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.

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.

Getting Closer to a Groove

It's been a busy time, and I've been remembering to write a lot of it down, so here goes with an unexpectedly-soon post!

I've been feeling like I'm settling into a better groove with the kids. Listening better to their questions, making sure my responses are as informative as I can manage, remembering to look it up later if I don't have a good answer, and following where the interests lead without judgment or wishing they were going somewhere else (or at least without acting on those wishes -- one step at a time!). I think I've had some success at directing less and collaborating more, at asking them for their thoughts when things get hard, and generally being present to them more. It's a good feeling.


Reading

• More in the library book on the human body. We've read about the structure of bones, osteomalacia and osteoporosis (after reading this  they asked for their vitamins to get their calcium and vitamin D supplements), the names of skeletal muscles (which one is this that's sore?), the male and female urinary and reproductive systems, what kidneys are for and some of what can go wrong with them (one of our cats is going through acute kidney failure, so this was of special interest). We continued with teeth, the anatomy of the mouth, and the parts of the digestive system and their functions. 
• P continues to read over my shoulder on the computer and during videos when there is text onscreen. 
• P reads kids' books to T pretty frequently.
• T played with Starfall.com for a while, enjoying the letter games and (with my help) the story pages.

Doing

• P went to a one-time class on mirrors at the local children's museum. I didn't go with her, so I don't know many details, but she excitedly showed me her drawing of the sunspots she'd observed through a solar telescope, and she made a triangular tube, mirrored on the inside, that gives nice kaleidoscopic effects when you look through it.
• Cleaning up -- mostly this is me, but P sometimes decides to dig in and get her room in better shape, with or without my help. And once recently, when I'd decided to spend half an hour tidying up at a run (while playing music) to get some aerobic exercise, T found the speed and liveliness contagious and helped me. We were so effective that before the half hour was up, there was very little stuff left to put away! P also dove willingly into cleaning her room more than has been usual recently when she got a book on CD from the library.
• Hooping (see below, under Making, for how we got started on this) -- P is working on hooping tricks in her own style, and she has some pretty original stuff going on. I've been working on it a lot, and I'm having fun hooping in the nearest shady spot when the kids are playing happily at a park.
• Swimming, with an emphasis on fun rather than specific skills. T, however, enjoys floating on his back with some support from me.

Making

• One mom in our unschooling park day group, after several people had fun learning some hula-hooping tricks from her, took orders with measurements and made custom-sized polyethylene-tubing hoops for everyone who wanted them -- 40 new hoopers! She brought appropriate tape for adding texture, weight, and decoration to the hoops, and each person decorated their own (or asked their mom to do it with their chosen colors!). P and I both got hoops. I can already see that I should have gotten one for T as well -- he loves trying to hoop with P's hoop, though it's too big for him to have extended success. P, armed with the right size hoop for her, has gone from frustrated to quite competent at hooping; and I'm having fun learning and inventing tricks to try. Hooping and hoop dancing are not as intense aerobically as running, but you can sure work up a sweat at them and strengthen some core muscles, as my sore body will attest!
• We bought T his first Lego Creator set -- it makes two kinds of rescue plane and one rescue boat. In the course of putting them together (he needed some support from me at first, but became increasingly independent after initial tries), he pays attention to numbers (step numbers on the page and counting bumps to find the right-size pieces), symmetry, angles, size, relative position, color, and whatever it looks like is taking shape (the nose of a plane, the engines, etc.). I was surprised, as we were going through the instructions for the first model plane, that he correctly and consistently identified the back end of the plane, although it took a while for it to be clear to me where the back was. It's a much richer experience than I had imagined.  T also did some improvising, adding waterskis to the bottom of the boat and such. P already has a couple of Lego Friends sets she got for her birthday this year, and the process of putting them together is similar, but she already had the number skills more firmly and put them together mostly by herself, so I didn't get as intimate a look at the process for her.

Writing

• P wrote out a recipe. She would ask how to spell things, and I'd encourage (but not require) her to take a guess and then let her know how she was doing. Most of her guesses were correct this time. Her spelling is gradually improving. I'm hoping her confidence will follow.
• Both kids signed their names to a note I sent along with a birthday present to their cousin. This was a big deal for T, who's only written his name 2 or 3 times before. Not so much for P, though she enjoyed writing her name in cursive.

Watching

• Fairly Legal, a TV series about a mediator working within a large law firm. The show takes the usual dramatic liberties with what mediators or lawyers would actually do, but it's neat to see how the different perspectives of lawyers and mediators work out in resolving conflicts, and of course it's nice for siblings to see how hard the mediator will work to find a win-win solution.
• Martha Speaks, the show about the talking dog, uses new vocabulary in ways that help it stick nicely.

