Worms, screen-free week, gardens, and more friends!

This blog covers a longer period than most, partly because we recently had a screen-free week. The kids were into the idea, and I joined them, though I did use email and recipe lookup sites. But not this one. :)  So here's a sampling of what we've been up to:

Reading

• One day, T realized that he could touch my phone screen in such a way as to highlight words on a web page. He loved highlighting different words and portions of words and having me read them. He did it over and over, breaking down different words, phrases, and parts of words, and he noticed with interest that when he highlighted the "hum" part of "human" I pronounced it differently than I did when the whole word was highlighted. He also liked highlighting spaces between words and asking me which words he'd just separated.
• P has been reading a novel called The Merlin Effect from the library, and other books from time to time. She's also been devouring comic-strip treasuries, including The Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes. The Far Side books have been fun for exploring some of the cultural references the jokes rely on. 
• My sister sent several picture books for the kids' birthdays, about the civil rights struggle of the 1950s-1960s in the United States, and we've read those together and talked a little about what was going on then and how things are different now, though racism still happens in some ways. Before I even got to the books, P had read all but one.
• We did a lot of reading aloud during screen-free week, even more than at other times. Some reading was by candlelight. I liked turning off the lights in the evening and reading in the circle of candlelight with the kids. It's amazing how distractions recede when the circle of light in a room is small. We focused better on the story and each other, and had good conversations, at those times.

Doing

• We took a trip on an airplane, the first T can remember. He loved watching the control surfaces on the wing do their things, always pointing out when he saw them change. We talked a little, when we were at full flaps for landing, about how that mimics birds who cup their wings forward when landing, to maintain lift while slowing forward motion. P was amazed at how slowly we seemed to be moving when we were up high. We played with different ways of clearing our ears on ascent and descent. We speculated about where the stuff in the airplane toilet goes on flushing. Here's a good answer.
• We started an indoor worm bin, buying worms from a garden center. We put it together, and the kids like looking inside to see where the worms are, what they seem to like best to eat, and how the food scraps change over time.
• The kids also enjoyed helping me assemble the outdoor compost bin, and playing inside it until we took it out and started loading it up. 
• During screen-free week, we played a lot of cards. P learned to play Gin, Five Crowns, Spit, and War with me. War (the most boring card game ever?) was made more interesting by having T judge who won each comparison. He was quite accurate in his decisions, and seemed to enjoy the practice. I asked if he'd give us a dramatic decision ("Queen beats three!"), and found that he didn't know all the number names; but he was game, so he got some practice with them.
• While T was having his gymnastics class one day, P and I sat in the bleachers. There was pop music playing, and I heard P starting to hum in harmony with the music. I started tapping some body percussion and then humming another harmony along with her. It kept changing over a few songs, and it was a wonderful series of wordlessly collaborative improvisational moments.

A great hand-me-down gift from a neighbor a few years ago comes into its own.

Both kids have played a lot recently with a color-sorting toy that uses binary ideas. T traces routes physically, adjusting the controls on the left to let a ball go where it belongs. P was doing the same. Then I asked them if they'd figured out the number part -- that if you make the numbers with "1" next to them on the left add up to the number under the slot you're aiming for, the ball will go there. Both of them started paying more attention to that and practicing some addition as a result. I gave P an introduction to writing numbers in binary format, but I'm not sure it stuck.

Making

• T's birthday happened recently, and P made her presents for him. He's always wanting to take over the couch or a long table as a runway for his toy planes, so P made him a cardboard runway, complete with a slight upward slope, drawn-on lights, and directional arrows. She also made a sort of airport terminal with waiting area, complete with tiny scrolls for the people to read while they waited.
• One day while I was digging the garden, T and P worked together inside to build a zipline the right size for Polly Pocket dolls to use, plus hooks and harnesses they could ride in.

Writing

• P told me one morning recently, when everyone else got up rather late, that she'd been in her room since early, drawing and writing. She hasn't yet showed me what she did.
• One morning, I found T had arisen before me and was diligently writing letters in a book for that purpose. P told me he'd found the book the night before. T used it all day, asking for different kinds of help (more details early on, then less as he got the hang of it), and going through all the letters. The next week or two, he used a magnetic drawing tablet a lot to write different things. One morning he asked me to show him how to write his name, so I wrote an example for him on a nearby dry-erase board. He wrote it beautifully, then erased both versions and kept writing his name through the day. He's written his name before, but this was the first time he did it without a model right in front of him. He's not reading very much yet, though he is recognizing some words in context by their first letters. It seems he may be learning to write first. :)
• T and I worked together to compose a thank-you note for a birthday gift. He didn't know what to say (it's a new skill for him), so I talked about the sorts of things people often say, asked him what he liked about the gift, and made suggestions about what to write, writing down the ones he approved of.

Watching

• I read in a favorite mom's blog about her kids, who enjoy cooking, doing "Iron Chef Lunch" some weekends when she is fresh out of energy and lunch ideas. I thought that could be fun if we built up the right skills and knowledge, so we watched a couple of episodes of Iron Chef America. The kids didn't like it as much as I did, but they got the concept, and it was interesting, if a little creepy, watching the crayfish episode (all recipes starting with live crayfish). We talked about crayfish basically being big water-dwelling bugs, and about other instances of human eating bugs on purpose.

Listening

• We had the radio on more than usual during our screen-free week, usually to the public-radio talk station. We didn't talk a whole lot about what we heard, but I could tell that at times the kids were listening. Sometimes if I went to turn the radio off, P told me she was listening and wanted to finish the story.

Talking

• P and T invented and initiated their own game, in T which gives P a series of numbers, and she adds them one by one for a cumulative total. I just listened to her get to 47 without making a mistake, even when she was mentally adding two 2-digit numbers (16 and 21). They've been doing this when I wasn't listening, they say. It tickles me to listen to P improving her mental arithmetic while T improves his sense of numbers and how quickly or slowly they add up.

