Chores, Choices, Chromosomes, Contact, and Crystals

I seem to have reorganized part of the inside of my head. This is hard to show pictures of, so here's a crystal tree to keep you going:

I recently finished reading Sandra Dodd's Big Book of Unschooling, which I bought from her at the Always Learning Live unschooling symposium. Lots of it was familiar from reading on her website; the book is a sort of snapshot of the web site from 2009. But there were many parts I hadn't seen before. One of them involved chores such as housecleaning. Sandra wrote that one of the principles they try to live by at her house is, "If a mess is bothering you, YOU clean it up." Really? Even if someone else made the whole thing? Even if I know who it was? This was in deep conflict with my existing ways of thinking about parenting. But it also resonated with some of what I'd heard at the symposium from other parents, and it sounded good, especially to my inner kid. I decided, provisionally, inside my own head, to try it out for a while. If P's room was really messy and bugging me and she didn't want to clean it, I'd spend some time on it myself. (This took some convincing of P the first time; she thought I meant to go in and get rid of things because she wouldn't clean them up, a sad memory from our older ways of doing things. We're still working on rebuilding trust from that sort of thing.) If the living room was too messy, I'd spend some time on it. (The living room is often a hard one to assign responsibility for anyway, since many people's messes intermingle there.)

I found that cleaning P's room by myself felt entirely different from cleaning it with her, in a good way. I didn't feel I had to teach her or somehow entrain her into doing it correctly on her own. I was just doing it, seeing it as my own project. I put things where I knew they went, or if I wasn't sure, I left them in a little pile in the middle of the room, so P wouldn't have a hard time finding them later. I enjoyed seeing what P was playing with and what kinds of juxtapositions she had made. I made some judgment calls I felt comfortable with as far as what bits and pieces to keep and what to recycle or throw away; and with some effort, I avoided the passive-aggressive urge to throw away more than P would, since I (!) was the one doing the cleaning. I felt at peace in that I was simply doing the task that I felt needed doing, not trying to get an unwilling other person to do it. I did feel a little irritated the next day, when most of what I'd cleaned had been messed up again. But I continued trying to be honest with myself, internally, about whether it was bugging me and why, and cleaning up when it felt like that would make my world better; and the irritation has passed for now.

In the rest of the house, focusing on tidying up and cleaning because I, personally (not some external arbiter or internalized voice in my head), would like things to be neater or cleaner, has had interesting effects. Parts of the house get a little messier than they used to, at least for a while. Other parts are cleaner. The kitchen looks great; I use it every day, and it really makes a difference to me when it's clean and ready to use. The bathroom is clean; I like using a clean sink and toilet and looking in an unbespattered mirror. I either put others' laundry away, feeling I'm giving them a gift and/or making my world better; or I wait until I can feel that way about it, or until they put it away themselves, whichever comes first. The living room only bothers me sometimes, so it gets picked up less frequently. Yesterday I saw UnschoolerDad walking across pieces of trash on the floor (there had been a pretend game involving lots of paper tickets or something) and asked him if it bothered him to be doing that. He said yes, and I said it was bothering me, too, so how about if we cleaned up? In about 10 minutes, the living room was looking great, and we were both feeling better about it. There was no browbeating the kids. Okay, we did tell them there were a few paper playthings we'd have a hard time telling apart from trash, so if they wanted to keep them, they should pick them up. Mostly they didn't care; the fun had been in making the things, more than in using them past the first couple of days.

