How the World Works

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

How the World Works (Science)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How the World Works (History, Civics, Geography)

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

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

Other Things About How the World Works

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

Camping Rocks!

This week we had our first camping trip as a family! I was pretty stressed about the preparations, but things worked out well. While we were at the camp, on day two, I finally had one of those moments when I realized all the necessary work had been done and that I could relax. (As you might imagine, these don't often happen at home; there's always something I could or should be doing!)

This was a group camping trip, and the kids had been enjoying playing with other kids, but it still seemed like they were missing the comforts of home (iPads, etc.) more than they were enjoying the camping trip. So I talked with a new friend who had grown to love camping as a child about what she had loved. And I remembered the good things about my camping trips as a Girl Scout. Having and helping build campfires was a big one. Being entrusted with a knife and learning to use it was another.

There was a campfire-building in the works for that evening, so I talked to the guy building it about bringing in interested kids on the experience, and he was game. We showed the kids (including P) how we were splitting cordwood into kindling and tinder with a hatchet. They didn't want to do that, but they enjoyed helping building the tinder/kindling structure of the fire. When it came time to light it, we gave each kid a thin wooden splint we'd split for the purpose, and then we lit the ends of their splints (none of them wanted to tackle cardboard matches this time, and I couldn't blame them, between the difficulty and the wind), and they lit the tinder and got the fire going. They all enjoyed that, and some stuck around to continue feeding the fire as it grew.

Also that afternoon, UnschoolerDad supervised as P used her pocket knife to strip the bark from a long, dead stick and smooth it, discovering the color variations beneath the bark and generally noticing about how the wood grew and what that meant for how it could be used. Some of P's friends came by the campsite and watched and talked. They were surprised that P had her own knife. I wonder if some other parents will be getting requests for sharp objects soon?

The kids' highlights from the trip had to do with sleeping out in a tent, being outside a lot, playing with friends, and having more attention from family and friends who were not as busy as usual. We also went on a modest hike, built fairy houses, and saw different ways people were cooking their food outdoors. We are considering one more trip before the winter sets in -- we'll see!

So, here's more about what we did and learned during the week:

Math and Spatial Learning

• Both kids did a lot of Lego building this week. Some of the instructions were a little challenging for T, but he worked through his difficulties with occasional help.
• The roller coaster building has continued in Minecraft, with variations including more powered tracks and powered mine carts (which burn coal to move on their own). The kids have also been watching Minecraft videos for inspiration, including a massive cube of TNT (decorated with other materials to make it look like the largest-ever single block of TNT) being built and detonated; a giant Earth globe; giant jet airplanes and sports cars, and probably more I didn't see at the time.
• I've overheard T a few times, counting out loud while building things in Minecraft. I think he was going for specific dimensions on something he was building.
• In a game of numeric one-upmanship on the way home from camping, both kids were using "infinity" as a number ("Mine is infinity times five!") We talked some about how infinity is more of an idea than a number. When T asks me if there's a number bigger than infinity, I reply that infinity is the idea that no matter how big a number you think of, there is a bigger one. But in the car, I couldn't resist getting into the game, so I said, "Mine is infinity to the fifth power!" Then I had to explain what I meant by that: an introduction to exponents. Now I'm hearing them crop up in the kids' conversations.

Social Studies (History, Geography, Civics, Economics)

• I read an online primer on the current situation in Syria to UnschoolerDad. P listened and asked a few questions.
• Around Labor Day, we watched a video about the origins of Labor Day as a holiday and what labor unions have done to improve working conditions for everyone. This comes up occasionally as we see updates on our local grocery store's attempts to organize, and on Wal-Mart's union-busting and other unfair labor practices.
• T read One Hen again, about microlending and its role in building small businesses and self-sufficiency.
• P asked for help finding Hawaii on the world map. She also asked about how to pronounce the names of several South American nations, wanted to know exactly what was meant by "America" on the map (we talked about a few different ways it's used), and wanted to know why world maps aren't round (we talked about what would be hard to see if a world map were simply a photo of one side of a globe). 
• As we drove back from camping, T wanted to know if we were back in our state yet. I explained that we hadn't left it; we'd only been in two counties, I think. When we got home we used Google Maps to look at our trip on various scales, from a map of the whole country, to a map of the state, to a map showing our route at full screen, to zooming in on our campsite and finding where we pitched our tent (and then doing the same for our house). I let him be in charge of the zoom level, because I know it's disorienting to me when someone else is zooming about faster than I can understand what I'm looking at.
• Also see Reading below: Theodosia is keeping us learning.