Visiting

• We went to the county recycling center to buy a good compost bin at a good price. They had a self-guided tour area from which we could see the sorting machines, the railroad spur that took the recyclables away, the wetlands that were helping with water purification, and lots of useful signs explaining the process of separating recyclables from each other and from contaminants. There was also a display that did a much better job than the pamphlets we get in the mail of explaining what can go in the curbside pickup, what can't, and why. Seeing how the machines worked made these rules make much more sense, too.
• I've been digging up a garden plot in the front yard, and that has helped with meeting neighbors. Recently a dad and two kids were ambling by, and I called T out to play (P was away at a musical with UnschoolerDad). We found out where they lived and visited them shortly afterward, seeing their garden and backyard and meeting their backyard chickens.
• I saw the next-door neighbor's child, a little older than mine, playing in the snow one day by herself. I asked if she'd like to play with my kids if they came out, and she said yes, so P and T dressed in a hurry and spent the rest of the afternoon playing outside with her. That was the start of a beautiful relationship -- she comes over often to play, and we are in good communication with her parents. This is the first time we've had a friend close enough for truly spontaneous visits and play, and we're loving it. P went to her house one day and played with her six pet rats.
• P went to an evening campfire at church with me. After we'd toasted our fill of marshmallows, I fell in with the music makers, and she played with several kids around the big yard. She told me afterward that she needed to come to the late service the next day, since she'd agreed with another kid to meet and check on the rabbits they'd found. Usually P and T don't come with me to church; I go to the early service and come back quickly so UD can do his own Sunday activity, and the kids prefer to stay home. That Sunday, though, they both went to church, and they both enjoyed it. I hope we're opening the way for them to enjoy church with me. They are both registered for a week-long day camp at church this summer, and with luck, they will build some friendships there that will make church even more fun for them.
• On our trip by plane, we visited friends, family, the beach in Alameda, and Chinatown in Oakland. On the beach we looked at birds, shells, erosion patterns, and how the tides went in and out. The kids built sandcastles. In Chinatown we tried new foods from a dim sum takeout stand, looked at traditional and American-influenced children's clothing for sale, looked at and bought a few beautiful things made of fabric and semi-precious stones. We also noticed how many more people were hanging around outdoors, without or without their families, and talked a little about the history of Chinese immigrants in the American West and how and why Chinatowns would have formed and persisted.

Thinking, Asking Questions, Planning...

• In the car one day, we were listening to a story on NPR about the foster care system. The interviewer mentioned that the guest had been a foster mom for more than a quarter century. I kept listening for a couple of minutes, and then P said this: "A quarter century would be 25 years. Because I know half of 100 is 50. And the sound on my computer goes up to 50, and when it's exactly halfway up it's on 25. [She told me later she knew it was exactly halfway because she could see it on two different scales, one showing 50 out of 100 and one showing 25 out of 50.] And half of 5 is two and a half, and if you imagine each of those ones is a ten, then the half is five, and that makes 25." I was tickled to hear all this -- it's not how I would have taught it (except maybe the last part), and she connected it all together on her own. I asked her later how she knew half of five was two and a half. Her answer: "Well, it wouldn't be fair if one person got three and the other got two, so each should get two and a half." Spoken like a big sister who needs to know these things!
• Again in the car, P asked about the GPS display (miles to next turn):
  - That three point four there, how do you say that?
  - I'm not sure what you mean. I'd say three point four.
  - Yes, but what does it mean?
  - Oh, it means 3 and four tenths. If there were another number, like three point four five, that would be hundredths: three and 45 hundredths.
  I say a little about how UnschoolerDad and I sometimes talk about short times in milliseconds, which are like three decimal places. 100 milliseconds is one tenth of a second.
  P is quiet a moment, then says:
  - I just realized something. One in ten is the same as ten in a hundred is the same as a hundred in a thousand.
  - Yep, that's right. (I went on a bit more about equivalent fractions, but she had moved on, so I let it go.)

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.

Life is full, learning is good, and this entry is long!

Whoo -- we've had solstice, Christmas, and a trip to an unschooling conference, with nary a blog entry. I'll try to hit the high points rather than fall farther behind!

For three days in late December, P was at a church day camp, which focused on the seven principles of Unitarian-Universalism in the form of the recently-invented holiday Chalica, condensed into three days. P and I celebrated Chalica last year together in a very low-key way at home, but this year we were going to be on the road and otherwise occupied during its Christmas-to-New-Year's span, so camp was it. At chapel each day, there were stories and songs related to that day's principles. Activities, specifically related or not, rounded out the days. A song to the tune of the do-re-mi song in The Sound of Music summarized all the principles (given in brackets) thus:
     One, each person is worthwhile [The inherent worth and dignity of every person]
     Two, be kind in all you do [Justice, equity and compassion in human relations]
     Three, we help each other learn [Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations]
     Four, and search for what is true [A free and responsible search for truth and meaning]
     Five, all people have a say [The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large]
     Six, work toward a peaceful world [The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all]
     Seven, the web of life's the way [Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part]
     That will bring us back to me and UU you!

P had a great time at camp playing with friends, making art, swimming at the local rec center, toasting marshmallows, helping make Stone Soup, and more. On the last day, families were invited to come share the Stone Soup, so T and I went. Both kids really love having a chance to be in the church sanctuary outside church services, exploring the space, asking questions about things, and making the place their own. I remember liking it the same way when I was young, though I started going to church at age 11.

One day while P was at camp, T brought me a Magic School Bus chapter book and asked me to read it to him. We read about half before we got tired of it. T was actively engaged in listening and making sense of the story. He asked questions about the story. At one point he pointed to the last line on a page and asked me what those words said, so I read them to him again. Unsatisfied, he pointed to the quotation marks on the line and asked what those were, finally getting what he was looking for in my explanation. I love watching him crack the code! Around once a day, he asks me how to spell some word, often a long one like transform. He's working actively on his spoken diction as well, starting to differentiate his L and R sounds and pronounce more consonant clusters, all of which makes him much easier to understand. He's also getting good at talking about things in a different way if he can't get us to understand a particular word. Recently he was trying to tell me something about snow, but he kept saying "so," and I just wasn't getting it because there wasn't enough context. He patiently explained, "You know, the white stuff that's falling down from the sky outside." He and I were both very happy when his idea got across!

In the lead-up to Christmas, T and P were doing lots of pretend play. I'm noticing more acceptance of a greater range of play. P used to get irritated at T whenever he wanted to play a female character or have a female name, which happens sometimes -- after all, his biggest pretend-play role model is his sister! I've been noticing recently that she has more slack for this and is embracing his creativity with fewer reservations. To top it off, on the 20th I overheard P saying that she was T's father in the game. Good stuff.