Would I want my kids to sit, unheeding, while I clean up their messes, forever? Nope. I'm not there yet, if indeed I ever will be. And I still do ask them to clean up some of their own messes (used tissues, and sometimes things I let them get out on the condition they would clean them up), though I try to let them have some say in the timing. I reserve the right to change where I draw the lines. But for now, I find cleaning up by myself much faster and less stressful than making the kids do it with me. And I don't think the kids are benefiting from my making them clean up. I think they're learning to resent it, and that their resistance to helping is likely to get worse, not better, unless and until they have their own reasons for wanting things cleaner or for helping me. (Empathy is not a strong point of their current developmental stages, but that won't be true forever.) Sure, by being made to pick up trash and put toys away, they learn how to do those tasks, but they aren't rocket science. It's easy stuff to figure out, and T (who has had far less required of him at age 3 than P has at ages 5-7) does tidy up spontaneously now and then. They do enjoy certain kinds of cleaning, like scrubbing the floors, if I let them choose when to do them. One unschooling writer, Joyce Fetteroll, often has unschooling moms consider whether what they're telling their kids is okay, by imagining their husbands saying the same things to the moms. I would be pissed if UnschoolerDad tried to tell me when to scrub the floor, or that it was time for me to pick things up off the floor right now, while I'm in the middle of writing a blog entry. If there were a good reason I could understand (if someone on whom we wanted to make a good impression were on their way over, say, or if he would be willing to vacuum if the floor were tidied up before he had to go do something else), I'd be on board. But I'd have to understand it, or at least trust his reasoning. When the chores required and the times for doing them are arbitrary as far as they're concerned, it's hard for the kids to get on board.

What many parents of older unschooled kids say is that, once the parents switched from requiring kids to do chores to doing them cheerfully themselves, the kids first kicked back for a while as they came to trust they wouldn't be forced to work, and then started pitching in fairly frequently without being asked, or even going beyond the original scope of work to do other chores they noticed needed to be done. I can hope for that. But I think that if I fix that in mind as my goal, it will lead to more of the same old resentment if it doesn't pan out on whatever schedule I have in mind, or for a particular task. So for now, I'll keep trying out the theory that chores won't be hard to learn when the kids are ready, and that doing them myself preserves more peace for me and everyone else than trying to conscript the kids into doing them. The more I can let go of my angst and resentment around chores (and I have had plenty), the more attractive helping me will look. We'll see how it goes.

I've continued trying to think in terms of two choices -- think of at least two ways to handle a given situation, and choose the one that matches my goals better. I've talked with P a little about this, too, to help her handle times when she's exasperated with T. It's sinking in a little. "Did you make a choice?" is becoming a useful question between us.

I saw a great TED talk this week and shared it with P and T. It's about scientific visualization of molecular processes within the human body. It had amazing visuals of DNA folding into chromosomes, and of mitosis, especially the part where microtubules pull one duplicate set of chromosomes to each end of the cell, forming two new nuclei. P enjoyed it, too. We paused a lot to talk about the basics (DNA replication, chromosomes, cell division, etc.). T, who watched most of it with us, asked at one point, "Is that going on in my body right now?" Yes, everywhere, my dear! I love it!

P watched large portions of the movie Contact with me this week. She wasn't much interested in all the talk and arguing about scientific funding policy in the beginning (no surprise), but once the prime numbers started coming in over the Very Large Array in New Mexico, she was pretty well hooked. We paused to talk about ham radio and some of its conventions, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), what prime numbers are, and why hearing them on a radio telescope would indicate a transmitting intelligence.

Before I get to crystals and everywhere they took us, here's a brief roundup of other highlights. There's a notable lack of anything involving leaving the house here, since we're still convalescing from the flu.

• I made a new robe for P this week. In the process, I showed her a few things about garment construction and how to use a sewing machine. She's not super-interested in machine sewing yet, but she listened and took it in, and she hand-sewed herself a little purse that day.
• P and T were playing a pretend game based on SuperWhy at one point (the SuperWhy board game was a total bust for actual game play, but the game pieces inspired extensive pretend play!), and when P tried Princess Presto's line, "Cue the sparkles! Cue the music! Princess Presto to the rescue!" only she said, "Do the sparkles! Do the music!" I realized she was missing the word cue. We talked about what cue means in stage and screen productions. With all the pretend play, this was right up P's current alley.