Reading and Writing

• We finished Theodosia and the Serpents of Chaos. This included some bits of early-20th-century culture in both Egypt and England. We read about open-air markets, beggars calling for baksheesh (alms), and about how archaeologists from colonial powers like Great Britain were accustomed to finding artifacts in other countries and taking them back to their home countries for display. We also talked a little about how some countries, more recently, have begun trying to get back their historical treasures that have been appropriated in this way. 
• P and UnschoolerDad finished The Burning Bridge, the second book in the Ranger's Apprentice series. 
• T enjoyed the rest of a Magic School Bus book about electrical storms.
• On the camping trip, we started a Magic Tree House book about early explorers of the ocean on the HMS Challenger.
• P wrote a short story to put in a book in Minecraft. She asked for spelling help when she needed it. She seems to care more about standardizing her spelling than she used to.
• T and P both played with Scribblenauts, asking for spellings when they needed them. P is able to help T with some words. Both kids continue learning their way around a keyboard in this way, too.
• T asked me about several words from Minecraft and what they really mean. These included ghast, blaze, and creeper. I was surprised that ghast is actually an English word (a transitive verb), albeit not commonly used.
• We saw an old Schoolhouse Rock video about verbs. We tied it into a song I often sing to the kids at night: "Sing When the Spirit Says Sing." T likes to substitute action verbs (especially build) into this song. That gave us many more examples of verbs.

Science

• In the Magic School Bus book on electrical storms, T learned about how lightning forms, what thunder is, how to count the distance to a lightning strike, lightning safety, and lightning rods, as well as a bit about atomic structure and electrons. (P's familiar with these from reading the same book before and from other experiences.)
• A hummingbird hawk moth showed up in our front yard recently, enjoying some flowers. UnschoolerDad and I had never seen one, but it stuck around long enough for us and P to get a good look. We looked it up and found it was probably a white-lined sphinx moth, and that it was an example of convergent evolution with hummingbirds and some other groups of birds.
• Several science videos were interesting this week: the Moon Illusion (covering many theories about the moon illusion, but not my favorite, so I explained that one too), first-ever footage of a deep-sea squid, how a pin-tumbler lock works, how bodies adapt to microgravity (and how that makes life hard upon returning to Earth gravity), and envisioning the age of the earth (compared to a calendar year, or to the life of a child from birth to the first day of high school).
• While we were camping, the kids enjoyed finding different kinds of rocks and pounding some of them to powder, getting different colors of powder out of different rocks. They also learned why we shouldn't scrape or otherwise damage tree bark (the trees have a hard enough time with the elk scraping them). We speculated about why trees in thickets have more snapped-off branches, higher up their trunks, than trees standing alone or at the edge of the woods (trees may shed their lower branches when other trees are blocking sunlight reaching them, and focus their energy on the higher branches, which can get sunlight and produce food for the tree). We saw many kinds of mushrooms and talked about the need to know a lot more than we do about mushrooms before considering tasting any of them. We saw chipmunks harvesting, nibbling, and carrying off some of the mushrooms and not others, and wondered whether humans and chipmunks could eat the same kinds of mushrooms (and whether any harm would befall those chipmunks from experimentation, or whether they already knew their way around the local mushrooms). We saw and talked about how campfires start and burn, including the need for plenty of air (but not too strong a wind in the beginning) and smaller fuels to start with. We also covered campfire safety, including keeping fuels and ourselves clear of the fire and keeping a big bucket of water nearby. The kids had gone to bed by the time we were extinguishing the fire, but they've seen that on previous campfire occasions at church.
• On the way home from camping, T spotted some kind of factory by the side of the road. He remembered a video we'd watched about how charcoal briquets are made and said the factory looked like it could be a charcoal factory. I had to agree that looked like a possibility based on the materials and machines we saw -- the kid has a good eye!

Odds and Ends

• We enjoyed a bike ride one evening.
• One day when I was practicing guitar, playing a song but not singing it, I heard P humming along with the right tune and even some good harmonies.
• Both kids loved a video of Rowan Atkinson in a live performance with an invisible drum set. A linked video of Jerry Lewis using an invisible typewriter fell flat, even after an explanation of how old typewriters worked. Atkinson showed much more attention to detail and variety in his performance. I had to agree he was funnier than Lewis.