Listening

• Me singing: UU hymns, chants, rounds (occasionally P learns them and we sing them in canon), patriotic songs, peace anthems, folk and country songs my dad sang to me when I was little, and whatever else pops into my mind along with enough of its lyrics at bedtime. 
• Lively music on the radio, when someone wants it.
• P checked out Book 5 of the 39 Clues series (The Black Circle) on CD and polished it off in just two days. This one is set in Russia, and I think it's related to the killings of the royal family at the time of the Revolution, though I wasn't listening closely enough to be sure.
• We went to an outdoor concert at a favorite park, but the amplified music was too loud for both kids. We tried moving way back away from the speakers, but they still weren't having a good time, so we ended up leaving. Maybe earplugs, or cotton to stuff in sensitive ears, should be in our car!

Talking

• When T was putting together his Lego set, P really wanted him to be playing with her instead. She wove and acted out an intense narrative right nearby, with eraser-pet animals and vehicles built of her own Lego. He was sucked in several times, though he kept coming back to his building. Often when they start off playing together, P weaves a tale, but conflict arises when T wants to do something in a different way (contribute his own thinking to the the game). In this case, she had to focus on creating a tale that would draw him in as much as possible, without direct feedback from him aside from what got him to come away from his building to look.
• Overheard between the kids: P was telling T about how, when T was a baby, he would pull P's hair really hard. T said, "Oh, is that why you boss me around so much?" P assured him she hardly remembered the hair pulling. T asked, "Then why do you do it?" and after a pause added, "I would like you to stop." This is clearer than he's been on this issue in the past. It seems to be much on his mind. I think it will be interesting to think with P about why she does act bossy so much and what might help change that dynamic. Her first thought in the conversation with T was that maybe she should stop hanging around a particular friend so much, since she is "the queen of the bossy people." P has mixed feelings about this friend, whom she sees at a particular gathering she attends often. She's glad to have someone to play with, but often P ends up in tears before the gathering is over.

Visiting

• We've spent some time at a local children's museum. Both kids love dressing up in costumes and sometimes using them to put on plays. They saw Earth's motions of rotation and revolution on a model where they could sit and spin in place or roll on a track around the sun. P saw why we have seasons using a model of the Sun and Earth that included the tilted axis, the north star, rotation and revolution, and a volunteer with laser tools to demonstrate everything. T played with model trains (electric and Thomas-type) for loooong stretches of time and dug in the sandbox. Both kids played with play money, play train tickets, and a whooshing vacuum system for delivering those little drive-thru bank canisters back and forth. They made huge bubble walls around themselves. They experimented with swinging an LED-lit pendulum over a rotating disk on which the light left tracks, and we saw some of the awesome possibilities of periodic motion. They tried rolling balls down tracks and seeing what shape tracks the balls could complete vs. those they would roll backward on. They learned about pirate flags and their uses in communication with other ships. They built with Lincoln Logs and similar but larger, big-enough-to-walk-inside-the-finished-house, modular building pieces. They held prisms and diffraction gratings (aka CDs) in sunlight and played with rainbows. They held their hands up in front of red, green, and blue lights and saw the multitude of colored shadows created by blocking some lights and not others. They shared toys, ideas, and pretend play with other kids, including friends and strangers, and made friends with the children of a friend of mine who just moved to town. At one point my friend observed, "The girls have traded little brothers, and I think they both like the change!"

Thinking, asking questions, planning...

• P asked whether Tasmanian devils were close relatives of dogs or cats. We looked them up and found they were marsupials. We talked about mammals including all three animals, and then about the major divisions of mammals (placental mammals, marsupials, and monotremes) and the key differences among them. P was very amused by the short-beaked echidna pictured on the Wikipedia page on monotremes. Even though her favorite TV show, Phineas and Ferb, includes a platypus character, Perry (he has his own theme song, similar to "Secret Agent Man," which starts off, "He's a semiaquatic, egg-laying mammal of action!"), beaked mammals were a funny idea. I think that speaks to a pretty good concept of mammals in general, monotremes excepted!

