I Spy...

We've been working hard on moving, searching for a new house, getting our old house ready to sell, etc., so I've been very spotty about keeping notes on our activities and learning; and the kids have been spending more time than usual learning on their own, without me. So this is just a tiny sample of what's actually happened, since it's what I saw and am now able to remember -- but it's what I can manage this time! Perhaps after our move things will settle down a bit and I'll be able to witness and record more of the learning.

Reading

• We finished reading The Black Cauldron out loud for bedtime reading.
• We read Land of Hope, a historical novel about immigrants coming to the U.S. via Ellis Island, with many pauses to talk about the history and why things happened as they did for the characters.
• We started Little House in the Big Woods. Both kids are enjoying it, looking at the pictures, and asking lots of questions.
• T is showing a new level of interest in words. UnschoolerDad started a tradition of reading the same book (The Sneetches and Other Stories by Dr. Seuss) to him every day. T likes to pick one word that appears often in each story and say that word when it comes up. He also likes to do a word search: I'll tell him a word that appears somewhere on the page we're reading, and he'll try to find the word on the page. The first time we tried this he seemed frustrated, but when I started to move on to more reading, he said he wanted to try it again. Not one to shrink from a challenge of his own choosing, this young one!
• We walked by a police car the other day, parked in a restaurant's dumpster area. We saw it from the back -- the lights on top were almost invisible, so the only sign it was a police car was the word POLICE written across the back of the trunk. T asked why the police car was parked by the trash. I answered him, then asked how he knew it was a police car. He said he saw the word "POLICE" on it. He was very proud of himself!
• P is enjoying the Amulet series of graphic novels. She reads and rereads them, to herself and to T, who also enjoys them.

Doing

• When we were getting ready to make an offer on a house to buy, P helped me do the arithmetic to figure price per square foot on some comparable homes sold in the area recently. I'd read her the prices and square footage of the homes, and she'd divide them out, tell me the result, and then multiply by the square footage of our desired home. This was the first time she'd dealt with place values up to the hundreds of thousands. I don't think it sank in all the way, but it was a good exposure, and she enjoyed the exercise.
• We went to a Heritage Event, a sort of living history event set in 1880 in the Colorado foothills. P enjoyed it and is considering becoming a volunteer next year, when she'll be old enough to do so as long as I'm volunteering too. We saw and/or tried metal bathtubs, chamber pots, hand tools for making buttons (we watched but didn't do it, as the line was very long!), butter churning, laundry with washboard and wringer, sausage making, a class in a multi-age schoolroom segregated by sex (though the teacher let P sit by T when she asked very politely if she could go and help him), and more.

Making

• We've been making cookies. T especially likes to help measure in the ingredients and lick the spoon. P picks up a new cooking term or technique from time to time.
• Both kids have been painting and drawing a lot.
• T is enjoying stamping with rubber stamps, including carefully cleaning the stamps between colors of ink.
• P is making amazing creations in Minecraft. She builds elaborate castles, farms, security systems, arenas, zoos, signs to be viewed from high in the sky, and more, and she's lighting them up with electric lamps controlled by redstone circuits, and then sometimes enjoying blowing them up with TNT and/or drowning them in lava when she's ready to move on. She watches YouTube videos other Minecraft enthusiasts have made to get ideas. I showed her how to access the Minecraft Wiki online to learn how to craft or use items in Minecraft, which is leading to a fair amount of reading, spelling, and online search activity. 
• T is building like mad with Lego. He has several Lego kits, and we've bought, organized, and labeled two big fishing-lure boxes to hold them in an accessible way by sorting them by size and shape. T enjoys the building and the sorting, and he likes sharing his creations with other kids and adults.

Writing

• T liked writing numbers on a slate at the living-history class. His numbers bear some resemblance to the usual forms. He reads numbers very well because of his extensive work with Lego building instructions. He also likes writing his name on things, though he still asks how to make some of the letters.
• P wrote a fairy story to put in a book in her Minecraft library. She's learning her way around a computer keyboard, so typing is becoming less frustrated.