Midwinter, Mountains, Music, and Minecraft

Wow, more than two months gone by! I don't have many notes from this period, so this will be a fairly skeletal sampling of what I can remember. It's been a busy time and a slow time, on different days and weeks.

An astonishing video, with music by Tchaikovsky, of a composite European city built in Minecraft.

Reading

• P has been reading a lot of graphic novels, since getting a good introduction from a friend (who gave her some Amulet books) and our local children's librarian (who pointed her at Akiko). She devours them solo and sometimes reads them out loud to T. She's anxiously awaiting her next Amulet installment!
• After reading Little House on the Prairie out loud, I searched for a book that would give a more balanced or positive view of Native Americans around the same time. I found Sign of the Beaver, which everyone enjoyed. It was a good information source and conversation starter about Indian woodlore, social structures in Indian and settler life, betrayals of Indians with bad treaties, and more.
• Then we read Farmer Boy, which was a lot of fun. I enjoyed thinking about the quantities of food being produced on the farm for the humans and livestock living there, and how they would translate to a smaller farm such as our family might someday have. The kids were very engaged as well, and asked many related questions while that book was in progress. T was especially interested in whether the characters in the books were real people. (Most of the major characters are; others are composites.)
• P has been playing Minecraft a lot, and she's learned to do her own research on the Minecraft wiki when she doesn't know how to craft something she wants to make. She surprises me frequently with things she's learned there; even T (through watching her use what she's learned) knows a lot about Minecraft! She and I, separately and together, have discovered amazing videos of other people's Minecraft constructions, including the London Bridge, Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water house, and a HUGE composite European imperial capital (see video linked above), showcasing architectural styles from various European cities.
• T has been asking a lot about what the signs on storefronts say; he seems to be on an active information-gathering expedition, working toward cracking the code.
• T got a hand-me-down cash register with play money, and he reads the numbers to sort the bills.
• At a recent game night at a friend's house, I found ten-sided dice for 4-digit numbers: one die was numbered from 0 to 9, one from 00 to 90, one from 000 to 900, and one from 0000 to 9000. Both kids, but especially T, enjoyed arranging the dice (sometimes removing one or more) and having me say what number the dice represented.
• We've started reading Savvy, a Newbery Honor Book by Ingrid Law, who lives not far from us, out loud. It's a funny book, with tween-friendly jokes and vivid writing. It centers on the coming-of-age of a girl in a family where most of the family members have special powers, called savvies. These appear on their thirteenth birthdays, and that's the day it is a few chapters into the story. P wasn't satisfied with eight chapters read aloud in one evening, so she took the book to bed to read more on her own.
• On a quick trip to the library to pick up Savvy, which was recommended by an unschooling friend, T wanted to play with trains, but he asked me to find him some books about cars and trucks. It took me a while to find the right section for those, and on the way I found an armload of books about things the kids have been asking about lately: boogers, kite making, origami, volcanoes, airships, and old fairy tales (P recently picked up a book of medieval tales I bought at a library sale a year or so ago, and she's been asking for bedtime stories from it and reading some on her own. We've also been enjoying a really colorful book of Aesop's fables discovered on another recent library visit.)

A gem of a book about boogers, belly buttons, tornadoes, and an astonishing number of things
the kids have already been asking about! P has already spent an evening with it.

