube. We watched a show about plasma (including auroras and plasma cannons) and one about the origins of black holes. I think we got there from a question about what a supernova is (UnschoolerDad remembered learning different things about this, and it turns out we were both right, as there are two different kinds of supernovas), which came from discussion about what the Star of Bethlehem could have been.
• On The Kid Should See This, we came across a video of a musician wiring up fruits and veggies to his synthesizer and then using that setup to loop the instrumental parts of "Teardrop," a song by Massive Attack. After watching that with P and T, I played them the official video for the song so they could hear the original instrumentals. The video is made to look like the song is being sung by a fetus in utero. Armed with our knowledge of fetal development from all the anatomy books, we were able to talk about things about the video that were realistic (fetus opening and closing mouth, moving about, sucking on fingers, etc.) versus those that were preposterous (a fetus with features and body proportions almost like a newborn having lots of room to move inside the uterus, having an adult-sounding voice, etc.). We also talked about what might be going on at the end of the video, when the lighting gets bright and erratic and the fetus looks startled. Here are those two videos:

• We watched the first 10 minutes or so of Microcosmos, the movie that gets super-close-up on insects and other wonderful tiny things. We watched a ladybug climb up a plant stem and start munching aphids; farther along the stem it encountered ants protecting groups of aphids, and the ants successfully fought off the ladybug. Afterward the ants milked the aphids and drank the honeydew they made. I did a mock voice over for the ant/ladybug fight: "Hey, you! Get away from my cows! That's right! And stay out!" P commented gleefully that to the ants, the ladybugs were like wolves eating their livestock. I love seeing connections like that getting made. She said the ants and the aphids were in a symbiotic relationship. We also talked about how, since the aphids can hurt the plants they feed on, ladybugs are considered beneficial insects by people growing those plants.
• We watched a series of videos from a company that makes processing machinery for obtaining juice and essential oils from citrus fruits (Fratelli Indelicato, if you'd like to look for them). No one video had enough images or explanation to get the whole process clear, but by watching several, we were able to piece it together. In the process, we talked about the qualities of different parts of a citrus fruit (zest, pith, juicy insides), what kinds of parameters the machine designers must have had to experiment with to get it right (time on the rasp, spacing of rollers and blades, etc.), separation of oil and water through gravity and through centrifuging, and more. Then we found a video of a set of machines for harvesting and processing mushrooms. Wow! That one was much more fully explained. Here it is:

Listening

• I was listening to T and P playing one day, and thinking about what they might be learning with their many sessions of free play. (They call them that: sometimes if I ask them to go somewhere, they'll say something like, "but we haven't had our morning play session yet!") They do spend some of their play time acting out and thinking through ideas related to things they've learned -- natural disasters they've been asking about, historical scenarios, and so on. But I think they're also learning a lot about talking and listening. Especially now, as T gets a little older and sticks up for himself more in the face of P's attempts to control the play situation, they're both needing to listen to each other more, so they can find the middle ground where each gets at least some of what s/he wants out of the game, so that both are willing to keep playing. They're also exploring a little bit of rougher play, and finding their comfort zones for play fighting and other roughhousing. There was a time when I would have been firmly against any kind of play fighting, but now I think they can both enjoy it and learn from it if they're allowed to try it out with adults nearby, ready to intervene if one of them is pushing too far. If nothing else, they're learning to communicate quickly and clearly about what they do and do not want in a play fighting situation. For example, they've made their own rule that no one should get hit in the face or head, even a little.

Talking

• T is getting interested in road signs. He tells me things like, "I saw a speed limit sign with two fives." He's learning to read two-digit numbers by keeping my informed of the speed limit when we're driving.  One day we saw a 70 mph speed limit, and he was stumped, since most of the speed limits end in 5. P said, "It's seven-oh. Do you know what that is?" T said he didn't. I said, "Well, if it were seven-five, it would be seventy-five, but since it's seven-zero, it's just seventy." T turned to P and said, "It's not an oh, it's a zero!" as if that explained everything. P claimed they were the same, so in the ensuing discussion, she learned something, too. P sometimes tries to actively teach T about numbers or other things. I've tried to be clear with her that he'll learn when he's ready, and that we can help him more by offering bits of interesting or useful information and by answering his questions than we can by drilling him on a skill when he's not asking for that kind of practice.
• We had a family meeting, just me and the kids. On our agenda were chores, concerns, activities, and gratitudes. We brainstormed a list of jobs that someone does fairly regularly around the house, listed the jobs the kids already do, and then they had a chance to say which others they might like to take on as a regular job, or occasionally for money. I don't think the discussion changed things much from the status quo, as far as what jobs I expect them to do; but perhaps having seen the whole list will change their perspective a bit and encourage more willingness to help. I don't plan to push much. I'd rather have their willingness to help spring from within, as empathy for me and UnschoolerDad or a desire to do something positive in the family. We'll see how it goes. Under Concerns, each person said something about how things were going (interpersonally, as it turned out) that they thought could use some change. We talked about possible solutions to each concern. Again, no definite solutions, but perhaps some things that will help, including more shared vocabulary for talking about certain issues. The kids had pretty much run out of gas by the time we got to Activities (what we'd like to do soon) and Gratitudes, but we did agree on one place to go soon (a museum, new to us, with a cool new exhibit on), and I did express my appreciation to P for suggesting we have a tea party to talk things over. Because of her suggestion, we had tea, cookies, and trail mix along with lunch for our meeting.