• P was looking with me at an online gallery of art-history references from The Simpsons (which she doesn't yet watch, but the gallery was linked on an unschooling list) when we saw a portrait in the style of Pablo Picasso, complete with too many eyes showing in a profile portrait. P remembered that Major Monogram on Phineas and Ferb is always shown the same way:
I showed everyone a video I found a while back of a vortex cannon (air cannon) being used to blow down structures made of straw, sticks, and bricks. That was fun! 
The kids and I watched Toy Story 3 together. This was mostly simple fun, but we did see a way that magnets could be used to sort ferrous metals out from trash, and the kids learned what an incinerator is. There was also some Spanish music and dance toward the end, when Buzz Lightyear got reset.
One morning, both kids were measuring everything with retractable metal tape measures. P told me a certain laundry basket was 13 inches across. I asked how many of those it would take to equal her height. (She's been telling me about some math of about that difficulty that she's doing in her head.) Rather than try the numbers, she started measuring 13-inch segments up her body, concluding that about three and a half of them fit within her height. I like her sense of what division means, there.
T has been having a lot of fun playing with my decommissioned electric toothbrush; seeing what the moving parts are and how they connect, seeing what kinds of noises it can make, changing brush heads, feeling the brush against his hand, enjoying the vibrations, and so on. 
P said something about platypuses being the only egg-laying mammals (monotremes). I thought I remembered otherwise from a museum exhibit, so we looked it up. We found out that four species of spiny anteaters (echidnas) share this distinction. And we found out the "mono" in "monotreme" comes from the fact that eggs, solid and liquid wastes all exit through the same cloacal opening. Guess it's a good thing those babies are inside protective shells, eh?

Okay, now for the crystals! This morning I got out a "Mystical Tree," which I bought recently on a toy store run with P. We set it up and got it growing. The finished product, after 6 hours, is shown at the top of this post. Here it is halfway through its growth:

I warned the kids not to touch the liquid, and then wondered whether my warnings were too strong. So I looked up the main ingredient, monopotassium phosphate. Yes, it's an eye, skin, and lung irritant -- and it's used in fertilizer and Gatorade! Okay then; I started thinking about other crystal-growing experiments the kids could be more hands-on with. I remembered making rock candy by growing sugar crystals in elementary school. So I heated up some water, dissolved a whole lot of sugar in it, and put it in two pint jars with wool yarn hanging down into them from craft sticks on top, below:

Then I got to thinking -- was that really enough sugar? I looked up a recipe for doing this and found that I'd put perhaps a third as much in as I should to saturate the solution. P watched as I boiled the solution again and put in more and more sugar, and always it dissolved out of sight. We talked about how the sugar molecules were associating with water molecules, and how we wanted to get to the point where every water molecule was doing all it could to dissolve the sugar molecules, with none left over. The dissolving got slower and weirder-looking (floating islands of granulated sugar, anyone?) until finally the solution wouldn't take any more and went all grainy. We added tiny bits of water until things dissolved again, and then re-jarred the solution to sit overnight. I gave the kids each a bit of the saturated sugar syrup in a bowl to feel and taste, and meanwhile I browsed online for other ideas. I found a page about making a Borax snowflake. P decided to try it with a spiral shape, which she made, below:

This time she did the stirring-in (only about 4.5 tablespoons of borax would dissolve in our jar of water, compared to more than 2 cups of sugar!), enjoying the swirling clouds of borax that slowly dissolved away, and the musical notes the spoon made against the jar. The jar was getting a little overfull, so I took out some water, and we found the notes got higher -- it seems the water, not so much the jar, was what determined the functional size of the resonator. After we put the jar up to cool and sit overnight next to our hopeful rock candy and (just for comparison) my weaker sugar syrup (I'll post photos of the finished crystals next time), we watched YouTube videos of glass harp music. I tried to show P how to play by rubbing the edge of a glass, but most of our glasses are too massive to vibrate well that way. We tried filling up a few with different amounts of water and striking them, but we could only get a range of about a fourth in those chunky glasses. One delicate glass teacup did allow us to stroke its edge just right to make a note of sorts. But it was nothing like the wine glasses in this Toccata and Fugue in D minor:

After a while, though, hearing Bach on wine glasses is like watching a bear dance: It's not that it's that the bear dances wonderfully that holds your attention, but that it can dance at all. So we looked up an organ version of the Bach and found this lovely video:

The piano-roll-style digital notation here is wonderfully intuitive, whether you read music yet or not. We listened to several pieces more by Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy, and more with similar visuals, enjoying the interplay between sound and sight and the artistry of the varied visual representations we found. P gave us the play-by-play for those pieces included in either version of Fantasia (1940 or 2000), but she also watched with total attention through Bach's entire Cello Suite No. 1, which isn't in either movie:

This exploration also led to watching videos on how a harpsichord works, discussing the differences between harpsichord and piano, and making a mallet from a skewer and rubber bands to try on P's lap harp. She says it sounds a little like a piano.

And if that isn't a nice excursion of ideas from a Mystical Tree, I don't know what is.

Mastermind, Maps, and Mandalas

Since I got back from the Always Learning Live unschooling symposium, I've been trying to get more deliberate about what I put into unschooling, proactively, and not just reacting to what I see in the kids. I was doing that before, but now I'm doing it better. One part of that is being on the lookout for interesting stuff to strew in the kids' paths. A sale notification for Barnes and Noble came across my email some days back, and I ordered some deeply discounted stuff: a puzzle of North America with pictures and labels in English and Spanish, a "Super Why" board game (based on the PBS series of the same name, which is for pre-readers like T and early readers), a coloring book of mandalas meant to be put in a window like stained glass, and the game Mastermind. I first encountered Mastermind in my elementary school library, perhaps a year after it first came out in the seventies. I never had it at home, but I loved it in the library. Its usability design has improved since then:

When the package arrived, I got out the Mastermind game and showed it to P, who was sick with the flu and lounging in an armchair in her room. She didn't want to play at first, so I played a game against myself, talking about it a little so she could see how it went. Her interest piqued, we tried a game with her guessing, which quickly became too frustrating, so we switched to her making the code and me guessing. We played for hours! P quickly understood the system of using mini-pegs to give feedback (so many pegs correct in color and position, so many correct in color but not position), and I thought out loud a lot (I'm not very good at the game without doing so!), so she got a look at my thinking and strategy. At first P claimed she was playing because I wanted to and it would make me happy -- sweet in itself -- but when I said I'd be happy to stop if she wanted to do something else, she owned up to an intense interest of her own, so we kept playing. The next day I got UnschoolerDad to play her a few games, so she got to see a different strategy of guessing and hear a lot of kibitzing between him and me about the advantages of one strategy vs. another. I learned something that day, which is that my usual set of starting guesses has unexpected results if the code I'm trying to guess has more than two pegs of the same color! P has tried guessing a few more times and gotten frustrated quickly. I remember guessing being really hard when I was her age -- there's a lot of abstraction involved in guessing the code quickly. I think she's at a great place for her developmental level in math and logic.

In breaks between games, P and I each colored a page from the Mandalas coloring book, enjoying talking about color combinations, why we chose them, and the effects they created. P also initiated a conversation about methods of getting the desired results from the felt-tip pens we were using. I told her what an art teacher had taught me about that, and P had already figured it out for herself. We also talked about the extreme symmetry of some of the images, and how a computer might be useful for creating such exact symmetry.

With T and P both having had the flu in the last couple of weeks, P is learning about various ways of managing illness -- antipyretics like ibuprofen and acetaminophen for fevers over 102 F or so; expectorants for when coughs become problematic (but not for kids T's age; he has a vaporizer running in his room); the need for lots of fluids and sleep and enough food for energy to fight the infection. The three of us also used a stethoscope to listen to each other's hearts and lungs; I was listening for signs of pneumonia, and the kids were having a good game of doctor's appointment.

Another bit of strewing this week was checking out the book Mistakes That Worked from the library: here's Amazon's cover image for it.

The text is a little dense to hold the kids' interest for long, and the cartoons in the book unfortunately don't correspond to what the book is describing, but some of them are funny. We read about the invention of Coca-Cola, chocolate chip cookies, Post-It notes (I'd heard the story of the adhesive's discovery before, but not how it came to be applied to paper), potato chips, and several other accidental or unintentional discoveries that led to hugely popular products. There's more to browse in the weeks before the book is due.