Doing

• P just started an aerial dance class at our newly local gymnastics gym, and it's going well.
• T is getting back into gymnastics after a fall hiatus. He didn't initially want to take classes at the gym near our new house, but after a parents' night out there, playing with the equipment and the instructors, he was full of enthusiasm, and he's enjoying it.
• P took a class late last year about the physics of music, through our local university's science discovery program. She made instruments, learned some musical notation, and had a lot of fun. This month she'll start a class on the science of toys through the same organization.
• The kids are playing together for long stretches, getting along better and better. I try to be nearby, listening and sometimes offering information or suggestions when things get tense. Both kids are using thoughtful language about how they are getting along. P commented recently that she doesn't feel like herself when she acts mean toward T. T speculates out loud sometimes about why P is still mean sometimes, and what he or others might be able to do to make that happen less. We spent some time talking about P's idea, considering in what senses it might be true, and what might help keep the peace.
• We've gone swimming at our new local rec center, which we can walk to.
• P and I attended a presentation sponsored by the local historical society. An archaeologist living in town had excavated the historic privy in her backyard, finding hundreds of artifacts, and a group of students in archaeology at a nearby university had analyzed the glass and ceramic artifacts. They spoke about what they found and how it related to the history of the area. Perhaps the most intruiging aspect of this was that people tended to throw things in their privies that they didn't want others to know about. The privy was in use throughout prohibition, and there were patent medicine bottles thrown in during occupancy by middle-class folks (furnishers and preachers), and liquor bottles from the mining families' occupancy. They explained that patent medicines usually derived any actual benefit from their high alcohol or opioid content. Sometimes this had unfortunate results, such as children taking a cough syrup that stopped their coughing but left them addicted to opium. This led to an interesting talk with P afterward about the history of prohibition and patent medicines, and the nature of addiction. We talked about physical addiction, peer pressure, and how a lot of people start smoking or using other addictive substances in their teenage years, when their friends' opinions often seem more important than anything else; and how once you get through those years to young adulthood, it starts getting easier to know what you want for your own life, independent of what your friends think. I told P I wasn't sure if her teen years would look like this, given that unschooling is encouraging a much more cooperative and relaxed relationship between us than many kids have with their parents. It will be interesting to find out.

Making

• T continues to build lots of Lego creations, both from instructions and from his imagination (he calls it "building with my mind," which always reminds me of Richard Feynman fixing radios by thinking). At Christmas we bought a Lego Mindstorms set for the family, and UnschoolerDad, T, and I enjoyed building one of the models together and testing the sensor probes (touch, light/color, distance via ultrasound, and perhaps others I'm forgetting) and motors attached to its computer. T is already thinking about what kinds of things he wants to program the robots to do -- sneeze when they catch a green marble, for example, or turn in circles when they catch a red marble.
• P is slowly learning more about preparing the foods she enjoys. Sometimes she makes food because she wants to, and sometimes because I am busy with something else and not getting to it as fast as she'd like. 
• P happily builds things with many methods: origami, cut paper, glued craft sticks, cardboard, drawing, painting, and combinations of these and other creative methods. She makes settings and props for playing with small toys mostly, but sometimes other things as well. When T expresses a desire for a toy or costume piece he doesn't have, P often jumps in and makes a reasonable (to an imaginative mind, at least) facsimile from materials she can find around the house.

Writing

• P insists that she wants to write her thank-you notes for Christmas presents herself, in her own handwriting, "So people will know they really came from me" and so people who care about her could feel good about her writing skills. Only one has gotten done so far; we'll see how that goes! Her spelling continues to improve.
• P wrote down some measurements for me, so that we could cut the right size shelves for her closet, and in the process learned the abbreviation for inches (") and how to write a mixed number with a fraction (22 3/4).
• P occasionally works on her own comic book, inspired by the superhero genre. Sometimes she shows it to me to see if I can understand what's going on, and that has led to her learning a bit more about the conventions of comic books, such as using lines to indicate motion.

Watching

The 2012 election results, had our electoral laws stood as in 1920, when women could vote,
but racial minorities still faced significant obstacles (e.g., poll taxes) to voting.

• I shared with P a web page that analyzed election results by demographics and gave maps showing what the results would have been if, say, only men, or only whites, or only people over 21 had voted (corresponding to various phases of U.S. law regarding who had the vote, and who faced significant barriers to voting). It was an interesting walk through the history of democracy in the United States.
• After we read Farmer Boy, T asked for more Little House on the Prairie videos, so we checked out the next 4 episodes from the library, and he's been watching them.
• Both kids have watched the three seasons of Avatar: The Last Airbender, and a few episodes of Avatar: The Legend of Korra. They enjoy playing games inspired by these, and talk a lot about the four elements (earth/water/air/fire) around which the world of these series is based. P has been curious about what the real elements are, so we've had several short conversations, talking a little about them. At the science museum in Oklahoma City, the table numbers for the cafe were elements, with cards showing all the stuff you'd find in a standard periodic table of the elements. We talked a little about what those numbers and symbols meant. Sometimes I pull out our Elements coffee-table book when a picture seems to be in order.
• The kids enjoy looking up YouTube videos to watch together; so far they are mostly on Minecraft and funny cats :)
• The whole family watched A Child's Garden of Poetry, which is a lovely HBO special we have on DVD about poetry, with beautiful animations and reading by children, poets, actors, and musicians. Kids in the video also talked rather eloquently, and at least seemingly unscripted, about understanding and enjoying poetry, as well as what it's like to write poetry. Both our kids were rapt.