Visiting

• We visited the new temporary exhibition on Mammoths and Mastodons at our local science and nature museum. We learned how tusks form in conical layers. We saw the sizes of various types of large and pygmy mammoths, and we watched a great video (repeatedly) about how isolation on islands tends to cause species to decrease in size. Another video and model showed Lyuba, a month-old baby mammoth found preserved in permafrost in Siberia. We saw a man working on cleaning and preserving a mammoth or mastodon specimen found here in Colorado. Then we enjoyed the permanent gems-and-minerals exhibit, which the kids haven't wanted to visit before. They enjoyed hands-on displays about density and hardness, and they marveled at the beautiful crystals. It was a good day.
• We went to our local Botanic Gardens for a homeschool day with a "plant detectives" theme. We looked at how plants are used in fabric, construction, school/office supplies, foods, and more. The kids planted four varieties of lettuce seeds to try growing. They dug in a compost pile that had been seeded two weeks before with various kinds of disposable products (chip wrappers, paper cups and plates, compostable and non-compostable plastics, etc.) and got a look at what was starting to break down and what was still like new. They looked at paper products made with hardwoods vs. softwoods, and tried pounding nails into each. They played at length in the three-acre children's garden, digging in the dirt, running, climbing, playing in makeshift shelters, meeting new friends and playing with old ones. We ran into several homeschoolers we know from other activities. It was good to feel connected.

Thinking, Asking Questions, Planning...

• P doesn't like to take baths. I do insist on her bathing at certain intervals so that she looks and smells like a healthy, reasonably cared-for kid. She was asking lots of questions about this the other day, wanting to find more pleasant ways to get the job done than a tub bath or a shower. We talked about sponge baths. She also wanted to know why her hair gets to looking or smelling dirty when it does. We talked about oil-producing glands on the skin and scalp, why they're there, and the effect that shampoo and soap have on them -- they strip the natural oils away, so the skin produces more oil than if you hadn't shampooed. I told her that some people wash their hair with baking soda instead of shampoo, because it can do a good job of cleaning without stripping oils, so over time the scalp produces less oil. She immediately wanted to try it. We did, and so far the results look and smell good. For that bath, she also chose to sponge-bathe and then rinse off with the hand-held nozzle in the bathtub (I washed her hair with baking soda first, as she hung her head into the tub), and she liked it, at least for a change. I am encouraged that she keeps asking questions and pushing the boundaries when she thinks there's room for a change that would make things better for her, and that we usually have the time for me to talk things through with her, rather than pushing to do it the usual way. She's assertive enough, and I'm relaxed enough, that we can find better ways to make things work. And as a bonus, she's probably found the least water-intensive method for getting clean, which appeals to her developing environmental sensibilities.
• On several mornings recently, I've been downstairs, P has still been asleep, and T has come down and started talking to me. A lot. If I listen actively and participate appropriately, he'll carry on for a while, and then eventually get interested in something and do that instead of talking. I see so much more of his thought process when I do this than when I stay engaged in whatever I was doing (cleaning, cooking, etc.) and half-listen. It seems obvious, but it's good for me to notice: I can understand a lot more about where he is, his interests and his cognitive abilities, when I really tune in. He sometimes does something similar at night, after lights are out, if there's an adult in the room to listen. He'll talk and talk and talk, sometimes asking questions, and then suddenly he'll be asleep. I've put a quote up on my wall that helps me remember what to do about this phenomenon:

Listen earnestly to anything your children want to tell you, no matter what. If you don't listen eagerly to the little stuff when they are little, they won't tell you the big stuff when they are big, because to them all of it has always been big stuff.
~Catherine M. Wallace~

Not Back to School!