At last Christmas came, with several cool gifts from relatives. Both kids got packages of 10 matchbox-style cars, the better to share playing with cars. P's been asking for some of her own, since T has so many! There were Polly Pockets and a camper van for them, Barbies and clothes for them, Transformers, and an erector set, which have made for great separate and shared play. We also gave T an airplane that comes apart, using a battery-operated, kid-size cordless screwdriver. He spent hours over the next couple of days (before we left town and had to leave it behind) very earnestly taking the plane apart (always with some reason it needed to be fixed), reassembling it, and flying it about. He's a natural with the tool, even better than I expected. (P has had a small set of real tools and some wood to use them with for years, and she enjoys them too.) The grandparents also picked some things from my wish list for the family, giving us a set of Cuisenaire rods and a United States map that goes with our Tag reader. The map is getting some play, and the Cuisenaire rods have already led into some informal exploration of addition, multiplication, area, volume, square and cubic numbers, and prime numbers. I'm having fun with my Christmas gift, too -- a coffee-table book of the elements with amazing illustrations and amusing and informative text. It's getting read aloud a lot, mostly by me to UnschoolerDad, but the kids get to hear and see some of the good parts, too. Christmas stockings also provided pocket magnifiers that came along on our trip and got some use looking at color elements on TV screens and playing with light refracting in through motel peepholes.

And then we went on our trip! We attended a symposium in Albuquerque for unschooling parents and families tied to the Always Learning list, one of Sandra Dodd's many gifts to the world. Sandra spoke, and so did Pam Sorooshian, Joyce Fetteroll, and several other long-time unschooling parents who contribute to the list, as well as some always-unschooled children, teens, and young adults. There were play rooms set up for kids right next to the room for speakers, so parents could go back and forth as needed. I missed parts of talks while mediating kid difficulties, but it was good to be able to hear what I did, and UnschoolerDad filled me in on some of what I missed. He also took turns helping the kids.

There weren't a huge number of new ideas for me at the symposium (though there were some), since I've been reading the list faithfully for a year now. I did find the experience valuable, though, in that I got to see other unschooling families in action and hear about some ideas in new ways that allowed for deeper understanding. One idea that sounded preposterous to me before the symposium, but that I'm thinking about more seriously now, is that children can be treated as guests in their homes. They didn't ask to join our families; we parents decided to have them, and we committed to their upbringing and care. As such, it may make more sense to keep doing chores and such ourselves, accepting help as it's willingly given rather than requiring it. I do find that P helps more willingly (whether asked or not) when I request help less, and not trying to require chores certainly reduces the adversarial situations between us and creates more opportunities for grace. One young-adult speaker, always unschooled, talked about how her mom always had a hard time getting help with chores other than laundry. The key difference, it seems, was that the mom enjoyed doing laundry. When the mom realized this and started being more cheerful about other tasks, help became more available with those as well. Another speaker, a mom, talked about giving up on getting taking-out-trash help from her husband (who was forced to do that chore as a child and never wanted to do it again), and instead asking kids along to do it with her and making it fun. There was an in-ground trampoline on the way from their back door to the trash cans, and taking out the trash turned into a short, fun family expedition, chatty, playful, and stress-free, with children enthusiastically finding their shoes to come along. One of the ideas Sandra Dodd talks about a lot is releasing our sense that we "have to" do anything in particular, and instead emphasizing that we choose our actions, in general (by choosing the principles by which we wish to live) and from moment to moment. We don't actually have to mop the floor. We can choose to, or we can let many socks do the job, or we can play Cinderella from time to time, or we can just let it be dirty, or... you get the idea. That idea is an important one for me, when I'm considering that perhaps chores are my job, not something to be forced upon youthful conscripts. I can choose my priorities. And one of them can be supporting my kids' priorities, so they can learn to make good choices and establish their own priorities and principles, rather than living life as a list of have-tos based on other people's priorities.

The array of things for kids to play with during the symposium was wonderful. There were art supplies, coloring books (including beautiful stained-glass mandalas), puzzles, mazes, Geoboards, Doodle Tops (with crayon tips), dinosaurs, pipe cleaners, a foam Fraction Burger, and lots more. The bigger kids' room had lots of board and card games, and several kids played Minecraft in there on various laptops that came with them. P joined them for a time on my computer, but unfortunately it had some problems. She did benefit from the expertise of some of the other kids, though, watching and learning from their amazing creations. Both kids had a great time with the Geoboards, and adults happening by and looking at the patterns they created often made comments that got the kids thinking even more. I think there are some Geoboards in our near future. Both kids also got to play with other kids a lot, both near their ages and not. We got some contact information for staying in touch with new friends. Unfortunately, none of them are local. But P is very enthusiastic about going to future unschooling conferences, so we may see some of them then if we don't see them sooner on trips!

P was very fearful and clingy when we went to the first evening gathering at the symposium. She was absolutely not willing to do the getting-to-know-you games that were going on, so I took her to the kids' play area to check out the toys. She played there happily for a long time, and by the time other people started coming in, she was ready to be social and get into the groove. Other big feelings came up a couple of times when she was dealing with younger children who were hitting. I sat with her outside and helped her release the feelings, and she rejoined the play with greater flexibility, enthusiasm, and resourcefulness. (This -- encouraging the release of big, hard feelings rather than changing the environment to make things easier -- is not an approach I learned from unschoolers, but it's one I think we'll keep using for a while, yet, because the rewards are great.) T wandered about from play room to snack table to our laps, getting his food and parent fixes as needed, and was on a pretty even keel emotionally the whole time. Both kids adapted easily to where and when noisy play was okay or not okay, and they enjoyed living all in one room in hotels. T, as usual, was sorry for the trip to end, though when he saw the left-behind toys, he didn't stay sad for long!

On the way home, we had some fun. We played tourist in Albuquerque, peeking in a few shops and eating our New-Mexican-leftovers lunch in the plaza in Old Town. We read about the brief occupation of Albuquerque by the Confederacy in 1862, and how the confederate troops buried eight cannons near the plaza and church as they fled. The former Confederate leader returned years later and showed the locals where to find the cannons, which by then were underneath a chile patch. Two of them (replicas now, because the originals were so valuable) are still on display in the plaza. We brought home a ristra of New Mexico red chile peppers (hard to find around here) and a blanket to remember Albuquerque by.