 Listening

• We bought a new car recently that came with a Sirius XM subscription. We discovered the channel called Book Radio ("Where the pictures are inside your head!"). P often finds the novel excerpts riveting and asks about checking out the books. We haven't done that yet -- there's so much we want to read that's written for young people and more enjoyable for T -- but I think it will happen before long. T is often engaged by the stories as well, but mostly not to the same degree as P.

Talking

• T asked, out of the blue, how you stop when you're riding a zipline. He also wanted to know whether people ever went uphill on ziplines, and if so, how. I told him what I knew, which was very little, and suggested we ask my mother, since she went ziplining on a vacation in Costa Rica last summer. We did so later, and she had some better answers. But in the moment, T asked if it would be possible for us to throw something far enough that it would hit Costa Rica. I said I didn't think we could throw anything that far. I loved his thinking -- he doesn't know much about units of length measure on that scale, so he handily placed the conversation in terms he could understand. We talked about how long it would take to drive to Costa Rica, compared to our recent driving trip to Texas. T often asks about where we are; he's working on wrapping his head around the ideas of city/state/country/continent/planet and how they are related.
• Other conversations have ended up in other sections. :)

Visiting

• On our trip to Texas, we visited Capulin Mountain, a dormant volcano in New Mexico. Before we got there, we noted the lava rocks scattered around the countryside for miles around and contemplated the force of an eruption that could throw so much weight so far. We drove up to the crater rim and walked down inside the crater, talking about the rocks there, how they formed, how fertile the soil was because of the minerals in the lava rocks and what plants predominated there, how long ago it had erupted (about 60,000 years ago) and whether it was likely to erupt again (no, according to what we read there). We speculated about whether a wall-like structure of lava rocks at the bottom of the crater was natural or human-made; we'd noticed several good places to get out of the weather among the jumbled rocks along the trail and thought that wall might make pretty good shelter too. While P and UnschoolerDad walked part way around the rim trail to see the view of several surrounding states (!), T sat on a bench near the trailhead and took a position for meditation. He couldn't remember the word meditation to tell me what he was doing, but he described it well enough that I could guess and supply the word. (I've been noticing that he's picking up multisyllabic words on one hearing and pronouncing them very precisely these days, though his Rs and Ls are still a little hard to distinguish; and although he shortens a lot of consonant clusters in words he's used for a long time, he says them well in new words; his once-problematic speech is cleaning itself up in a hurry, and he really enjoys being able to talk to almost everyone he runs into and be understood.) He was so peaceful, soaking up the sun on that chilly day.
• On the way back from Texas, we visited the science museum in Oklahoma City. T got to drive a Segway; we stood on moving plates simulating different kinds of ground motion from earthquakes; P and I spent some time in a hall full of optical illusions; both kids played a long time with jets of air and plastic balls, finding many things they could do with them; and I'm sure there was much more I'm forgetting. It's a great museum that we've visited before, and I'm sure we'll go again at some point.
• Also on the Texas trip, we visited the Prairie Museum of Art and History in Colby, Kansas. We looked around the collections of wedding dresses, military uniforms, dolls, fine china, and more rather quickly, since we got there close to closing time. The real fun started when we went outside to look at the other buildings. We visited a dugout house (and got to see exactly how the latch described in Little House on the Prairie worked, since it was the same type), where there were settler-style clothes to try on and cleaning tools we were welcomed to use to clean the place up (the kids were happy to do their part). We visited a one-room schoolhouse, looked through the readers and spellers, and thought about where the kids would sit based on their age and sex. We visited a church where we were encouraged to ring the bell in the bell tower (harder than we thought it would be) and got a look at hymn books and Sunday clothing, as well as the style of the building and its furnishings. But the highlight for me was visiting the huge barn, where a small stage has been added to the hayloft to use for weddings. Since we were the only ones there, P and I sang "Bright Morning Star" in  voices in full voice in the hayloft, enjoying the acoustics of the huge space. It felt like the right song for the place, and P knows it, since it's been one of our lullabies for years.
• On the Texas trip, we visited my family and met my parents' new bloodhound, a dog rescued last year from starvation and neglect at the hands of a breeder. The kids got to see how amazing a bloodhound's sense of smell could be when in the service of a total obsession with food. The dog was gentle and friendly when no food was available, though, and the kids loved her. They also enjoyed my sister's dog, a huge Great Pyrenees, totally unflappable and calmly friendly. T is losing his fear of big dogs, though he's still very wary about strange, off-leash dogs of any size. The kids liked seeing all the people, too, and I think they interacted pretty well with them, with reasonable manners and grace, from great-grandmother all the way through young cousins.
• After the holidays, we visited the Da Vinci Machines exhibit in Denver. This consisted chiefly of machines built based on Leonardo's drawings, from materials that would have been available to him. Many of these were okay to touch and play with, though T was sorely disappointed that Leonardo's idea for a tank was not one of them. He really wanted to try out moving the four independently driven wheels in different directions to see what movements the tank might have been capable of. He loved the bicycle chain, though, as well as the cam hammer, the compound pulleys (he spent a lot of time with these, with and without me, trying out ideas about how they worked), and pretty much everything else he could touch. P enjoyed these too, and also spent a while watching the 40-minute video running on a loop. She particularly liked the water pump based on the spiral of Archimedes (if memory serves, Leonardo figured out that if you made it from pipe wrapped around a cylinder and put the cylinder at a 45-degree angle, it could move water uphill). She asked me why it worked, and it was fun figuring out enough to answer her question accurately. We bought a kit to build a working model of Da Vinci's aerial screw, a failed but inspiring attempt at a helicopter.