In July, when we were coming up to the deadline to give our notice of intent to homeschool for this school year, P started saying she'd like to go back to school, "just for one more year." We talked some about why. It lit a fire under me to look for ways to make things more interesting and satisfying for her, as well as doing more active strewing so she doesn't spend so much of her day on the computer. (P has told me that, although the computer interests her a lot and can occupy her for hours on end, she feels dissatisfied when she spends too long using it without doing other things.) We had good conversations about what she wanted that school might provide, and how we might get those same benefits and more without school. She wanted to be able to walk some places and do some things on her own, so we settled on a first experiment: having her take the bus to the library to turn in a DVD, with me tailing her at a distance so she could fall back if she needed me. I told her I'd be all right with her doing that sort of thing without a tail, once she was comfortable with all the steps -- she was most uncertain about how she'd know when to get off the bus. We ended up getting rained out on that errand, but not before P had had a taste of doing something on her own. P also wanted to see more of friends, so we planned more play dates. Most of all, she said she wanted more one-on-one time with me. (School wouldn't have helped with this, but it was something she said would make her life better, so we started having fairly regular "date nights" when P and I would do something, just the two of us.) But P still said she wanted to go to school.

She expressed some apprehension about being asked to do things at school that she wouldn't know how to do, and asked me if I thought that would happen. I said I thought she'd be very strong in reading, would probably need to work on her spelling (but that seemed doable to both of us), and might be confused about some of the math notation. She's been working with a lot of math concepts, but not in a schoolish way; e.g., she knows what division is about and can do it in her head to a reasonable extent for a 2nd/3rd grader, but she didn't know what a division sign looked like. The math part gave her the most concern, so I pointed out that long ago she'd picked up a 2nd-grade workbook at a book sale, and that by working through that, she could make sure she'd seen most or all of the same stuff as her peers. She wanted to do that, so we worked out that at 15 pages per day, she could finish the workbook before school started, spending less time per day on it than she'd spend doing desk work at school.

P set out on that course, but after a few days of doing worksheets on skills that, while useful, were out of the richer context she's grown accustomed to having with her learning, she was souring on the idea of school, and decided she wanted to stick with unschooling after all -- though she did exact my promise that we could continue with play dates (subject to the desired friends' availability, which we knew would be a lot less once school started), with increasing independence for her, and with date nights.

I sighed with relief, my feelings far less mixed than they were when P initially left school. I've grown to enjoy this way of life and the improved relationship I have with both kids, without school dictating our sleep schedule and shaping most of our daytime activities. I'd been trying to prepare myself, mentally and emotionally, for supporting her in returning to school. I knew I could let her come home again if she changed her mind. What I expected to be hard was letting P's relationship with school be her own, not stepping in and ruthlessly enforcing the demands of school. I was a very dedicated student when I was in school, and then I was a schoolteacher for four years, and it's really hard for me to imagine supporting a student who is in school by choice in not toeing the line on homework, attendance, etc. I was working on figuring it out, and someday that time may still come. But for now I'm glad we're still out of school!

Sandra Dodd wrote a very thought-provoking essay, "Public School on Your Own Terms," that was helpful to me in thinking about the possibilities for different relationships between me and my kid's school. I am uncomfortable with the idea of lying to school authorities about absences -- I really dislike outright dishonesty and avoid it whenever I can -- but the rest of it makes a lot of sense to me.

So, all that aside, a lot has been going on since I last posted. In the past six weeks we've been in overdrive on housing changes. UnschoolerDad and I decided we were spending too much money on housing for our one-earner lifestyle to be sustainable, so we moved out of our house into a small apartment, prepared our house for sale, put it on the market, got into contract to sell it, searched for a new house, and got into contract to buy one two towns over, about the same size as before but MUCH less expensive. Hopefully both sales will go through! We held off on the decision until we knew P would not be returning to school this year, so we wouldn't be yanking her away from school if she chose it. Both kids have been helpful with the transition. They are sad to leave our home, but they have been excited about hunting for a new one, and they both love the one we've chosen. They are sharing a room in our transitional apartment, which has led to some additional conflict, but also to much more opportunity for me to be with both of them at bedtime, and not only with T. (On good nights, we've had one parent with each child, but UnschoolerDad's schedule and mine sometimes mean there's only one parent at bedtime.) P has gotten clearer as a result that in our new house, she wants her room near T's so bedtimes can still be shared, and not on another floor as she previously thought. That helped with our choices in house hunting! We're moving to an area where the schools, should our kids want them, are still good, though not as highly rated as those we're leaving. My belief is that if a child is in school by choice, he or she will be much more able to suck the marrow out of school, regardless of what school s/he attends. I remember my parents saying something like that to me when I was college hunting -- that it would be helpful to find a college that would be a good match for my style, but that because I was so active in pursuing learning, I would be able to get a good education almost no matter where I went. So here's hoping it's true.