Watching

• We watched the first three Star Wars movies (Episodes IV, V, VI) on DVD. T is starting to be more okay with tense moments in movies, though sometimes he leaves and plays with something else for a while. 
• Minecraft videos
• Opera scenes on YouTube -- I heard some great opera arias on a public radio pledge drive one day, and I wanted to share them with whoever was interested, so I looked them up on YouTube and played some. (I also made a pledge that will get us a 6-CD set of 100 opera arias sometime soon.) T was very interested in the costumes and the facial expressions and body language. Sometimes he asked what they were saying, and I supplied the best translations I could come up with for the Italian or German.

Listening

• Both kids are more attentive than they look at times, catching odd bits of my conversations with UnschoolerDad or of stories on the radio and asking questions about them. Examples of that are in some other sections.

Talking

• After a little bit of stargazing in new-moon dark skies recently, P started asking questions: Why do the planets go around the Sun instead of around some other star? (We talked about relative strengths of gravitational attraction based on distance, about measuring distance in light years and light minutes, and about how everything in our galaxy orbits the galactic core.) T wanted to know what planets were in our solar system (P was able to come up with most of them, and I supplied the rest). P wanted to know why the band of stars across the sky was called the Milky Way, when that's the galaxy we're in (We talked about spiral arms and the general shape of the galaxy). We talked about the lengths of years for different planets at different distances from the Sun. There was more along those lines, but that's what I remember.
• T asked UnschoolerDad how fast a car would have to go to keep up with the sun (really with the earth's rotation, keeping the sun always in the sky). UD asked me, and I said it would depend on latitude, but at the equator, you'd have to go a little over 1000 miles per hour. We talked about why a car wouldn't be able to do that. UD mentioned that in space, without air resistance, the space shuttle could orbit in a matter of hours, going MUCH faster than the car at the equator and passing quickly from day to night and back again. T was intrigued.
• P asked why the sky is blue even though the sun is yellow. We talked about atmospheric scattering of blue light, and why these two observations are partly due to the same phenomenon.
• I took the kids out to dinner recently, and one of the straws that came with their milk drinks had some liquid in it inside the wrapper. We washed it out thoroughly, and a conversation about various kinds of food contamination (deliberate and accidental) ensued. We talked about how one poisoning incident with medicines when I was a child had led to just about everything having safety seals on it. We talked about pop-up lids on goods in jars, and why they work the way they do (UD returned a jar of something recently after discovering its lid had popped up before we opened it, and the kids noticed that and wanted to know about it). We talked about swollen cans or jar lids and the connection with botulism, about safe opening and disposal of contaminated goods, and more. P connected the pressure in botulism-infected cans with the pressure of fizzy drinks when you open them, so we talked about carbonation. We also talked a little about Botox injections and how the botulinum toxin in them paralyzes facial muscles, and wondered together why people getting Botox injections don't get botulism illness.

Visiting

• Both kids have enjoyed looking at new houses we were considering buying. They love the one we chose. They've been back to the old house with me many times, doing various things to get it ready for sale or get our stuff out of it. They watched as UD and I hauled some heavy tools up a steep ramp from the workshop to the garage (whence the movers can take over), using a block and tackle so I could pull the 400-lb tools up fairly easily while UD supported and steered them up the ramp.

Thinking, asking questions, planning...

• I've been reading The Black Cauldron to the kids at bedtime. One night we reached the part apart the Marshes of Morva, and the book mentioned that the marshes reeked. I explained that reeking meant stinking, and talked a bit about aerobic and anaerobic bacteria, and how anaerobes' products of decomposition make marshes stinky, just as they do compost piles that don't get enough turning or aeration; but that decomposition by aerobic bacteria doesn't create nearly such a foul odor. P wanted to know what sorts of dead things would be decomposing, and we talked a little about the plant and animal possibilities.
• P wants to write a thank-you note to our realtor for helping us find such a cool new house. She really likes him and says he's great with kids. I told her the best time to give a note like that would be at closing, since then we'd know we really were moving into that cool house. She thought about how much she'd like to write and started mentally working out how many sentences she could write if she did two per day for a week. (She got an incorrect answer, but when I used her same method to show her the correct answer, she immediately recognized what her mistake had been. As a former math teacher, I wish all my students had been so willing and able to seek and find their mistakes!)

Can We Do Some Math? Pleeeease?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other fun bits lately:

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