On a brief stop in Santa Fe, we browsed the markets, enjoyed some red-chile kettle corn, and found another couple of souvenirs. At first, as we waited to use a hotel restroom, I was distressed at how coiffed, made-up, and put-together the folks in Santa Fe seemed to be, compared to those in Albuquerque or other places I've been comfortable with my casual self. But it turned out that was the selection effect of the pricey hotel and the expensive shops on its ground level; once we hit the plaza, it was just folks again. The amount of public art on display in Santa Fe was impressive; I'm glad such creativity doesn't have to go along with people who go to such lengths to change their appearances.

Our last tourist stop before home was an aircraft museum in Pueblo, Colorado. There were dozens of aircraft on display, ranging in history from the Civil War to nearly the present, and a couple of helicopters were open to explore the inside and check out the instrumentation and seating, which made the kids happy. We also saw bombs, a space shuttle tire used on Atlantis, a MASH-type evacuation helicopter for the wounded, and many other craft. A huge captured Nazi flag was on display, and we talked about how Germany had changed from being our enemy in WWII to being an ally now, and what ally means. We saw a display of uniforms from real, local, female servicemembers. One Pueblo woman whose uniform was displayed had been a test pilot for prototype aircraft during WWII. We talked about the danger such a job would involve, and the high level of skill a good test pilot would need. P and T each chose a model airplane to bring home; T indulged his perpetual love of biplanes, and P chose a Blue Angels F/A-18 Hornet, which she's been cuddling as blissfully as any doll. Today we found a web site about the Hornet, because we wanted to know how fast it could go. P's eyes were wide as we compared its Mach 1.7+ top speed to a fast ordinary car and to the fastest racing cars. P remembered seeing something like the Blue Angels in the movie Cars, and seeing the real Blue Angels fly over our house from time to time in Boulder. We also bought a water rocket that should be fun to play with, exploring the effects of pressure and Newton's third law, when we get a warm day.

Since we returned, I've been trying to leave something fun or interesting on the coffee table each night for the kids to find in the morning -- a form of strewing that Sandra recently referred to as a "daily special." I love that idea, though I can imagine I'll have to give it some thought to come up with things. This morning I left out a set of blocks, similar to the Jenga game, to play with, having found them in a closet last night. The kids were up before me, and by the time I came out, there was a problem with not enough blocks to go around, so I got out some alphabet blocks and Connectagons. P went to town with the Connectagons, building a Robot Town and regaling us with stories about the various robots and how they worked. Later she was pretending to be a robot. This evening I put out the Tag reader, the books currently loaded on it, and the U.S. Tag map. T asked P to play with a Tag book geared to helping kids learn to write letters, which she willingly did as he watched, absorbed. The Tag things were meant to be tomorrow's daily special. I guess it's a good thing for me, for my own development as a co-discoverer with my kids of interesting stuff, that I can't wait to get out the fun stuff once I think of it. Maybe I'll get out a jigsaw puzzle for tomorrow, one that no one's seen for a while. I could really get to like this!

Cabin Fever and Its Fruits

Another week and though I'm improving slowly, I'm still sick. I guess I need more sleep. But unschooling carries on, albeit at a somewhat slower pace and with a measure of cabin fever.

In the world of ideas about school: Two different people pointed me to a Washington Post article about a school board member, a very successful businessman, who pledged to take the high-stakes tests students in his district were required to pass for graduation, and to publish his results. Of 60 math questions (to take just one section), he knew the answers to none but was able to guess correctly at 10. This experience raised huge questions for him about who writes these tests, who decides what should be on them, and how the results should be used -- he would have been required to take a remedial reading course based on his results. I recommend the article heartily.

Here's a simple, mama-needs-sleep-soon list of highlights for us this week:

• We set up and decorated our large artificial Christmas tree. P is now strong and dexterous enough to get the branches into place on the trunk, and T can now read letters reliably, so my role has been reduced to fluffing up the branches, mediating minor squabbles, and doing things too high for either child to reach. It was a good exercise in cooperation among the three of us, and we did pretty well. Our biggest wrangle was over playing with ornaments (delicate) as if they were toys (stronger). After gluing several broken ornaments back together, I ended up hanging the precious things high and giving up on protecting things that weren't of great sentimental value to any of us. The subsequent decrease in interest in the ornaments has me wondering whether my reaction wasn't one of the fun parts of playing with them. In any case, one of the things I'm working on is decreasing my attachment to particular objects and ways of doing things, especially where that attachment conflicts with my kids' desires for learning and interesting experiences.
• We rolled, cut, and baked dough ornaments. Decorating them is waiting on a trip to the craft store for acrylic paints. As we measured the flour for the dough, we found it infested with some kind of maggots. We looked them up and found they were probably Indian Meal Moths, common worldwide. We looked at photos of them, read a bit about their life cycle and methods for controlling them, and then proceeded to sift them out of the flour and make our ornaments. At least one was alive and wiggling. Having lived in Northern California, where similar (identical?) critters called orchard moths are everywhere, we already keep most of our vulnerable foodstuffs in airtight containers, but our crafts-only white flour was unprotected.
• We roasted some chestnuts, after looking up different ways to cook them and settling on the method used by New York street vendors, which is to boil them until tender and then just toast them a bit for nice looks. Along the way we looked at photos of chestnut trees, chestnut lumber, and the furry green casings in which the nuts grow. We talked a bit about chestnut blight and how its has almost completely wiped out American chestnut trees, so we're eating chestnuts from Asian chestnut trees, which coevolved with the blight. After speculating a bit about the etymology of chestnut, we looked it up and found it has nothing to do with chests, but is most likely what some English speaker heard when someone said Castanea, the genus name and original name of the tree in many places, across language groups.
• P got out an origami-per-day calendar I gave her a while back and wanted to learn to fold things from it. I'm helping her learn to read the instructions and diagrams and do the various techniques. She gets very frustrated sometimes. This week she was fuming loudly in the spectators' area during T's gymnastics lesson, and I said if she couldn't handle her frustration without bothering the people around us, she should wait until we got home to work on the origami. I was pleased to see that she was able to to quiet down and still work through her frustration to a satisfactory result. Learning something you're interested in is always satisfying generally, but not always fun in the moment!
• I'd been noticing that lots of P's pretend play was about being poor, so on one car ride, I suggested we brainstorm the minimum possessions a family living in very limited conditions (no running water or electricity) would need. P took me up on it. She played along as we thought about things like one cooking pot and a fire ring or some kind of stove to use it on; but she really lit up when we started thinking about toys and books. She thought they'd have a few, but when I told her that many poor families have no toys or books at all, she thought long and hard about what kinds of things the kids would play with, or how they might learn to read if they had the opportunity. We got another angle on poverty on a more typical United-States level when I told her a story I'd just read about a family, living on a very tight budget, who had decided to give each other only one gift each, with a $5 spending limit -- and how that Christmas was the best they'd ever had. We have been burning through savings this year and doing less discretionary spending than usual because we're waiting to see the first income from an independent software project to be released very soon, and I can see from her play that money is very much on P's mind. I'm trying to strike a balance in talking with her about money and poverty, not romanticizing poverty, but also letting P know that not having lots of money doesn't mean a family can't have a good life. The kids and I had planned to sign up to help sort gifts at the Share-a-Gift "store," where families who can't afford Christmas presents can pick out donated toys and books to give their kids; but while I was ill and delaying new commitments, volunteer registration filled up. We'll still sort through what we have to donate some gently-used toys to the program.
• After last week's bullying in gymnastics, P and I talked about what might happen if we spoke to the hair-pulling girls and their parents (with possibilities ranging from the situation being resolved to the girls really having it in for her). Today in class, P made a connection with one of the girls and got her to stop; the other girl wasn't in class. Here's hoping this episode of P's education in dealing with bullies is over.
• After reading a thread about art on my favorite unschooling email list (AlwaysLearning), I decided to increase the kids' independent access to art supplies. We took our arts/crafts basket down from the counter and put it on the train table, which never gets used for trains anyway since the floor is so much nicer for big track layouts. P and I sorted supplies and found containers to make them easy to find and use, and I put just a few things up high so T can't decorate too many walls in an unsupervised moment. There's more ongoing art happening now. P has been writing in pretend Chinese characters -- she loves the concept of ideograms for words. I dug up a postcard from my adventures on PostCrossing.com on which my correspondent had illustrated the steps for writing "hi" (Ni Hao) in Chinese, and put them into a form P can use more readily when she's ready for some real characters. Besides art supplies, we started a container of bits and bobs that could be incorporated into creations. P enjoyed taking apart and reassembling some older, less-efficient sink aerators we recently replaced, asking about what they were for, and then transforming them into buildings in a town, with scrap-yarn roads and an inexplicably tall dentist's office building. P's appetite for making creations has been whetted; now she wants lots of yarn she can use to make giant spiderwebs. It's on the shopping list!