I haven't been tracking the kids' activities here during the whole move process. But here are some things I've noticed and remembered about what they've been doing.

Reading

• On a visit to the library, P picked out LOTS of chapter books and some picture books. She and I had just been talking, in the context of our school-or-unschool conversation about third grade, about the fact that in school she'd be exposed to lots of stories she might not otherwise think to read. I pointed out that, since she'll be in contact with her schooled friends, she can ask them about what they're reading and check it out if it seems intriguing. I also offered to read some of the same books she's reading and discuss them with her, or help her follow up on doing or learning more about subjects in which they pique her interest. Perhaps that inspired her to be more adventurous about trying new series and authors, in addition to picking up Book Two in the How to Train Your Dragon series, the next 39 Clues book, and another book by the same author as the Fairy Realm books she's been enjoying. On another visit, I picked up a bunch of things I thought she might like. She's enjoying some mystery books, and I'm reading The Chronicles of Prydain out loud to both kids for bedtime reading.
• P continues to read to herself and out loud, to me and to T. She's really quite fluent, and she usually asks about words she doesn't know, if I'm listening.
• More in the anatomy book: the digestive system, appendicitis. 
• I've been reading Parent/Teen Breakthrough: The Relationship Approach: The New Program to End Battles With Your Pre-Teens and Teens, which gets a lot of recommendations from parents of grown unschoolers, even though it's clearly written with schooled adolescents in mind. When I started to read it, I was thinking in terms of things I might need in a few years, but I'm recognizing some of the preteen/teen relationship patterns from my current relationship with P. It's already been helpful to put the book's main advice into practice: Rather than trying to control your adolescent as you may have when they were younger, put lots of energy into building a strong, warm relationship with your child, because once they hit adolescence and their main mission in life becomes individuation and independence, a solid relationship is the best way to have a good influence in their lives. At this stage in P's life, a certain amount of direct control is still possible, but I already see her starting to resist in places, and I know I don't want to go down the path of ever-more-draconian measures to keep her in line -- that's a losing battle all the way around, especially as she gets older. So this book is becoming helpful in steering my thinking away from battling for control and toward building warm relationship and positive influence, including real dialogue with the kids about what's going to help make our lives as individuals and as a family go well -- not just me and UnschoolerDad figuring it out and announcing our decisions.
• I read Roald Dahl's The BFG to both kids. They enjoy the nonsensical, yet intelligible, talk of the giant. Every once in a while P asks me what something means. Usually it's a coined, nonsensical word, but what she really wants to know is, what is the giant trying to say, and what does that mean?

Doing

• P did a Young Inventors workshop at the local children's museum. She took apart an analog clock and built a lizard-grabber thing from craft sticks, egg cartons, tape, yarn, and paper clips. She was very pleased with it.
• The next day, P did a Dinosaurs workshop at the same place. She found a plastic stegosaurus in a digging activity, but another girl really, really wanted the stegosaurus, so P gave it to her and settled for a brachiosaurus. ("Of course she wanted the stegosaurus. It is our state fossil, so everyone wants it!") P had lots of questions about brachiosaurus -- how did it defend itself from predators? Were predators even interested in taking on something so much larger than themselves? Did brachiosaurus swim all the way underwater? P also exclaimed to me that there was a dinosaur (spinosaurus) that looked just like the spiny animals my character was hunting in World of Warcraft. I pointed out that the WoW creatures had two spiny fans rather than one, and P said yes, they could get twice as much heating or cooling that way, and wasn't it cool how WoW was based partly on science?! In the workshop, they also compared the sizes of parts of their hands, feet, and fingers with dinosaur tracks of different sizes, and P remarked that some of the dinosaurs were pretty small! I came across a fact the other day, that on a linear time scale, Triceratops lived closer to humans than it did to Stegosaurus, and P was as surprised as I was to hear that, but the facts bear out. We have a long way to go until the dinosaurs will have been extinct for as long as they ruled the earth.
• Both kids and I did an ice-cream-making workshop at the same place. We had fun making a really basic vanilla ice cream in nested ziploc bags. P and I talked a little about ice crystal formation and the role of stirring in making ice cream with a good texture.
• The kids have started "keep-trading" toys with each other. I warned P, when this started, that T, like many four-year-olds, didn't have a very good sense of permanance of trades, and that she needed to be ready to trade back if he asked her to. At first she was called on to trade back a lot. Now T seems to be gaining more of a lasting sense of what trading means, but P is still good-natured about it when he occasionally wants to trade back. And sometimes P wants to trade back, and T is good about that, too.
• As the garden starts to grow in earnest, we've been doing things like eating green onions and beet green thinnings together, straight from the ground. I talked a little with P about how beet greens have the vitamins and minerals of spinach, but without the oxalic acid to prevent calcium absorption. T enjoyed tasting beet greens for the first time, which he was remarkable non-reluctant to do. We pretended to be caterpillars. T is also showing me which squash to harvest, based on their size, and enjoying looking for squash of various sizes and stages as they grow. P and I are looking forward to our fermented (traditional pickle-crock) dill pickles being ready. Today I showed her the bubbles that are rising in the crock as the fermentation process really gets going. Periodically we cut off a piece of pickle and taste it to see how things are changing.
• T and P played a complicated board game, Lords of Waterdeep, with UnschoolerDad, who simplified the rules a bit to make it friendlier for not-yet-reading T. After a while T lost interest, so UD and P played with the full rules. P is very enthusiastic about playing complicated strategy games. She went to a mostly-adult game night with UD and played the game there, to both their great satisfaction. I know UD will be glad to have someone in the house more interested in the really complicated games than I am! Fluxx is about my speed, and UD, P, and I played that together once or twice.