Short-beaked echidna

• P asked me, as we were in the car, about to turn onto the residential through street near our house, whether it was a one-way street. I said no, they were all two-way around here, so she asked, "Then why do we drive right down the middle of it?" I pointed out we were slightly to the right and talked about what my driver ed teacher told me -- that when you're driving on a street without lane markings, you have to position yourself between actual and likely hazards. We talked about what those were for that road -- oncoming traffic (none at the moment), car doors opening or people or animals walking out between parked cars (always possible), and P understood that was why we would drive out toward the middle rather than hugging the parked cars on the right. We also talked about how drivers always need to be scanning ahead for possible hazards, like children playing in yards, dogs walking off leash, cars backing out of driveways, and other beings who might dart out into the road without thinking or without seeing us in time to avoid a collision without our vigilance.
• P asked why the police tell people to come out (of buildings, cars, etc.) with their hands up. We talked about the possibility of concealed weapons and the police needing to know that people aren't about to use them.
• P asked why people learn to fly on gliders rather than small powered planes. We talked about the pros and cons: it would be nice to have the option of aborting a landing and going around again if you miss the runway, for example, but in a glider there would be fewer controls to learn to handle simultaneously. We also talked about instructors with dual controls providing a safeguard against serious errors by new pilots.
• P asked whether you need to get a permit when you move from one state to another. I told her that wasn't necessary within the United States, but that you did need a visa to move to another country. We also talked about what you do have to do when you change states, like getting a driver's license in your new state, re-registering your car, re-registering to vote, etc.
• P asked why some horses whose paddocks we were driving by had hoods on that covered their eyes. We wondered whether they were skittish and could relax better when blindfolded. We looked it up after we got home and found out those were fly masks. Flies like to drink the liquid that comes from a horse's eyes, and this is very annoying to the horse. The fly masks are made of a fabric that the horses can see through, because it's so close to their eyes. One site we found said that horses are almost never blindfolded, unless it's an emergency situation like a fire, when the handler needs to lead a horse quickly without it being distracted by scary things around it.
• T asked whether there were real rescue planes like the one he was building with his Lego set. We looked up rescue seaplanes and found some interesting Wikipedia pages, like this one, about particular flying boats.

Through the Long Gap: Part I

It's been a very busy time here -- plannning, preparing for, having, and cleaning up after a birthday party, and also painting T's room so we can make it a cooler place to be. The room is mostly put back together now, and just waiting for the supposedly-VOC-free paint to outgas and stop stinking before we have T sleep in there again (he's camping out in my bedroom.) The walls look great. The kids got to help when they wanted to, learning bits about painting and putting together Ikea furniture. Now to document some of the other learning that's been going on....

There's been a lot of social learning. The kids play together a lot, and pretend play is usually their default activity if nothing else is suggested to them. They also seem to metabolize most of what they learn from outside sources (books, videos, situations we encounter together) through pretend play. That means there are LOTS of opportunities to have interactions with each other go well or poorly. Flexibility is key; I've told P about the rule in improvisational theater that you try not to act in a way that shuts off someone else's idea, but instead adopt an attitude of, "Yes, and...." She and T are both getting better at this kind of flexibility. Can there be lava in My Little Pony? Can there be two of the same character in a game? Increasingly, the answer is some form of, "Yes, and...." Sometimes when one of them is digging in heels at the other's suggestion, if I'm nearby and see it starting to happen, I'll say something like, "I think you have a big enough imagination to handle that, don't you?" That often gets things back on a cooperative track. Sometimes one doesn't directly concede the other's point, but comes up with a way around it. T and P were both wanting to play the same My Little Pony character, but P didn't want that, so she came up with her own original MLP persona (with her own name, colors, and "cutie mark," natch) that she can be if T wants the same character she does. It worked, releasing the tension and letting the game go on. They, and I, are learning to find the yes in as many situations as we can. (Part of this idea also comes from Sandra Dodd's writing and web pages; here's one about saying yes.)

We're also looking at competition, friendly and otherwise, and how it affects our relationships. Are we racing? Does everyone have to be racing for it to really be a race? If only the winner was racing, how does their gloating affect the rest of us? One way the kids argue about racing is getting buckled into car seats when we're getting ready to go somewhere. I wanted to head off the same old argument one day as we got ready to go, so I made up a song on the fly, to a raucous western-ish tune:

     No one wins, but everybody wins, when we work together
     No one wins, but everybody wins, when we're on the same team
     When we work against each other, people win or lose
     So there's one thing we get to do: We all get to choose
     'Cause no one wins, but everybody wins, when we work together
     No one wins, but everybody wins, when we're on the same team

Like most of my songs, it was pretty ad hoc, but it hit a nerve for the kids. They've been requesting it a lot and singing it themselves, especially when things are getting a little more tense and competitive than they're comfortable with. They understood my suggestion that, really, our goal was to get going, so we all won once we were all buckled in, regardless of who finished first.

In other social happenings, P now has a good friend at park days, one of the girls whose fairy house P added a tornado shelter to on that first good day. And I've been gratified that P has asked for, and taken, my advice several times recently. Sometimes she listens to my reasoning and still chooses something else, but she asks and listens, and I like that.

There's been a lot of reading. Some examples:

• I picked up The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes for twenty cents at a library sale a while back. Recently P picked it up and read it for hours on end.
• UnschoolerDad order a book of the collected Copper web comics. When it came, P picked it up and read it all evening.
• When I've brought home library books and at other times, P's been reading picture books to T a lot, and both of them are enjoying it.
• One night, P stayed up very late and read an entire Magic School Bus chapter book about butterflies.