The North America puzzle led to some cool connections. T and I had fun putting it together, and then we spent some time looking at the pictures on the map. Which areas had cacti? Where were there oil wells? T wanted to know what the oil wells were, so I explained a bit about plants and animals like the dinosaurs turning into oil over millions of years. We looked at the Gulf of Mexico and talked about hurricanes and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which P remembers because UnschoolerDad and I talked about it a lot at the time, and then again later after I heard a talk from a former physics mentor of mine who was head of the US Geological Survey during the spill. P and T linked this to a tanker oil spill in an episode of Go, Diego, Go! I talked a little about the Exxon Valdez oil spill and the problems it caused for animals and birds. P wished there were real-life oil vacuums that worked as well as the ones in the Diego episode.

Other strewing this week included:

• Bananagrams, which we've had but not played with for a while: T kept cleaning up the tiles and putting them away, but then he had fun spelling some words with me. He's been doing spontaneous bits of cleaning lately; it's nice to see.
• A jigsaw puzzle meant for families to work together, with pieces of three different sizes in different parts of the puzzle: T put together the big pieces and I did the rest.
• A pile of kids' library books that were due back soon: No one even looked at them this time, but T enjoyed it when I offered to read him a book on the history of aircraft. He had lots of good questions, especially about where the people would go in each craft (he picked up quickly on the oddity of an unmanned craft) and how you would pilot it.
• The iPad game Where's My Water?, in which players route water to a crocodile waiting for a bath, negotiating various obstacles and difficulties: both kids are having fun with this, as am I. There are lots of opportunities for looking at fun and/or bizarre cause-and-effect relationships and thinking about some of the physics of fluids.
• Writing thank-you notes for Christmas presents: Okay, not exactly strewing. But P got to think some more about social conventions and what people might like to read in a thank-you note.

Much of the rest of the learning I noticed this week was initiated by the kids. They made some great connections and found interesting things to notice in objects that have been around the house a long time -- a good case for leaving stuff around where it can be seen or found! Here are some of the highlights:

• T went downstairs with me when I went to clean the cat litter boxes one day. He had lots of questions, never having taken a good look at them before. The idea of cat pee causing the litter to clump was fascinating. I've brought some clean litter upstairs in a big bowl to experiment with when it seems like the right moment; we could also try mixing water with other things, like flour, cornstarch, oats, baking soda, salt, sugar...
• I was mending a sweater one evening, sitting next to T while he played with trains on the floor. I said, "Ouch!" and he asked why; I'd poked myself with the needle, I explained. He asked what a needle was, so I showed him -- pointy on one end, with an eye on the other for putting thread through, and here's how you use it. It's easy to forget, sometimes, what little kids haven't yet learned. I'm so glad mine are asking!
• T has been building lots of fancy train-track layouts, sometimes asking for help with them. After watching me mess with some sticky situations where I needed a piece with two male or two female ends to complete a layout, he made one himself where he used a dual-ended female connector to get a bridge in place. He came to me, excited, to tell me about it.
• P and T both asked about how airplanes steer. I showed them the control surfaces on some of their toy planes and talked a little about what each kind could do. We also talked about how both propellers and jet engines work. I'm realizing as I write this that we might do well to follow up with some video. The kids saw both kinds of engines in person at the aircraft museum in my last entry.
• P noticed out loud that if she drools and sucks it back in, or spits in her hand and licks it back up, it's cooler already. Ew, but good stuff -- she thought out loud and accurately about why it got cool quickly (cooler air surrounding), and I talked about the idea of the saliva losing heat to the air by evaporation, which has come up before.
• I was trying to learn the lyrics of the Phineas and Ferb theme song from P, who knows them pretty well. She noticed aloud that there were lots of rhymes, and wondered if all songs and poems rhyme. I mentioned and described haiku as a non-rhyming form. She did something with haiku in kindergarten, and she has the book Zen Ties, which has a character named Ku who always speaks in haiku. (When he is greeted on his arrival in the story, the greeting is of course, "Hi, Ku!") She also said "nanobots" was a weird word and asked what it meant -- robots whose size would be measured in nanometers -- and we compared a nanometer to the smallest thing you could see close up and to the size of a hydrogen atom.
• P noticed again that there seemed to be two Russias on our large world map. She wanted to know why, so I explained that the map had been done as if wrapping a big piece of paper around a globe and overlapping the edges, so both Russia and Alaska could be shown whole. We noticed several other places that appear on both map edges. P asked if Colorado were really a rectangle; this followed on an earlier conversation about how states and countries get their shapes (mostly straight lines from surveys and wiggly lines from rivers) and how some boundaries, including one between Texas and New Mexico, have come into dispute as surveying and GPS technologies have improved. I talked a bit about the difference between a rectangle on a flat piece of paper and the warped, curved rectangle that Colorado really is on the surface of the Earth. P said she wanted to learn lots of things from the map and write them down. More ensued:
• P noticed the equator was well below the center of our map. We noticed there was more land, and more population centers, in the Northern Hemisphere, and that Antarctica was quite truncated, and chalked this up to the map being a political map, and there being no national boundaries and not many people in Antarctica. (We can talk another time about Eurocentrism and other political biases.) We noticed some areas, like the area north of the Arctic Circle and the Sahara desert, where there were very few cities, and those small; and we talked about why not many people would live there.
• Both kids noticed some interesting things about the national flags, many of which appear at the bottom of our map. Liberia's flag is a lot like the U.S. flag. We talked about why: Liberia was founded as a nation by freed U.S. slaves, who took a lot of the details of government, their flag design, and their capital's name from U.S. sources. And they governed even though they were a small minority vs. a large indigenous population -- also arguably a page from U.S. and other colonial history. We noticed the flags of Australia, New Zealand, and Tuvalu were very similar, each having a Union Jack in the upper left and a different pattern of stars in the remainder of the flag. We looked up the patterns and found that Australia's and New Zealand's were each a different version of the Southern Cross, while Tuvalu's was a map of its nine islands, with East on the top and North to the left. I wondered why, but things moved on too quickly to investigate this time.
• P asked me to tell her stories from my childhood. We got through moving when I was two weeks old (with reflections on the recent development of car seats and cat carriers), my first three memories (with links to experiences of tarantulas, spiders, bees, and wasps), and moving to the house where my parents still live and we've visited them, before things moved on to...
• T noticing the "adjustment screw" detail on his non-adjustable plastic wrench from his Erector set and asking what it was for. We got out P's toolkit, including a real adjustable wrench, to show him. They played together with P's set of real tools -- hand-cranked drill, little wooden workbench, screwdriver, etc. -- for a little while before crankiness scuttled that bit of cooperation. Nap and bath time.
• P asked more about Tuvalu while she was in the bath, so I looked things up and we talked more. Their main crop, pulaka, led to talking about what water table means and the drilling of wells. We learned a bit about atolls and how they form. We read about how Tuvalu is threatened by sea-level rise, since its highest point is only 15 feet above sea level. We learned that Tuvalans play a game like cricket, which led to a brief discussion about Britain's influence on its many colonies. P asked if the U.S. had been a British colony, and whether people played cricket here, so we talked about baseball as an offshoot of cricket and the relative unpopularity of cricket in the U.S. compared to baseball. We learned that Tuvalu has few roads, no railroads, 10 square miles of land over 9 islands, one primary school for each island and one boarding secondary school for the entire country of just over 10,000 people, along with an adult literacy rate of 99%, about the same as the U.S. We did the math for how many adults in Tuvalu can''t read, and P noted that she'd never (to her knowledge) met an adult who couldn't read.

This has gotten long enough, so I'll leave my internal insights of this week for another entry: in which UnschoolerMom learns to love housework and refereeing kids' fights? Hmm...