Making

• P has been drawing and labeling even more house plans for the cars, eraser pets, and other tiny toys both kids have. They're getting better thought out, with more relevant furnishings, room for doors to open, and more.
• P and T are building elaborate block structures using both their sets of blocks, now that they're in the same room.
• T has become a Lego fiend. He has several "Creator" sets (these are great because you can use the same set of blocks to build 3 or 4 different models), and he plays with them every day for long stretches, both building from the instructions and improvising his own designs. He needed a little support with the instructions at first, but he figured them out very quickly and now can build completely independently with the age 7-12 Creator sets. He does frequently need my help getting blocks apart, which is a nice chance for us to reconnect. Sometimes I help by finding the blocks he needs as he builds, or by organizing his blocks to make particular kinds easier to locate.

Writing

• I've found a few things in P's room that seem to be either price lists for a store game or game rules -- not enough context to tell.
• P wrote in her workbook when she was considering school.
• P wrote a gift tag, very neatly, for her cousin's birthday gift.
• P has written some stories in books in Minecraft, and she's getting faster at keyboarding. She's also written and illustrated some stories in paper booklets she puts together.

Watching

• A "Disney Connections" DVD about the Colonial (English colonies in America) period and pirates, and how moviemakers portrayed them. I was disappointed because I thought it would be more history and less Disney-movie pseudohistory. The kids probably would have enjoyed it more if they had seen Pocahontas or Pirates of the Caribbean.
• P and I watched The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. T still doesn't like movies that get this scary, so he watched other things and hung out with UnschoolerDad while we watched. It's interesting to me, as a non-Christian who knows the stories of Jesus's life quite well, to see the close parallels between Aslan's sacrifice and Jesus's crucifixion that I missed when I read the books as a child, before I knew C.S. Lewis was a Christian theologian. I think P is likely to have some similar, interesting revelations at some point. I don't know whether we'll talk about it explicitly. P is interested in comparative religions already, so she may get to it sooner than I did.
• P and I watched a video from the library about puberty for girls. The information went by really fast, so we stopped it a lot to talk about it. She learned some of the essentials she'll need in the next few years about body changes, periods, mood changes, and more. It was a good opportunity to talk a little about how our relationship is evolving as she starts to think a little more about her future as an adult and wants to move toward more independence, but still has a lot to learn that I can help her with.
• P and T often watch shows together. Recent  hits include My Little Pony, Horseland, and old favorite Phineas and Ferb, which is still releasing new episodes.
• P watched some of the second season of Downton Abbey with me. It didn't suck her in as it did me, but she asked questions about the social conventions depicted and we discussed the relevant history (mostly battlefield tactics and conscription practices circa WWI) a bit.

Listening

• P and T are having to get better at listening to each other, as we live in close quarters and need to share the space, and as they share a lot of play together. I've been trying to support each in hearing what the other is saying, and thinking about what kinds of responses will contribute to a happier relationship and to their getting their needs met.
• P has been paying more attention to the radio, when I have it on in the car, and asking questions about what she hears. We've talked at some length about presidential politics as we've heard snippets from the Republican and Democratic conventions.