There's been a fair amount of watching of interesting videos, long and short:

• We watched a Nature program about raccoons. This happened in two sittings, because once a family of baby raccoons appeared for a few minutes in the program, the kids were off to play baby raccoons. In the second sitting, we heard how urban raccoons may be evolving for more sophisticated brain development, as the urban environment gives them ever more challenging situations to respond to.
• We (mostly P and I) watched a NOVA program on genetic testing and genomics. The program covered techniques and ethics of embryonic screening; how some genes determine disorders while others only influence their probability of occurring; how some people choose not to find out about the risk-factor genes, since the influence is fuzzy enough that they'd rather not know; how some people choose to get tested for things like the Huntington's gene so they can plan their lives accordingly and make appropriate financial plans; the structure of DNA and how single mutations or multiple copies of a sequence can cause problems; how DNA specifies proteins, which do most of the body's work; and more. Experimental drug therapies for melanoma and cystic fibrosis (CF) were described, along with patient case studies and the mechanism of failure in CF. I talked with P about how I got tested for the CF gene before getting pregnant, but since I was negative, UnscoolerDad (UD) didn't get tested, which means P may want to get tested before having kids in case she has a CF gene copy from UD. (We also talked about how, since genetic science and technology is progressing so fast, she may face a whole different set of tests and choices than we did.) When P was listening to the part of the program about mutations, she remembered a set of monsters in World of Warcraft called Mutated Owlkin; these monsters are found in an area with lots of radiation.
• We watched the first part of a NOVA pragram about tornadoes; perhaps we'll watch the rest another time. It covered Doppler radar, and how you can use it to see the hook shapes in a thunderstorm that indicate a tornado may be forming. It also had great graphics of the jet stream and other weather patterns that contribute to tornado formation. We talked about duck and cover, and where the safer places are to be in a tornado.
• We watched part of a PBS program about industrial agriculture. The first part of the program was very gee-whiz positive about all of it; unfortunately P got interested in something else just as the program started to get around to environmental and health consequences. Maybe we'll finish it soon! 
• Both kids asked the same question within a day of each other: Are lions nocturnal? This led to a YouTube exploration of lions hunting, elephants helping each other out of a water hole, keepers moving an elephant to a new zoo exhibit nearby that we hope to visit, people taking a behind-the-scenes visit with two zoo hippos, and many other animal things. It turns out, by the way, that lions sleep about 20 hours out of 24, and their few active hours occur during both night and day.

Since it's been so long since I got anything out on this blog, I'll write up the rest of my notes (writing, economics, math, computers, etc.) in another post. But to wind up this one, here's a quick note on where my online time has been going instead of to this blog: Partly I'm playing World of Warcraft, with P or on my own; but lately I'm brushing up my Spanish and beginning to learn German on DuoLingo, a translation and language-learning project I encountered in a TED talk a while back that's still in the beta phase. T likes to listen to the audio that DuoLingo puts out and ask what each sentence means. P wants to try using it to learn Spanish, so I've put her on the list for a beta invitation. I tried LingQ a while back, but I didn't find it as engaging as DuoLingo has been so far, and trying to start a new language (Mandarin) on LingQ was a total fail for me; I just couldn't get a toehold. DuoLingo seems to have a better approach for a cold start on a language, though I've done enough singing in German that I can't quite say I'm starting from nothing; and of course having most of the alphabet in common between English and German is a huge help, compared to Mandarin. But aside from software comparisons, the most fun thing I've learned while playing with DuoLingo is that I do just fine working on two foreign languages at once. It might even make both go better. I used to think I had only one foreign-language spot in my head for a given word or concept in English, but it turns out there's more capacity there than I thought.

Spring Smorgasbord

Spring weather has finally arrived in our area, and our bodies and minds are all over the place. Except in the garden, where I'd like to be preparing the soil for planting; but the kids want to be playing inside today, and so I have time to write.

We've been getting outdoors a lot for letterboxing adventures, learning, and socialization. A non-comprehensive list of our outdoor play:

• We took our first hike of the season in the nearby mountain park, hoping to find a letterbox at the end of the hike. I was glad we had a goal in mind, because the uphill hike was tiring, and we considered turning around but persisted, thinking (correctly) that our goal was close at hand. On the hike we talked about circulation and surgery: P wanted to know why you can't feel your leg when its circulation gets cut off for a while, so we talked about nerve cells needing oxygen to work; then she wanted to know if you'd have to be asleep for a surgery in which blood flow to a part of the body needed to be stopped. We talked about various kinds of surgeries and which could be done awake or asleep. We saw and identified yucca, cactus, grasses, trees, magpies, and blue jays. We talked about moss, which we saw on some rocks in creeks. The kids enjoyed playing on the rocks across the creek in several places, and building tiny dams of pine needles, sticks, and moss. T is much steadier on his feet than I expected; he was able to cross creeks on rocks easily on his own. Both kids ran joyfully most of the way on the downhill return hike.
• T went with me for another letterbox while P was at her choir rehearsal nearby. He enjoyed playing with the compass and beginning to learn to use it. He was clear that if he faced north, south was behind him, and vice versa.
• We visited a nearby park, playing for as long as the kids wanted and then going to find two more letterboxes in the neighboring open space. On that walk the kids played in mud, experiencing different textures and kinds, including pull-your-shoes-off sticky mud. They played in a big puddle/small pond with sticks, stirring up the very fine sediment and noticing how the water looked cloudy, but the individual silt/clay particles were too fine to see. We talked about what kind of rock those sediments would form, given enough time and pressure. I was uptight about the mud at first, but before we went home I had relaxed into letting the kids get as messy as they wanted, knowing we'd be able to clean ourselves up. I was reminded of Ms. Frizzle's slogan from The Magic School Bus: "Take chances, make mistakes, get messy!" That might make a good unschooling motto!
• At an unschooling park day, P experienced some rejection when trying to join a game being played by several girls near her age, who've played together for months or years. As the afternoon went on, I made some suggestions about how to join their play (learn their names instead of calling them "guys," use questions and suggestions rather than demands, look for opportunities to expand on their game in fun ways, rather than trying to change it), and I came along to try to grease the skids a bit. She did eventually work her way in, providing a tornado shelter for the fairy house they were building, and she played for a long time with one of the girls after the others went home. T also wanted to be in on some of those games, and I worked with him on how to make his way in, too. He was carrying a big stick that one of the girls was worried about, so she was telling him to stay away; but once he put down the stick and came to help, he was more or less welcome.

Through these outings, I was working on my pace and how I handled transitions with the kids. I'm noticing that when I avoid making arbitrary demands (do this, do that, hurry up), the requests or demands that I do make, for real reasons, are met with greater cooperation. There's a "Duh!" element to this, of course, but it's sinking in more deeply for me that when I notice what the kids are enjoying at transition time, rather than focusing on how fast I can get them to do something else, they notice my consideration for them and react better when the time to move on has really (and it helps if it's for reasons they can understand) arrived. They light up when they can share their enjoyment with me and feel seen, along with all their pleasures and preferences about how life goes -- and that helps when their preferences don't work out on a particular occasion.

We had some interesting books from the library:

• Every Thing On It, a book of poems by Shel Silverstein. These are delightfully attuned to kids' interests, including gross and silly stuff as well as calmer fare. And the segmented nature of the poems lends itself well to bedtime reading, when I'm trying to keep an eye on approaching sleep and stop reading when it's time to doze off quietly. We had one delightful group nap on the big bed, on a day when I felt everyone could use one -- I grabbed a stack of interesting books and said I'd read them to anyone who came along. Everyone was listening within 2 minutes, and everyone was asleep in about half an hour, including me. Yum!
• Listen for the Bus: David's Story. Both kids liked this picture book about David, a boy who's blind and hard of hearing. The book talks about how kindergarten works for David, including braille and other tactile clues his teachers use to help him navigate his world; and about what David loves most in his life outside school (loud noises, big dogs, hammock swings, riding horses, and more). 

• To Everything There Is a Season. I was reading a Secular Homeschooling Magazine article about reading the Bible for cultural literacy, and this book came up there as a good start for kids still a little young for some of the Bible's more disturbing offerings. The illustrations are based on the content and style of pictures from a variety of cultures -- Japanese, ancient Egyptian, Aztec, Thai, Indian, and more -- and there is a key to the illustrations in the back of the book that briefly explains both the meaning of the verse from Ecclesiastes on that page, and a bit about the cultural context of the illustration used. P was very engaged in both the text and the illustration key. She did point out, in response the the verse used at the end (Ecclesiastes 1:4, "One generation passes away, and another generation comes; But the earth abides forever."), that the Earth would actually be engulfed in the sun in a few billion more years. We talked a little about how that compares to the time scale of human life.
• The Magic School Bus Hops Home: A Book About Animal Habitats. This was the book that started our group-nap reading. I like that it addresses both what animals need in real and artificial habitats, and how they might be better or worse off as pets than living in the wider world.

• Starry Messenger, a book about Galileo Galilei. P, who is already familiar with Galileo's going against church teachings based on his observations of the planets, liked this one. It has the basic story of Galileo's discoveries and his conflict with the church, and also handwritten quotes on every page from Galileo's notebooks, supporting his attitude that science is a better guide than scripture for humans trying to understand how their world works.
• Hattie Big Sky. We recently started reading this book about an orphaned 16-year-old girl in 1917 who inherits her uncle's unproved claim in Montana and goes to work it and finish proving up by herself. We talked about why damp hands would freeze to a pump handle, what banking a fire means, food and land prices during World War I, why people were suspicious of their German neighbors, rationing, knitting for soldiers at the front, and more.