The kids have spent a lot of time on Netflix and at other iPad pastimes while I've been sick. I get glimpses:

• P writing "I Love You" with alphabet-soup letters in the Morris Lessmore app
• Both kids transforming Morris Lessmore characters into characters from famous books and related movies. One was the Bride of Frankenstein, which reminded us of a friend's photo I'd recently shown P on Facebook, of her post-op "Frankenfoot," all gussied up with neck bolts and such to go with the stitches, and accompanied by "Bride of Frankenfoot," her other foot, with the classic tall, gray-templed hairdo -- everything really does relate to everything else somewhere! P was curious, so I told her the basics of the story of the creation of Frankenstein's monster.
• P asking today, out of the blue, what a shrine is. She's been watching Phineas and Ferb, a Disney cartoon series she discovered on her own, and one character built a shrine for another who'd been sucked into another dimension. P described the shrine to me in great detail. I told her a little about shrines on different scales, from a tabletop to a building, and we talked a little about what they're for (reminders of loved ones or religious figures; places to focus, pray, and/or meditate). Thank goodness there's something to be learned from P&F, and P's willing to ask the key questions.

P and I also watched a bit more of Cosmos together. One episode, "Heaven and Hell," covered some ground we've seen before, about asteroid impacts, the Tunguska event, etc., as well as vividly describing the hot, corrosive atmosphere of Venus. I stopped to clarify things, including why the planets' appearances and their distances from each other couldn't easily be shown in the same scale, and how the solar-system model used in the series obscures the fact that an asteroid or comet, zooming through our solar system, has a negligible chance of hitting any planet. The word negligible made for an interesting discussion -- I explained it as "so small you could basically ignore it," which led back to more talk about scale -- how small is that? So small relative to what? We also wrestled a bit with helping P understand Kepler's Second Law of Planetary Motion (planets in orbit sweep out equal areas in equal times) -- we'll have to find some better ways of exploring the concept of area, but I think P got the basic idea.

The other big vocabulary-builder recently has been Dragonsinger, which UnschoolerDad finished reading to P tonight. P asks about unfamiliar words, and when UD isn't sure, he calls me in for my knowledge and my willingness to look words up. Just tonight I gave them definitions of querulous and sinecure, as well as a couple more I've already forgotten. Bless Anne McCaffrey; from beyond the grave she's enriching my daughter's vocabulary along with her imagination.

World Religions, Wild Birds, Wooly Animals, and more

It's been a very scheduled week, for us. P went to a day camp focused on world religions at our church this past week, so we had a school-day schedule, but with a longer commute. P had a lot of fun at the day camp and made some friends she can see again at church or for play dates. On various days the camp activities focused on Islam, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Earth-centered religions, and Unitarian Universalism. They heard stories, sang songs, learned dances, and visited some nearby places of worship for different faiths and spoke with ministers or educators there. Each day there was time for play, meditation, journaling, and art as well. Getting up early and getting places on time was a little hard, but it was nice that no one would get in trouble for being a little late, and it helped that P was anxious to go, so there was little foot-dragging in the morning.

T and I spent camp times letterboxing, playing outside, reading stories, running errands, and having naps. T is becoming a good hiker for short distances. He loves walking a pretty trail, seeing a new bird (he was the first to see a spotted towhee on one hike), and checking out creeks, boulders, and interesting plants along the way. One day we saw -- actually, we heard its piercing calls first -- a killdeer and were treated to a virtuoso broken-wing display (though which wing was broken was debatable!) as it tried to lure us away from its nest. We took a peek back at the nest to see the beautiful spotted egg, and then left the amazing bird alone. I wouldn't know most of these birds myself, but we're carrying our Colorado bird guide everywhere these days.

In the afternoons after camp, often we'd head someplace with a letterbox and a fun place to play, and take advantage of both. On Thursday afternoon we visited a little mining museum, which a local historical society opens two afternoons per week. We saw a diorama of a nearby coal mine, mining tools, textiles from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and implements for cooking, farming, blacksmithing, sewing, and more, all from around the same period. A volunteer docent answered most of our questions; the most mysterious thing we saw turned out to be a cream separator. P, closely examining a rail car formerly used in the coal mines, decided (correctly, I think) that a funny-shaped piece of wood sitting on top of the wheels was a brake for the car.