Talking

• Both kids have been wanting to tell their dreams. It's interesting seeing how they listen, respond, and often fail to listen to each other, interrupting with corrections, of all things! It's a good chance to work on listening skills, and on my own patience with dream retellings that loop back on themselves and are full of contradictions.
• P took a one-hour job at the company that makes the Rosetta Stone language software, repeating 200 sentences in English or Spanish to give them data to improve the way the software works with children's voices in native and non-native languages. She earned a $25 Visa gift card for her work. T and I built Lego models very quietly in the corner of the room while P worked. 
• T and P are both working up some enthusiasm for learning Spanish, especially as the town we are moving to has a larger Latino population than the one we are leaving. They're noticing people speaking Spanish in public and wanting to be able to communicate more with them.

Visiting

• Both kids went to a birthday party at their cousin's martial-arts dojo. T was the youngest child present and didn't think at first that he would participate, and he did sit on the sidelines taking pictures for part of the time; but when the obstacle courses got started, T was fully and joyfully in on the action. When he wasn't participating, he was using UnschoolerDad's spare camera to document the action.
• The kids and I visited a local history museum we hadn't seen before, one day after looking at some houses we were considering. They enjoyed it and we didn't see everything, so we'll probably go back soon. We played a lot with a water table where you could open and close gates, directing water to farm fields, cities, recreational river activities, and more. They enjoyed the challenges offered on the museum display for the water table.

Thinking, asking questions, planning...

• P is noticing more things that she'd like to film. I've enlisted UnschoolerDad's help to gather together our video-recording technology.
• At a park recently, T was playing on an odd playground feature shaped like a hippo, with major hippo organs (including at least three stomachs) portrayed on the playing floor. T remarked, correctly, "Oh, these must be the kidneys." Further conversation revealed that he wasn't reading the labels on the organs, but identifying them by their shape and position, based on our reading in the last couple of weeks about kidneys and the urinary system. We traced through the respiratory and digestive systems on the hippo diagram, much to T's delight.
• T showed me recently how he could make "a part of your heart" with pattern blocks. He arranged three blue rhombuses into a hexagon, and then he made thump-bump sounds with his mouth while moving the pieces apart and back together. I saw immediately what he was doing -- it was a tricuspid valve, which he remembered from previous readings in our library anatomy book. I was impressed and told him so. P happened along then and said she'd actually thought of it and showed T. Still pretty cool!
• P wanted to know why we were picking up a vaccination form at the doctor's office, so I told her we were signing her up for a homeschooling umbrella school, which would change our day-to-day life not at all but would mean she wouldn't have to take standardized tests unless she wants to. She said sometimes taking tests was fun and that she would like to try it, and I told her I'd look for a test we could do and grade at home so she could give it a try. She said she thought she could do pretty well on a 3rd-grade test, and I said one thing that might be on it that she hadn't done much was multiplication. She said she already knew some multiplication, and told me some multiplication facts that were true. I said sometimes people used multiplication tables to learn more about multiplication and the patterns that go with it, and she asked if I would make her one. I made the grid and filled in the numbers along the side and top, and then I started filling in the grid with her input. She noticed the 2's row was like counting by twos. We kept going, using mental arithmetic tricks she knows to fill things in (e.g., four sixes is the same as two twelves, and she knows how to add two-digit numbers, so we did that to come up with 24). The more patterns she noticed, the giddier she became! I recognized the feeling from when I started learning about multiplication, and shared my memory of that pleasure with her. I told her that when I looked down our growing columns of sixes and sevens, they looked like old friends. "Oh, hello, sixes! Good to see you again!"  We kept going, and she started physically rolling around on the floor with excitement. I recognized this behavior from a much earlier time when I tried to help her figure out some math stuff on a worksheet, at her request if I recall correctly -- I can't remember if it was before or after we started unschooling. That other time, though, I thought I saw a lot of tension and unpleasant feeling, perhaps frustration or fear, going along with the giddiness I saw today. It was good this time to see the pleasure of figuring things out unalloyed with anxiety! She kept begging me to go on. Finally I called a halt since it had gotten quite late and we had plans the next day. By the time we stopped, we had visited place value into the billions, why commas are used in really long numbers, different symbols people use to show multiplication (x, dot, parentheses), a little bit of order of operations, diagrams to show multiplication with tiny squares forming larger rectangles or squares, what multiplication of multiple-digit numbers looks like, and how to show inequalities with < and > symbols, with a lot of fun along the way.

Building: Patterns, Links, and Growth

The process of learning feels like a crystal growing, building itself from bits of stuff in the environment. Sometimes it grows in a regular pattern determined by its main constituents. Sometimes it encounters other minerals in its environment and incorporates them as inclusions, which can be very beautiful in their departures from regularity. Sometimes it sends off spiky shoots in new directions, where it can grow unimpeded, becoming more fully itself.