Thinking, asking questions, planning...

• P is torn about her room. Sometimes she says she likes it messy. We usually try to clean it up some (usually with my help) when someone is coming over to play. I've been trying not to put a lot of pressure on her about it, which is different from what I did before unschooling. Recently she said to me, "I don't often have the time and the will for this at the same time, but I really want my room to be neat, with a place for everything." I was privately very pleased that she could say that to me, and that instead of launching into possible solutions, I was able simply to ask whether there was anything I could do to support her in that goal. Thus we have measured for shelves in the closet, and I'm helping her with cleaning, organizing, and helping her think about what she's willing to give away, for short periods more frequently, rather than helping mainly with crisis cleaning.
• Recently, P saw a woman with dwarfism in a store where we were shopping. I think she was the first such person P has seen outside The Wizard of Oz (and I don't know whether we talked about it then, so P might have thought that was done with special effects). P looked very curious and made sure I saw the woman, too. I asked P not to point or stare, and as we moved on, I told her the basics about the most common form of dwarfism. P moved on to other things comfortably. Perhaps there will be more questions in time, or I can share the Wikipedia article with her, but for that moment, her curiosity was satisfied.
• T asked me one evening whether you would die if your arm got cut off. I said you might if no one helped you, because you could bleed too much to survive, but that if someone could keep you from bleeding too much, you might survive and have a stump left where your arm was. T wanted to see pictures, so we found a photo of a man who had lost limbs in a train accident, showing his healed stumps. T wanted to know if he could walk, and I said maybe not (he'd lost both legs above the knee as well as an arm), but maybe so if he could get good prosthetic limbs. There followed a long time of looking at pictures, reading descriptions, and then watching videos about various kinds of prostheses, including the C-leg and various prosthetic arms, hands, and fingers. We stopped a lot to talk about what wasn't being made explicit in the videos, such as how the people wearing the prosthetics controlled them. When T had had enough of prosthetics, he asked what else we could watch. He's been asking lots of questions about volcanoes, so we watched a video about the 1980 eruptions of Mount St. Helens, noting that several images from that video corresponded very closely to the volcano sequence in Fantasia 2000, in which a sleeping volcano awakes and erupts. (I've read that St. Helens was the model for the volcano in that sequence, set to Stravinsky's Firebird.) Then T saw links to videos about the space program, so we watched videos about Moon and Mars missions (including Spirit/Opportunity and Curiosity). It was a fruitful evening, and T asked lots of good questions, like, "Are the Mars rovers kind of like robot servants to help those people?" I asked which people he meant, and he said, "The people who want to know more about what it's like on Mars." I told him he was right on. We had already discussed how the rovers had to be able to do some things on their own, because it took so long for messages to travel between Earth and Mars, but that big decisions about what to do came as messages from the scientists on Earth.