This weekend there was a wool market in Estes Park, and P and I went on Saturday afternoon. P liked it so much that we went back on Sunday, taking T with us. At the wool market we saw llamas, alpacas, paco-vicuñas, angora bunnies, sheep, and goats on display, as well as fiber from all of them, and got to interact with some of the animals. We watched demonstrations of sheep shearing and sheepdog training, and saw the sheep-to-shawl teams hard at work spinning and weaving their contest entries. In the children's tent, we saw people spinning and weaving on three different kinds of looms (jack, rigid heddle, and inkle), and both P and T tried their hands at inkle-loom weaving. P, who is still getting clear on how buying things with cash works, chose several small things to buy with allowance and birthday money, and she got some real-life math lessons along the way. I find that cashiers and shopkeepers will often take a few moments to provide some consumer education when a child is making a purchase, and I've been pleased with how pleasant and informative they have been.

On the way to and from the wool market, we had great opportunities to talk about a lot of things:

• Jerky and smoked meats and their use for winter or traveling provisions (we stopped at a place where these were sold and tried some)
• Water wheels (the place we bought the jerky had one) and how they have been used
• Windmills and why they are called that (as opposed to wind engines or wind turbines) -- historic connection to grinding of grains
• Local geology -- There are a couple of hard sandstone layers in the local rock column, and depending on how much they've tilted, you can see mesas and hogbacks that have formed. P definitely got this -- she remarked on some such features when we drove back over the same route on Sunday. We also talked about the Front Range's past as a seashore area, and this connected up with some large fish fossils P saw a couple of years ago on a driving trip through Kansas (the erstwhile inland sea).
• Driving etiquette on mountain roads, including the use of pullouts to let faster drivers pass

In addition to our hiking and outdoor play, P recently said she wants to learn to skateboard. I haven't really tried it since I was her age, and I never got the hang of it then. We have a neighbor with a child a little younger than P, and he skateboards, so perhaps he can help out with P learning. I don't think T would be far behind; he was fascinated when we stopped to watch kids playing at a local skate park. I do think, though, that I'll encourage P to finish learning to ride a two-wheeled bike before taking on a skateboard. She's so close, I think another outing or two might get her off and running, and she's excited at the prospect. (Our local topography is so hilly that beginning bike-riding practice requires an outing with a parent to flatter ground, or I'm sure she'd have it down already.) The risk-averse side of me hopes she'll stick with biking and forget about skateboarding, but I think if she wants to do it, I can buy her the appropriate safety gear, find someone to teach her, and give her my blessing. Heck, my coordination and balance have improved since I was seven -- maybe I'll try to learn, too.

It Never Rains But It Pours

After a couple of largely uneventful weeks, we are having a doozy. We started with preparing for and hosting P's seventh birthday party this weekend. It was a letterboxing party, with clue puzzles to solve and follow to specially-planted letterboxes in our yard and some willing neighbors' yards. There was a mix of strong readers and still-emerging readers among the guests, and they worked well together, each doing what they could, and also enjoyed creating and using their own signature stamps. Everyone had a good time, but especially the strong readers, who relished the reading of clues and the use of logbooks.

I learned, in the runup to the party, that P seemed to think that the fact it was "her party" meant she didn't need to help prepare, clean, or extend any special courtesy to her guests. We had some good talks about that (though I'll admit some of them were at high volume!) and she ended up realizing that the sole automatic privilege of being the guest of honor at a birthday party is being the one to blow out the candles and open the presents. She helped a reasonable amount with preparations and was a reasonably gracious hostess, and she really enjoyed seeing several friends she hasn't had play dates with since leaving school. We have gone a couple of times to be at school when kids got out, so she could play with friends on the playground after school, and we've had play dates with some friends, but still, it was a welcome gathering. Now that we've introduced her friends to letterboxing -- and some of them have really caught on with joy -- we have a new possibility for play dates!

A few people gave P books for her birthday, which is starting to help her out of her rut concerning what books to read. She's enjoying Sideways Stories from the Wayside School, and she's gotten a start on How To Train Your Dragon. Before her birthday, she was adamant that she only wanted to read her usual series, but after a brief complaint (beyond her guests' hearing) that the gift books were not the books she wanted, and a brief reassurance that these books were surely chosen because other kids her age loved them, she's picked them up without any further urging from us.

P is still enjoying her Magic Tree House and Magic School Bus fixes. She discovered the MTH web site, where kids can play games related to the books. She's read enough of the books now that most of the content is familiar, and she had a good time with it. That said, she hasn't asked about using the web site again since the first time. I don't think I'll bring it up; it was mostly quizzes and didn't seem to add much to the stories themselves. She's also watched MSB videos on sound, bats, spiders, recycling, desert life, and ecosystem interdependence in the context of the rainforest.

Other media have provided some nice connections. We watched Microcosmos on DVD from the library. It was awesome, of course. Both kids were riveted and had a nearly unending stream of questions about what was going on. It provided some real-life footage to tie in with the MSB video on spiders, and the discussions of what was going on tied in with some of our real-life experiences with insects and other creepy-crawlies. We also listened to an audio CD from the library called Vivaldi's Ring of Mystery, a Tale of Venice and and Violins. The kids have thoroughly enjoyed this series of classical-music CDs, which have storylines involving a famous composer as a character, with background and plot-related music from that composer (Vivaldi is our third such CD, after Bach and Beethoven). This was no different, except that when it became clear the story took place in Venice during carnival, P burst out delightedly that this was in the Magic Tree House book she is now reading, Carnival at Candlelight.

I've been doing a fair amount of letterbox-hunting with one or both kids. Recently we found a letterbox commemorating the history of coal mining in Colorado's Front Range. I read the historical information from the clue to P and T, and P, surprised, asked why coal came from underground. This led to a brief discussion of what "fossil fuels" means and why they are limited resources, at least at the rate they are currently being used. We've visited a number of interesting, fun, and/or beautiful places while letterboxing; this is one of my favorite things about the hobby. P learned a bit about how a reference desk works at a library, because we had to visit one to claim one letterbox. At that and other times recently, I've been noticing her becoming more willing to interact with strangers in the world to get things she wants. It's a great way to watch her blossom, and it will serve her well if she continues as an unschooler -- parents can't provide the desired information on every topic without recourse to outside experts, and if the child can interact directly with the experts (in a safe way), so much the better.