Other media encounters in the past two weeks:

• We discovered that new episodes of Phineas and Ferb are being produced and made available on Netflix. P recognized an allusion to the bridge in Monty Python and the Holy Grail in one of them, from my showing her the scene on YouTube months ago. The new episodes are even richer than usual in cultural and literary allusions, which I'm looking forward to unpacking with P.
• I remembered Paddle to the Sea, a short film I saw as a child, and showed it to P on YouTube. She watched it all the way through, and we talked a little about how the people who found the wooden Indian felt, and why they sent Paddle on his way instead of keeping him. After watching it, we tried making origami boats out of regular paper (which bogged down quickly as the water soaked through) and waxed paper (this floated for 3-4 days with very little change before we needed the space for something else). We talked a bit about water permeability and saw and felt the difference between the permeable and impermeable papers.
• With St. Patrick's Day coming up, I was thinking about the Blarney Stone, and we looked up the origins of the custom of kissing it, as well as images of how people kissed it before and after the iron railings for that purpose were added. The risk has been considerably reduced from the time when one had to be dangled by the ankles!
• P asked when Easter would be, and we looked up how it's figured (roughly speaking, it's the Sunday after the full moon that falls on or after March 21, unless you're talking about Orthodox Easter, which uses the Julian calendar, in which the equinox is figured around April 3...) and this year's date.
• A friend posted this marvelous web site about the scale of the universe, which all of perused at some length. It was interesting, after the pond adventure, to see the particle of silt, just below the size humans can see with the unaided eye. (Note: this site works much better in Chrome than in Firefox.) While I was writing this blog entry and went back to get the link for the site, P got interested again and I needed to give up the computer for a time so she could continue exploring! P discovered that you can click on objects on the site to learn more about them.
• T spent some time typing on a One-Laptop-Per-Child computer we've had for a long time, and which he sort of knows how to use. He asked how to spell my name so he could type it. He's figured out how to use Shift to get capital letters, and he knows all his capital letters, so he can hunt and peck to type what I say. P took a turn later and wrote some nicely spelled short messages!

The kids asked lots of cool questions. A few of them:

• "What are animals with pickles on their backs called?" That was T, who at age three doesn't say Rs yet. He was thinking of porcupines. He wanted to play porcupines with P, so he also wanted to know what porcupines ate. (Leaves, twigs, and other plants; in winter, inner bark/cambium. They smell like old sawdust.) We also learned that they turn their rumps to protect themselves from predators, that they cannot throw their quills but release them more easily when frightened, that they may slap with their tails, and that their common causes of death include predation, getting hit by cars, and falling out of trees.
• "If you looked in a mirror with x-ray glasses on, would you see behind the mirror or inside yourself?" P asked this. We talked a bit about why x-ray glasses wouldn't work so well (setting the depth of field is a problem), but then we looked it up. X rays reflect from mirrors only at grazing angles, so mostly you'd see behind the mirror. But they can "reflect" by Bragg diffraction (constructive interference between reflections from atoms in different layers of a crystal), which makes x-ray crystallography possible. at just the right angle, thus the possibility of x-ray crystallography.)
• "Why do our teeth curve backward instead of being in a straight line in front?" That was P. I explained it in terms of leverage: just as it's easier to cut near the pivot of scissors, our jaws are more powerful near the joint, so we can chew harder things with teeth that curve backward. So natural selection would favor animals whose jaws had that powerful construction. 

And there was much miscellany:

• T built some neat, non-tesselated tile designs with the pattern blocks. He also noticed that you could build up the shapes of some pattern blocks using others: three green triangles make a red trapezoid, two trapezoids make a yellow hexagon, etc.
• We went to a place with a lot of inflated, bouncy structures for one snowy park day. P went from lonely to buddied up (she has since played with those new friends at another park day), and T grew much more confident in his climbing as the hours wore on.
• P and I looked at photos of fishing flies and lures and talked about how and why they would be useful for catching fish.
• P was making triangles on a geoboard that happened to be isosceles triangles, so I commented on that and said it meant they had two sides the same. I wasn't sure she was listening, but she piped up, "And one side different." Nice to see comprehension when even attention wasn't a sure thing!
• P talked about having two and a half fourths of something. I said that I knew what she meant, and drew a circle divided into fourths, with 2.5 of them colored in. Then I redivided the circle into eighths with a different color of marker and showed her how 2.5 fourths was the same as five eighths. We did it with 3.5 fourths and 2.5 tenths as well. I showed her the "giant one" method for converting fractions that I used to teach to seventh graders. That may have been too much to sink in at this developmental stage, but I think P understood the pie charts. The next day P asked about how to divide 7 things equally between 2 people, and she followed the explanation well and reversed the calculations correctly herself.
• When UnschoolerDad came back from a business trip, we picked him up at the airport. It was a bit of a comedy of errors, trying to reach the right curb on the right level to pick him up; we circled the airport three times. While I drove, we talked about airport security and why we weren't allowed to park long enough for UD to walk to where we were.
• UD brought home gifts for the kids, including a model F-14 Tomcat fighter plane for T, who has been envious of P's model Blue Angel jet. The F-14's wings swivel back into a smaller, swept-back profile when it goes faster, and we talked a little about why different wing sizes would be desirable at different speeds, especially supersonic speeds (when a lot of vibration would be hard on wide wings, but swept-back wings can withstand it better).