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!)

Getting Closer to a Groove

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

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


Reading

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

Doing

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

Making

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

Writing

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

Watching

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

Listening

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

Talking

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

Visiting

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

Thinking, asking questions, planning...

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

Short-beaked echidna

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

Through the (Now Much Longer) Long Gap: Part II

It's been a very long time since I wrote. This blog might be getting less frequent in general. I'm finding that, as I really pay attention to what the kids are doing and learning, and as I do more with them, things flow in a way that's harder to write about because we go SO many places in such a short time sometimes. For my next blog entry I'll try a different format for a change. But here's the entry that would have come in late April, based on the notes I made then -- words like "today" and "yesterday," of course, have a very different meaning now!

There's been some developing body awareness: the kids' awareness of their own needs, and my awareness of  how to support them in meeting the needs. T has been moving toward giving up his naps, so early in these last few weeks I stopped trying to help him get down for them, except when he's really dead on his feet. A few times in that first week, he went to bed and took a nap on his own initiative, asking us to close his curtains so his room could be dark. After the first week, he napped less, but sometimes fell asleep on the couch just before or after dinner after a big day. UnschoolerDad and I still need a somewhat regular sleep schedule to keep up with work and the kids, so we still encourage a bedtime, trying to keep it pleasant and loving. Sometimes T really doesn't want to go to bed, and other times he goes down easily. P usually goes to bed without much protest, but I'm sure it helps that she can read in bed if she wants.

A recent outing to a Russian festival on the nearby college campus brought unexpected learning opportunities, in addition to the chance to hear Balkan music and try some Russian cookies. We rode the bus to the festival to avoid parking difficulties near campus, and P spent a long time reading the route map and learning how to use it. (P and T have also been playing a lot lately with a United States map that goes with their Tag reader, getting more familiar with where things are in our home country.) When the festival didn't hold the kids' attention (it wasn't geared as much to young people as we thought it might be), we wandered down to a nearby pond, where P noticed the way the pond drain was built and we talked about how that would keep the pond at a constant water level. We checked out the turtles resting on a log in the pond and thought about why they would choose that spot for warming sun, available moisture, and sufficient distance from likely predators. Someone was trying out his thrift-store radio-controlled boat on the pond, and he let each of the kids steer it for a little while, which they loved. We met a few other homeschoolers, broadening our local network a bit.

In the food department, T has a typically narrow diet for a four-year-old, but not too much so (lots of bread, tortillas, cheese, and peanut butter and jelly, with some fruits and vegetables and a few beans, other grains, etc.), though he's growing a bit more willing to taste new things; I hope our not forcing the issue will help him continue getting more adventurous and finding more things he enjoys. [Note from June: He has continued to be more willing to taste things.] P is enjoying more variety, sometimes choosing to make herself salads with custom ingredients (a favorite recipe follows) rather than eat the old lunch standbys. She's told me she wants to learn to prepare more of the foods she eats, and maybe go for a week making all her own food and some of T's. So far she's gone a day, but then wanted help, which is fine with me. She sometimes asks to help when I'm cooking, too.

     Rockin' Salad - P's invention
          1 apple, cut up in chunks
          1 green onion, chopped
          12 or so green olives
          1-2 ounces of cheese, preferably pepper jack, in chunks
          No dressing required. Side dish of sardines can be nice. 


P wrote the list of ingredients for her salad, and the beginning of a story she's writing and illustrating. I showed her how to use Word's spell checker when she's not sure how to spell something -- for every misspelled word we entered into it, she picked the correct alternative from the list of suggestions, so I think she's learning to identify correct spellings by sight for familiar words, even if she can't produce the correct spelling on the first try herself. I've heard that other unschoolers have learned to spell in a similar way. I'm trying to support P using the computer to find what she wants (log in to a game, or Netflix, or look up something on the internet if she's willing), so keyboarding is becoming motivated for her. I still do stuff for her if she asks me, but she's more and more willing to do it herself. I need to think about which of my online passwords I'm willing for her to have! Fortunately they're all different, so we can pick and choose. She's starting to learn to navigate what actions might cause problems (being charged money unintentionally, going to a web site that might put malware on our computer, etc.), but she still has a lot to learn. Mostly I stay close by when she's using the computer, so we can check out unfamiliar situations together. I'll have her read me dialog boxes rather than just looking and clicking through myself, so she learns what they say and how to respond, and when possible I try to explain why I choose the action I do.