And finally, P is going to a day camp this week, with a theme of World Religions. I'll write more about that later, when I have a bigger picture of what it was like. In two days, campers have walked to two nearby places of worship and talked with staff members there about their respective religions. P agreed to be signed up for this camp months ago, and I'm not sure she realized what she was agreeing to at the time; but she does seem to be enjoying it quite a bit. I feel exhausted, being back on the school-like schedule for the week, but it's getting us all out of the house a lot more, which has been fun for a change -- especially after our stick-in-the-mud weeks!

A Week a Weaver Could Love

Many strands of learning are active these days. Thinking about how the strands pick up, leave off, and resume at different times, and how they twist and weave together in our lives, reminds me of Norse and so many other myths about spinners and weavers of fate, and of playful weavers of my own acquaintance.

There are fine motor skills: After several previous attempts at knitting in which P needed me to be hands-on on a continual basis, this week she picked it up and owned it. She still loses track sometimes of where she is in the four stages of making a stitch, but she's getting better at figuring that out, too. I used a rhyme I learned from another knitter, long after I learned myself: "In through the front door, dance around the back, out through the window, and off jumps Jack." P is amazingly happy to be knitting without constant supervision and exclaims often about how incredibly good at it she is. I imagine that her knitting self-image will ride a few roller coaster hills before it settles down. For now, I just let her know I'm really pleased, too, and I knit with her whenever I get a chance, occasionally showing her something in my own knitting that she may want to use when garter-stitch rectangles get old.

There are gross motor and strength skills: T is working on doing headstands with support and has somersaults down cold (except for the part about making sure you have room to complete the somersault without falling off something or running into something!), and P continues her handstand pushups and other strengthening exercises. We still don't have a bar for pullups, but we've discovered that she can do pullups on my forearm, as long as she's careful when letting go -- since otherwise I whack myself in the face. We'll figure it out.

There's Helen Keller. We watched The Miracle Worker recently, but we were disappointed that the story stopped so early in Helen's process of learning to connect with the world. On our next trip to the library, we found a book about the friendship between Helen Keller and Alexander Graham Bell that covers both their early lives in some detail, and I've begun reading that out loud to P. It's a nice little look at telephone technology so far, and I imagine we'll touch on several communication modes for deaf and blind people as well.

There are the last few chapters of Genesis. After we returned The Miracle Worker, our next Netflix movie was Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. I hadn't seen it before, and I found it quite odd. We paused for plot clarification a lot, since the all-songs structure of the movie didn't make things very plain for a six-year-old. I was curious about how closely the movie hewed to the original story, so we read it afterward. I looked up the most accessible translation I could find, and we read from Chapter 37 to the end of Genesis, glossing over or summarizing passages where the plot wandered or the text became repetitive. P listened indifferently at first, but when I paused, she asked me to keep going. I hadn't realized that the end of Joseph's story wove so smoothly into the beginning of the Israelites' captivity in Egypt and thence to the Passover story (which P learned during this past Passover). When I last read Genesis and Exodus straight through, I was about 11 years old, and it was the King James translation, with predictable results for my understanding and recall.

There's World War II. As I wrote before, this started with The King's Speech and continued through the documentary on the discovery of the planets. Today, as it happened, there was a free concert at the library by a group called Reveille 3, which does an Andrews-Sisters-style concert (complete with costumes and choreography), interspersed with touching, entertaining readings of letters to and from the front, which I believe were based on real letters from WWII. This morning I played P a couple of the Andrews Sisters' songs. On the bus on the way to the concert and while we waited for it to start, I talked with P about the basics of enlistment, the draft, food rationing, scrap drives, war bonds, the USO, "loose lips sink ships" (and the fact that the Allies also had spies in Europe) and some of the social issues for families and lovers separated by the war. The concert went a little long for the kids, but they both enjoyed it, and it was at a good level for P to understand a lot of what was going on. T just had me sing "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree" about five times in a row and still wanted more, so I think he's enjoying it on some level as well.

Before we left the library, we checked out Number the Stars for reading aloud. I think that focusing first on Denmark, where the Jews were mostly hidden from the German occupiers by Gentile friends and neighbors, or smuggled to safety in Sweden, will be a good path into the Holocaust part of WWII for a young child. So many approaches to the Holocaust are fraught with despair; Anne Frank has her place (a little later, I think), but I want to make sure P learns about brave, successful resistance as well, and hears of situations where Gentiles saw Jews as inextricably linked to themselves, not as "others" or dispensable from society. I'm looking forward to playing Fred Small's song, "Denmark 1943,"  for P once we've read Number the Stars. (A free sample and a paid download are available at that link, and I don't get anything out of it; it's simply one of my favorite true-story songs.)

We also talked about the involvement in WWII of three of my relatives who were in the U.S. military (one of my grandfathers was killed in action; two others survived their service). I briefly described the internment camps where Japanese-Americans were imprisoned. And at some point we'll talk about UnschoolerDad's side of the family for another perspective -- his family's town was in German-occupied western Poland during the war and then Communist-ruled Poland afterward.

There's reading in general: P is reading chapter books, especially Magic Tree House books, as fast as she can get her hands on them. I'm trying to intersperse some high-quality books by other authors as read-alouds so she won't feel too bereaved when she finishes all the available MTH books.

And there's some physics: P noticed today that her reflection in the inside of her spoon was upside down and asked why. I dredged up my memories from learning and later teaching optics, and the diagrams I was able to draw seemed to make sense to her. We talked about flat mirrors first, and equal angles of incidence and reflection. Since light reflects just like balls bounce (disregarding rotation of the balls), that's not hard stuff. After we talked about reflections in calm lakes, P generalized nicely to how reflections in ripply lakes are distorted and look ripply themselves. Then we took on curved mirrors. I love it when kids get engaged with physics before anyone at school would have bothered teaching it.

Faith in the Process: Conversations and Continuity

Sometimes with this unschooly approach to learning, it feels like a huge assortment of stuff gets presented, or discussed, or looked at once or twice, but it's hard to tell what's sinking in. It reminds me of the anti-drug ad that shows a teen's face looking exactly the same before and after her parents talk to her about drugs. OK, P's not that opaque at 6. But still, sometimes it seems information goes in one ear and out the other.