Interests in the Driver's Seat

What are my kids interested in? This week, I got to see some of their their interests that have little to do with school subjects coming to the fore. After borrowing my needle and thread to try making a cape for a doll, P asked for a needle and thread of her own. I asked if she'd like a bit more than that, and she said yes, so I "went shopping" in my sewing supplies. Ten minutes later she had several colors of thread (including a strong quilting thread for tougher projects), a sewing needle, a pincushion with pins, a few other bits and bobs, and a small toolbox to keep them in. Then P and I went through my rag bag, and she found several pieces of cloth she loved that were big enough for doll stuff but nearly useless otherwise except for scrap quilts (the sort of thing that brings me joy to give away!), and we tucked those into the large bottom compartment of her box. She's been making doll capes, doll dresses, and small bags for random stuff. From her first efforts, which had stitches I could stick a thumb through and loose thread ends coming out, to her later ones, which have smaller, more secure stitches, she's making a lot of progress, with very little instruction desired or given. 

T has completed his potty transition, and is now a self-motivated, full-time potty user. Knock wood, it's been at least a couple of weeks since the last accident. He chose a book at the library with shoelaces to practice tying and has been asking me to read it to him (and show him how to tie them) a lot. He's obsessed with buttons -- buttoning and unbuttoning them repeatedly when he could be eating, or playing, or going someplace he loves -- and is unhappy when he can't find a shirt with buttons to wear. And this week he climbed a tree on his own for the first time -- and, the next day, fell out of a tree for the first time. Fortunately he landed well and took no lasting damage. He was so proud to show me where he could climb!

One night, I heard P singing a variety of nursery rhymes and songs to a single tune, which had a trochaic meter with 4/3/4/3 feet per line. She had already found that "Mary Had a Little Lamb" worked fine, but that "Rock-a-Bye Baby" and "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" were awkward. I sang each of them to her (to its own tune) while counting stressed syllables on my fingers, and she immediately caught on to the difference between the 4/3/4/3 pattern of "Mary" and the 4/4/4/4 pattern of the other songs. We didn't use the words meter, foot, trochee, or dactyl, but P learned the basics of scanning poetic meter handily from something she was already trying on her own.

We've had a video-heavy week -- I'm experimenting with placing fewer limits on screen time and seeing where the kids' natural preferences take them -- but we've still had some good family walk and walk/bus expeditions, and I'm hoping for more biking soon, now that the nearby school playground (which has lots of level blacktop and gentle grassy slopes) is open after renovation. My activity during the videos has been knitting a hat from yarn I spun last month. Now that it's done, both kids want a similar one, maybe in different colors. That will have to wait until I catch up with the laundry folding, but it should provide another good opportunity for thinking about colors and elements of textile design.

A while back, P broke her bedside lamp. At the time she declined my offer of a replacement. This week I offered again and she accepted, and bam, we're back on the reading-into-the-night track. I'm thrilled that she's reading in volume again, but sometimes she'll read a whole book in a night and still be in bed at 11 the next morning. With T still taking an afternoon nap, that puts a real crimp in our ability to get out and do things. We'll be searching for a good balance. Tonight I asked P to set a timer for a reasonable hour for lights-out, to remind her not to read through the night, and I see that she has honored it. More reading means more trips to the library. P still searches for any Magic Tree House books she can find, but she's chosen a few books in other genres. We'll see if they get read before they're due.

Here's a sampling of recent videos and their subjects:

• The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That: different ways of getting clean for different animals; silkworms; camouflage; different animals' adaptations for living in trees
• The Way Things Work: Ballooning, belts and gears, inclined planes, flight
• National Geographic's Really Wild Animals: Polar Prowl was about animals' adaptations to prevent freezing to death (migration, insulation, hibernation, and staying in the water a lot); and how young are raised and learn survival behaviors. A bonus feature on cats highlighted similarities between domestic and big cats, as well as cats' adaptations and behaviors for hunting, and how young cats learn to hunt by playing. After all this, my kids' imaginative play has taken a turn toward feeding baby birds, including regurgitating food for their penguin babies.