In other writing fun, P used the phrase "big cat allergies" to mean severe allergies to cats. I giggled about the possible alternate meaning (allergies to lions, cheetahs, etc.), and she wanted to know what was funny, so I showed her how punctuation could make the difference between "big cat allergies" and "big-cat allergies."

P recently received a Lego Friends set, with hundreds of itty-bitty pieces to assemble into a cafe scene. She meticulously followed the instructions, which had no words but required close attention to detail over a long period, and successfully assembled the cafe. I was interested to see that she built a mirror image of what the instructions showed, so I asked her about it. She had noticed that several steps in, and thought hard about how to reverse each subsequent step.

One day P and I had a great conversation about economics. P started it by remarking that, since Luna bars seemed to be getting more popular, she thought their makers might raise the prices since the demand would be higher. (We had talked once before about low supply and high demand leading to higher prices.) I said they might do that, but because it would make some customers unhappy and prompt them to look for cheaper brands, perhaps they'd increase their profits in other ways, like running the machines that make the bars for extra shifts and hiring more workers. We talked and thought together about economies of scale -- even though the extra power and worker hours would cost more, Luna might not need more machines; or if they did, they might be able to fit them in existing factory space; and so on, allowing the product to get cheaper as production and sales increased. We also talked about how, if Luna needed to increase prices to cover their costs, they might bring out new flavors that would cost more, and later bring other prices up to match if the new flavors were popular enough; or possibly they'd make some product improvement they could tout on the packaging and increase the price at the same time. And we went backwards in time, thinking about how a person selling their first-ever snack bars, baked at home, at a farmer's market say, might have to charge a lot more per bar to start off (no wholesale deals on ingredients, no economies of scale in production)  -- but how some people might be willing to pay those prices for an interesting new product, or because they could meet the producer and find out a lot about the product. And then that person might ramp up production by leasing a commercial kitchen and hiring workers to help, if the demand was growing and a local store wanted to carry the bars. Some of these concepts have come up in other conversations since.

P thinks a lot about ways to make money. We watched a video together about Caine's Arcade -- it's really worth seeing and is linked below. P asked if I thought she could do something similar, and we talked about the advantages Caine had -- one of the biggest being the use of a storefront, since his dad's auto parts business had mostly gone online. (Of course Caine had only one customer until the flash mob -- we haven't gone there explicitly yet, but I think P understood.)

Not long after watching this, P built a supermarket for fairies out of paper and cardboard. It included shelves for the goods being sold, signs, and an elevator so the tiny fairies could get from one level to another.

P asks almost every day what something means -- something she's heard on the radio, or read in a story, or seen in a TV program. Today, as we ate dinner and she watched a baseball game being played silently on the TVs in the restaurant bar, she asked what the goal of a baseball game was. Yesterday she clarified the meanings of increase and decrease. Today we followed up with what "in decline" meant when said of a person or animal.

Both kids got cameras of their own this month, so UnschoolerDad and I can worry less about ours getting wet, dropped, lost, etc. The kids noticed odd blurs in some of their images and turned it into a ghost hunt! We also experimented with taking photos of moving objects, or scenes with large disparity in lighting, and trying to create some of those mysterious blurs in those ways.

A quick math/numbers roundup:

• T made his first paper-model cell phone -- the kids play with these a lot, but in the past P has made them all. T wanted to write the numbers on his phone, and P helped by writing sample numbers he could copy.
• P came and offered to show me how to divide a pizza into 3 equal parts, using a drawing. The pattern blocks were out, so I duplicated her picture using a yellow hexagon with 3 blue rhombuses arranged to cover it, so the same angles showed up in the middle. She watched, then said in an odd, sing-song way, "That's science." So I sang back, "Or math, or geometry, or life." She smiled.
• P was setting up an easter-egg hunt for both kids. She had 16 eggs, and unasked, she worked out that they could find 8 eggs apiece. Thinking about it a bit, she then exclamed, "I did that right!" and explained her reasoning: half 10 (5) plus half 6 (3) is eight.