And then it doesn't, and I see the links among bits of knowledge forming and getting used, and interest returning to related themes again and again, and my faith in this process of interest-driven learning returns.

A recent example: P has probably finished a sentence about a scientific or historical subject three times for me today, using knowledge I didn't know she had. How did she learn all this stuff? From Magic Tree House and, even more so, Magic School Bus chapter books. She has been rereading her moderately large collection at two books per day this week, which at first made me feel guilty for not finding her more good chapter books yet. But I'm noticing that the ones she's been rereading are providing a lot of the knowledge that gets mapped into other situations. So I will get her more (or put them on her birthday list for others), but I won't be in such a rush!

By the way, her reading skill is coming along beautifully. She wanted to read to me the other day from a Magic Tree House book about dinosaurs, and while she stumbled over Cretaceous and Pteranodon, her oral fluency with the more ordinary vocabulary was almost as good as mine -- which, I think can honestly say, is saying something! She's also getting much more accurate than she was a month ago at using punctuation clues to read dialogue with correct expression and intonation. I love watching her soar.

Saturday evening I took P to a friend's choral concert. On the way to the concert (a 45-minute drive), while waiting for it to begin (it was held in a Congregational church; we are Unitarian-Universalist), and on the way home, we talked about at least the following, and probably more that I don't remember:

• Some possible reasons cats may be linked with witches in popular lore (One of my guesses: cats have been considered good luck at births because they give birth with apparent ease compared to human mothers; female healers, who would have assisted with births and who were later painted as witches when men started trying to take over medicine, may thus, or for other similar reasons, become associated with cats. I don't know whether this is the case, but cats-birth and women healers-witches are definitely associations that have been drawn at various places and times.)
• Where it's safest to be in a lightning storm; lightning rods and how they can protect buildings and their occupants
• How people get red hair; recessive genes; children get half their genes from each parent
• Ways of ending up with a child without having it yourself (adoption, foster care)
• What it means to be gay or lesbian (the chorus had a large number of GLBT members, and the friends who invited us are a gay couple with a child who came to them through the foster-to-adoption process)
• Why there were bibles in the pew racks
• What the little round holes in the pew racks are for (individual communion cups, which led to the story of the Last Supper and how Christian churches of various stripes practice communion, and why some non-Christian churches, like ours, have communion as well)
• Other stuff in the pew racks: prayer request cards, envelopes for cash offerings... only the envelopes and the hymnals have close analogues at our church, so this was all fascinating stuff
• Speed limits: why they exist, why they are enforced, why people exceeding them slightly don't generally get ticketed
• Why infants ride in backward-facing car seats, why we don't all ride facing backwards

Today I showed P a photo one of my friends, who is a midwife, posted on Facebook, showing her tending to a newborn baby. P asked, "Did she bring a cat?" We talked about the likely answer (probably not, though she probably would have no problem with the family's cat being there for a home birth), but I loved the continuity of ideas, considering that I didn't even mention the word midwife in the earlier conversation. P remembered it because three years ago, when T was born, a nurse-midwife at the hospital was our main caregiver during pregnancy, labor and birth. Also today, P said something about blue jeans and then noted aloud that jeans is a homonym. I asked her other meaning she knew, and she talked about the genes that come from both parents to make a baby. Hooray!

Also this week, we listened to Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes on tape. We've been talking a little about nuclear weapons and radiation in the context of the current nuclear troubles in Japan, so this was a natural extension. Sadako's leukemia also tied back to our recent conversations about cancer.

And today, we found our first letterbox! (Look here for a short description and lots of links about letterboxing.) We hiked about a mile round-trip on rocky trails near the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Before setting out, we visited the NCAR lobby, which has lots of displays, some of them interactive, about atmospheric science and the tools it uses. Along the way, we identified some plants (yucca, juniper) and talked about their defenses against getting eaten. On the way back, we stopped and read several signs on the NCAR weather trail about floods, droughts, fires (one of the sentences P finished for me was about fire suppression leading to more intense forest fires, whereas allowing fires to burn and just protecting structures can lead to healthier forests), lightning, and erosion. We examined the anemometers and wind vanes atop the NCAR roof and talked about what they measured and how, and whether any of those other things up there were lightning rods. We read signs about trails that were closed, some for revegetation and others to protect nesting raptors and breeding bats. We marveled at the view from the NCAR terrace, where we ate part of our picnic lunch. It was a beautiful hike and a rich learning experience, and the kids loved the "secret mission" feel of finding and re-hiding the letterbox. That the 1-mile hike took us an hour and a quarter may give you an idea of the walking:learning ratio.

I think letterboxing, pursued at a leisurely pace and with lots of side trips, is going to be a great way for us to get out and see new places and things. And P wants her 7th birthday party, which will happen next month, to be a letterboxing party. Now that's a party I can have fun helping prepare! We'll hide boxes with hand-carved stamps and logbooks around our yard and possibly in cooperative neighbors' yards. We'll help each guest create his or her own unique signature stamp. We'll prepare puzzle clues so each child can play a part in working out where to find the boxes. It's a win-win-win: we make a fancy treasure hunt with a low budget and a theme that may introduce other families to a cool new hobby, P and I will get to create puzzles together, and I'll get to practice my stamp carving!

Even more stuff: P and I watched the last of the Jim Henson: Storyteller Greek myth episodes, which was the story of Perseus and the Gorgon. I think the most interesting discussion we had about that was about Acrisius' attempt to prevent Perseus from killing him, as the Oracle predicted. He imprisoned Danae, and then after she bore Zeus's child anyway, he had mother and son locked in a treasure chest and thrown into the sea. They lived, and Acrisius was eventually killed in an accident, by a discus Perseus threw in a competition Acrisius attended, before the two could become reacquainted. The theme of fate being inevitable, of disaster avoided on one path returning by another (cf. Oedipus the King), is so clear here.

Oh, and never fear, T is learning too! He can talk about more things and show more of what he knows all the time. Today we found a Brain Quest deck of questions and answers for 3-4 year olds (T recently turned 3, but these were from when P was little), and he and I had fun going through it and seeing how much knowledge and cognitive skill he has picked up in his short and late-to-speak life. There's no shortage of candlepower there. But I write more about P -- partly because no school district yet has the right to ask me to account for T's learning, but they could do so for P -- and partly because P just talks so much more about, well, almost everything except helicopters, motorcycles, and construction machinery.