Quartz crystal with pyrite inclusions -- more here

Spiky white aragonite crystals -- more here

A lot of the visible patterns forming here this week are happening with our new set of pattern blocks. P and T use them pretty differently, but both are coming up with wonderful things, and their designs (and mine, when I join in) inform each other, so their creations evolve over time.

T came up with the central design; P added the border.

Besides building freeform, we've talked about the names of the shapes and how many names could apply to some of them (three different kinds of rhombuses, one cleverly disguised as a square...). P gravitates toward designs with reflective and rotational symmetry; I talked with her about those ideas, and she grasps them with ease. Both kids are building designs with translational symmetry. T builds mountain ranges while asking me questions about how real mountains form. T and I have built some collaborative designs that start off with high symmetry but break into more chaotic forms as we go on. P is discovering which angles combine for nice, solid walls and mosaics.

P's first mosaic. I asked if she wanted help moving it so she could finish it,
but she said the opening was intentional -- a door into the house.

The wall has fallen apart a bit, but the mountain lookout is complete.

Both kids have also built things to resemble real-life objects like houses, walls, or spaceships. An argument about what a spaceship should look like led to looking briefly at an update on the Voyager probes, as an example of a spacecraft that's not aerodynamic and has no landing gear, because it's never intended to enter an atmosphere or to land. T's very interested in landing gear. Every time we visit the science museum nearby, he watches the video that shows how the Mars rovers (Spirit and Opportunity) landed and went about their missions, and then asks questions about the replica rover in the museum.

P got out the Cuisenaire rods recently and wanted to do some number exploration with them. We tried using them to find factors, first of 10, then 12. P reasoned well about why various numbers would or would not divide 12 evenly; for example, 5 doesn't, because 5+5 is 10, and since 12 is only 10+2 (making 12 with Cuisenaire rods makes this obvious, but she knows it abstractly too), there's not room for another 5 in 12. After the math play, both kids built house layouts with the rods, and used the white unit cubes as people inhabiting the houses and driving around in their 9- and 10-rod limousines. The garages were bigger than the living quarters in these car-centric houses!

P embellished my star; parts got borrowed for other things;
change happens quickly with pattern blocks.

P's been drawing lots of house (and garage) plans on large paper and using them to play with T with dolls and toy cars. They've made and populated neighborhoods of row houses and played for hours with them, often making home improvements before the next iteration of the game. Since our toy budget has been limited a lot of late by limited cash flow, this is part of a larger theme of creatively making do with what we have to play in new ways. Recently both kids were walking around in homemade waterskis or snowshoes or ice skates (depending on when you asked) made from newspaper, egg cartons, and yarn. There have been pirate eyepatches and daggers with sheaths, superhero capes, cat ears and tails, and more, all made with materials at hand. The craft table and its contents are getting a lot of use.

T puts finishing touches on a design he and I made together

This morning, before I was even up, P got started building a scrapbook from photos she had lying around. I'm glad to see this for a number of reasons, including that these photos have been lying around for a long time with no real home, and it's good to see them safely stored and in use! She's using a binder full of notebook paper I gave her months ago, which has gotten no love until now. P's been telling me occasionally that she doesn't like writing, but she's writing captions for her photos with enthusiasm. There are some themes emerging, like her favorite toys from different Christmases, and she's borrowed my camera to take pictures of some toys that weren't in photos yet. I also love seeing how much she writes about playing with T and loving him. I told her about acid-free paper and archival glue, but she's happy with her notebook paper and giant glue stick for now. We can always upgrade if scrapbooking becomes a passion for her.

One of P's photos for her scrapbook

One evening this week I put on a DVD about the design of castles and the English occupation of Wales by means of castle fortifications. As often happens, though the kids didn't express interest in it beforehand, they were drawn into it quickly. Castles played some part in the floor plans and pattern-block constructions after that.

Also this week, we bought and broke out a kids' magnetic poetry kit. The main action it's seen so far is T lining up long sequences of words and asking me to read them to him. He enjoys it when I try to make phrases out of them, with appropriate inflection, rather than just reading them as lists of words. I tried to paint a piece of sheet metal with chalkboard paint so we could write words along with our magnetic poetry, but we all learned that despite the Lowe's salesman's assurances, we should have used a metal primer first. Soon we'll try it again on the other side, if we can find a metal primer that will support latex paint on top.