The Beat Goes On

It's been a busy couple of weeks -- I've been getting out less with the kids than I like, but I've been able to put in some productive time on UnschoolerDad's current programming project. Not being a software engineer myself, usually I'm confined to bookkeeping and helping to wrote ticklish emails; but this project has some stuff I can sink my teeth into. This the longer break between blog entries. Oh, and Blogger eating some of my notes didn't help. :(  Nonetheless, learning continues... as if I could stop it if I tried!

The Bob the Builder spree has died down, but one of the last episodes the kids watched was about a dinosaur dig. I took that opportunity to get out the plastic dinosaur we long ago buried in plaster and let the kids continue digging it out. We put it away, back then, because sharing tools became too contentious. This time we talked about some ways of sharing, and things went much better -- particularly after we discovered that craft sticks, of which we have plenty, made the best tools for getting the plaster off. We exposed enough to figure out we were digging out a biped (P thought she remembered it was a stegosaurus); I'm sure we'll get it the rest of the way out at some point. The kids enjoyed the feel of the plaster dust, and figuring out ways to handle it so we wouldn't inhale a bunch of it. They also explored the use of gentler tools and techniques as we began exposing the buried dinosaur.

Learning to share more peacefully has been a theme:

• There's been some lovely cooperative play with the wooden train tracks and our many trains, as various combinations of family members have built track layouts together, modified them, played with trains on them, and improvised shelters and garages for the trains and their friends, the cars and trucks. T's really getting into social pretend play with the wheeled beings, much as P did at his age. 
• The kids made and baked some things from Sculpey clay, including a bunch of play coins; it turned out this was so P would have some play money she'd be willing to share with T, as she felt her existing play money set was "too special." It's true that T mostly still loses things with many small parts, so I can understand. They had fun painting their play money with acrylic paints after it was baked.
• One morning when UnschoolerDad and I were on a phone call for the software project, the kids made a museum in their rooms, with multiple exhibits of different objects of interest from their collections. P helped T put together an exhibit of some of his favorite toys (dinosaurs, cars, trucks, transformers, and airplanes), and she made exhibits of musical instruments, sewing accoutrements, and stuffed animals, as well as a please-touch exhibit with fun tactile stuff for T to play with. T didn't get the memo; he enjoyed the sewing exhibit the most. But it was delightful to come out of our phone meeting, for which we'd equipped the kids with snacks and technological toys, and find the time had instead been spent in pure creativity and cooperation!

After the kids made their own museum, we spent an afternoon at our local museum of nature and science, which has a new exhibit of snakes and lizards, including dozens of live animals and several hands-on activities. The kids were engaged by a little stage show about snakes' sensory abilities; several times P mentioned she'd learned about various things in the show from watching Wild Kratts. Both kids loved seeing the snakes and lizards up close and making links between what we saw there, what they'd learned before, and the kinds of toy snakes they had at home. They shopped for snake and lizard toys (P did some money math to decide what she could afford), and played snakes and lizards with both toys and their bodies after we got home. P saw a picture at the museum of an Indian Cobra and recognized the markings on its back as matching one of her toy snakes, which she showed me when we got home.

There's been lots of fun with books. T has continued bringing me the anatomy book from the library for questions and general exploration, and P's been drawn in a few times. Once, T was looking through the book on his own, when he excitedly called out to me, "Mama! I found the baby page!" He'd found the sequence on fetal development. We looked through it together, talking about how the baby developed and how similar the baby in the book was to T when he was inside me. Then we looked at the pages on birth, infant development, and puberty, talking about how kids' bodies and abilities change as they grow. Both kids were rapt, though P was more interested than T in the puberty information. T correctly pointed out that the baby in all the fetal development drawings was a boy, but that some of the babies and kids shown later on were girls.

On another day, T asked lots of questions about the circulatory system pages. Arteries and veins have been catching his attention in all the diagrams, so now he learned about the chambers and valves of the heart, capillaries and how they bleed slowly when he gets scraped up, balloon angioplasty (this seemed intriguing and somewhat confusing), and more. He asked what the red blood cells were, and we talked briefly about the roles of red and white blood cells in the body. The next day, he brought me the book again, and I asked what he wanted to look at. He asked, "How do I pee?" So we found the pages on the urinary tract in boys, and I showed him the path urine takes from kidneys to bladder to penis and out. He traced over that path a few times with the superball he'd been playing with. Then he traced it backwards and asked, "What happens if the pee goes this way?" I said that if it brought any germs from the outside with it, the germs might get into the bladder and cause an infection. Without missing a beat, he said, "And then the white blood cells would fight the infection." Hooray for connections!