In related events, a few days ago when T was having me ask him questions from a Brain Quest kindergarten question pack (one of his favorite "stories" for bedtime), he read his first word! There was a question asking him to pick out, from several words in a picture, the one that matched a circled word. He found it correctly. I asked him if he knew what that word was, and he read it: "ON." He's seen that on many a radio-controlled or other electronic toy, and he's also alert to phonics, so there's no telling whether he sounded it out or recognized it as a sight word.

Other highlights from this week:

• After taking three beginner classes at a local mixed-martial-arts dojo (rooted in Tae Kwon Do), and watching a higher-level sparring class, P and I decided neither of us was very interested in pursuing martial arts if sparring was to be the high-level goal. Sparring is required starting at intermediate levels at that dojo, so it's time to move on. We have friends who take classes at a local aikido dojo, so we may go watch classes there soon. We're taking a break for the moment.
• We took a trip to the small museum of natural history at our local university, which is free and convenient by bus. Arriving after a nice lunch at a campus-area taqueria, we tried on a beekeeping veil, saw a model beehive, and touched honeycomb and a paper-wasp nest. We looked at the dwellings and tools of Pueblo Indians in this general area, from antiquity through current times. T liked looking at and hearing about the variety of houses; there were great dioramas of pit houses, row houses, and cliff houses. We compared the teeth of carnivorous and herbivorous dinosaurs. We touched bison bones, a skunk's tail, a cow hoof, and assorted fossils. P bought a coloring book of Mexican folk art in the gift shop; T chose some crystals in a little pouch. I bought some sun-print paper for us to try when things warm up a bit.
• Today we did an extended problem-solving session about sharing of toys and rooms. We came up with some possible solutions, including sharing space and toys differently, using timers to limit sharing time so there's a clear time boundary, and other possibilities. They're trying one of P's ideas as I write this bit: They trade rooms for a limited time, with a timer set, and can play with each other's stuff during that time. When the timer rings, they'll both help clean up both rooms, unless they agree to set the timer for additional time before cleanup. [Note later: More work needed here. UnschoolerDad says he thinks the answer is to make T's room cooler than it is. I think he may be at least partly right.]
• We played with gelatin, dissolving gelatin capsules to release the spongy animal shapes inside and also making Jell-O, so we got to see the creation and dissolution processes.
• One day when we pulled our car alongside a semi, T wanted to know how to hitch and unhitch the trailer. I had guesses, but really didn't know, so we found some YouTube videos from truck-driving schools showing the process -- not in great detail, but enough for now. Both kids are psyched about the prospect of having a video chat with a friend of mine who is a long-haul trucker; I'm working on setting it up with him, which is tricky since he usually doesn't know in advance when he'll have down time (waiting for a load or unload) with a good internet connection available.
• We finished reading The Friendship Doll out loud. P and I linked the phrase "chewing the fat" to an Inuit story we read months ago, in which a special kind of fat was saved for sharing while talking with visitors. We looked up the phrase origins and found related and unrelated, likely and apocryphal possibilities. We also read about car tires that could be repaired as bike tires can be now, the dust bowl, the shoddy welcome given Okies arriving in California, the hundreds of thousands of letters people wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt during the depression, and more. After finishing the story, we read online about the real 58 Japanese friendship dolls, and we found out one of them is in a museum near us. Perhaps we'll visit soon!
• We started reading Hattie Big Sky, also by Kirby Lawson, who wrote The Friendship Doll. P is totally intrigued by this story of a 16-year-old girl, orphaned at 5 and bounced around from one distant relative to another, who inherits a 320-acre claim of dubious value from an uncle in Montana and tries to prove up the claim on her own.
• We finished reading The Hobbit out loud. P wants to see the Lord of the Rings movies. We'll see; they're so graphic in their violence that they give me nightmares. We might try the books first, though those didn't hold my attention until I was in my teens.
• P told me she doesn't want to read any more of the slim chapter books in the Rainbow Magic Fairies series; she has outgrown them. She's still game for the bigger "special edition" books in that series, but she says that mostly she wants to read "bigger stories," like The Hobbit or Hattie Big Sky. Perhaps she's ready for Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising series, or The Chronicles of Narnia, or Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain. 
• P has been enjoying reading newpaper comics, and she devoured her first Garfield book checked out from the library. She read some of it aloud to T, who enjoyed it as well.

To close, here's a different bit from Marge Piercy's poem, "The Seven of Pentacles," which I've quoted here before. I can imagine, from her underground roots and brambles, sudden explosions of upward growth when conditions encourage it.

          Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
          Live a life you can endure; Make love that is loving.
          Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
          a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
          interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.