Another day, P pulled out the children's dictionaries we have and took a fun exploratory trip through hers, which has more interesting pictures and sidebars. For an hour or more, she excitedly pointed out her finds to me and T. She found pictures of the Earth's structure and linked this to lots of recent talk about volcanoes, including questions about calderas, volcanic chimneys, what colors lava can be, and so on. That same afternoon I found myself humming a theme from Beethoven's 6th symphony. T wanted to know what it was, and P recognized it as coming from Fantasia but misidentified it as the "forest spirit music" (Stravinsky's Firebird Suite), so I played both on YouTube so she could hear the difference. The Firebird clip I chose was the forest-spirit sequence from Fantasia, and as P watched it, she realized for the first time that part of that sequence takes place in the caldera of a volcano. We made the connections, including the super-fertile soil that comes from the breakdown of volcanic rock (the volcano in the Fantasia sequence gets covered with rich vegetation after its eruption,albeit with magical speed) and proceeded to listen to a bunch more great music as I finished making dinner.

Though P looked at pictures more than words on her dictionary expedition, she's definitely using text to make sense of her world. She frequently points things out to me or asks questions based on what she's read in her environment. And a few times recently, she's read aloud to T, which both of them enjoy immensely -- me, too! T is enjoying hearing short chapter books read aloud. Most recently I read him the Magic Tree House book Buffalo Before Breakfast, in which Jack and Annie visit a Lakota encampment before the destruction of the buffalo herds. Later, T told P, "Holding up two fingers means you're a friend."

Some other recent highlights:

• I helped P get her room really clean. She did a lot of the initial work, and I came in to help with the later, more difficult stages. I've been helping her clean a lot in the evenings, which can get frustrating for me, since it seems like we're picking up the same things day after day, and it seems no cleaning is happening during the days between activities. So I've started trying to help out during the day, when a minute or two of tidying up can save several times that effort later on. Trying to get things clean with minimal stress is still a work in progress, but P is pleased with how her room looks, and we actually had space to play in her room during T's nap today.
• During some alone time with me, T asked, "Why do babies have to stay in hospital long day?" (He meant, for a long time.) He was in the NICU for a week after he was born with several issues -- thankfully the NICU here lets moms stay with the babies 24/7, so it was a lot less scary than it could have been -- and we talked about how some babies (not all) need to stay for a while to help them get healthy so they can go home. He asked why he was sick, and I replied truthfully that we never really knew what caused his problems. He said, "I think maybe something went down the wrong way and I got sick." That's close to one of the possibilities, which is that he aspirated some meconium, leading to pneumonia. I wonder how much he remembers about any of that; I have some vague memories of very early events, and I've talked to others who have earlier and clearer memories than I do. It's good to be able to help him think through it.
• P and I, on our date night at a restaurant alone together, talked some about calories. UnschoolerDad and I have both been trying to shed a little extra weight, and P had gotten the idea that excess calories could be problematic. I kicked myself a bit for discussing it in front of her without giving her useful context, and proceeded to give it -- that calories are how we measure energy from food, that we all need them, and that gaining weight is good at her age, since she's growing quickly. She says she doesn't want to gain weight because she really likes her current car seat and knows she'll outgrow it at 65 pounds. I assured her we could find her another good one, and also assured her that growing kids who eat a good variety of healthy foods and eat only when they're hungry will stay healthy and grow as fast as they should. We also talked about how sweets give quick energy that goes away quickly, while other foods give longer-lasting energy, which is why I encourage the kids to eat something non-sweet first when they are hungry. Food and sweets lost some of their tension after that conversation.
• We watched Bambi together for a family movie night. We'd previously thought T might be too scared by it, but he requested it. He was a little sad about Bambi's mother dying, but relieved that he still had his dad. He had lots of questions afterward about fire, and why the animals would be safe on an island while the forest burned.
• There's been some good physical activity. Both kids went to gymnastics classes and to an open gym. They had fun playing in the snow one very snowy day, and taking advantage of its freshness to eat as much snow as they could hold. I also had chances to take each one swimming without the other, so they could do what they wanted. (Since neither was swimming strongly yet, they had to go where the other wanted to be a lot, so I could be with both of them.) P, who quit swimming lessons a while back, has been continuing to experiment on her own. I challenged her to swim across the deepest part (where she can still touch) without touching the bottom, and though her methods were highly unorthodox, she managed it! That was enough to let her go down the waterslide, so I offered that, but she was having fun and wanted to practice swimming more. This is a great milestone, since her being safer in the water means there will be more chances for both kids to swim. T, in his swim time with me, wore water wings and spent almost the whole time in the deep end, enjoying the sensation of floating and perfecting his kicking for propulsion. I think they'll both become swimmers yet!