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!

Floods, Egypt, and Good Questions

It's been an eventful couple of weeks here. The Front Range just got about a year's worth of rain in about four days. We were fortunately dry and warm in our house, but the roads were dangerous, so we holed up at home for the duration -- glad to have electricity, clean water, and enough food on hand -- and kept up with friends and acquaintances who were evacuating, digging out, and drying out.

I think this is in central Boulder. Here's the original, but be aware -- it will start a video automatically.

The flooding led to some interesting learning around here. T and I played an imaginary game in which he accidentally dropped a magical bucket of water that flooded the whole world. We played at being, and talked about, squid, sea snakes, some of the smallest sea creatures (plankton and coral), some of the fastest sea creatures (tuna), and how we'd be better off breathing with gills. T also asked where the ocean was deepest, and where in the world giant squid lived. We found the Mariana Trench and the Challenger Deep on our world map. We looked up giant squid and found out about where they've been seen (all over the world, pretty much) and how they swim. We also found the first video captured of a giant squid in its own habitat. The scientists in the video were hugely excited, and so was T!

When we were able to drive around again, we were at a Park Day, talking with friends displaced by the floods and seeking interim housing, when another thunderstorm rolled in. We quickly got to the car and started home. On the way home, as we had on the way, we watched for areas that were still flooded or showed signs of flooding (P spotted so much debris caught on one barbed-wire fence that it looked as if it were made of hay bales!), and we talked a little hydrology -- what runoff is, and how it starts to happen faster when the ground is already saturated from previous rains, which was why we were driving home instead of waiting the storm out at the park. We also talked about what to do in a flash flood situation -- getting to higher ground as quickly as possible, which for some people in the canyons meant grabbing only their shoes and each other and climbing a hill in their pajamas before their houses washed away.

We've been reading a lot from the Theodosia series of books about Egyptologists and Egyptian magic in Edwardian London. In those books and online, we read some details about how the ancient Egyptians made mummies of their dead. We talked about the concept of desecration, as we read a part of the story in which a mummy was unwrapped for the entertainment of guests at a party. The story compared this to digging up and undressing one's deceased grandfather. Perhaps the richest thing about the Theodosia books has been their unstinting vocabulary. In the past two weeks, P has learned an enormous number of words from context and from my explaining them as we read. Here's a small sampling, from the times when my notebook was nearby to jot down the juicy words and phrases (while most of these are from Theodosia, a few are from the Ranger's Apprentice series, which P is reading with UnschoolerDad):

* fete * champagne * desecration * lorgnette * ensorcelled * wreak/reek * codger * scrutiny * wrath * stroke * apoplexy * frippery * poltroon * stevedore * treason * sherry * sarcophagus * lavatory * comportment * contravention * impertinent * loathe * glower * discern * simper * disabuse * attributed * grimoire * understatement * mortification * dudgeon * rue the day * tumult * charlatan * wizened * calling card * score (20) * macabre * lumbered * gin * listed * ajar * nonplussed * supercilious * demur * dressed above his station * spats *

I had to look up a few of these myself! Fortunately we're reading library e-books on a Kindle, so definitions for most of them are as easy to find as pushing a few buttons, and the flow of the story is hardly interrupted.

Here's a sampling of what else we've been up to, by general subject areas:

Math, Spatial Learning, and Logic (and a little Reading)

• Both kids have been playing a lot with Minecraft. UnschoolerDad (UD) had some time during the floods to set up a server where they could play together, and he included the ComputerCraft mod, so they can also program "turtles" (like almost everything else in Minecraft, they're cubical) to dig, farm, tunnel, or do other tasks. So far they've mostly seen what UD could make the turtles do. The kids themselves have been continuing to experiment with roller coasters made from mine carts and mine-cart tracks, including ordinary tracks, powered tracks (which can accelerate or brake the carts depending on whether they're on or off), and detector tracks (which are nice for setting off huge piles of TNT blocks and creating new valleys in which to build coasters!). T in particular has been experimenting in very detailed ways. I watched him build a stretch of track between two stops (blocks placed across the track) that used a dip in the tracks to accelerate carts toward and away from one of the stopping blocks. When he had a train of mine carts behaving one way, he'd replace one section of track at a time with a different type of track and see how it affected their behavior. This investigation is completely self-driven. When I watch him I'm reminded of some research I recently read about regarding toys and how kids use them. Apparently when researchers instruct kids in the proper way to use a toy, the kids play with it less and rate it as less enjoyable than when the approach is more discovery-based and open-ended. Minecraft is an incredibly open-ended set of tools and toys, and T is enjoying it and using it a lot! 
• On the reading side of things, T found out about using slash commands to change his game mode mid-game (from survival to creative and back again), and he's learning to recognize and type the appropriate commands. I tell him the letters to type when he asks, describing their position on the  keyboard if he doesn't already know where to find them -- so he's getting some right-left practice here, along with letter recognition and learning some written words. He's asking me a lot to read him the names of items in his inventory so he can find the specific items (often potions, which mostly look alike) he wants to use, and he seems gradually to be recognizing some of the words himself. 
• T has been asking a lot of questions about adding small numbers, and also about doubling numbers again and again. I think many of these are motivated by watching the numbers of items change as he crafts items in Minecraft or organizes his inventory. P answers some of his questions, and seems to enjoy doing so.
• T has also been enjoying making his character in Minecraft invisible (so only his armor shows) and then watching himself in third person while he builds things. This new point of view seemed a little challenging at first, but he's taken to it quickly and now gets around almost as easily with the third-person, varying-angle point of view as he does in first-person view.
• P is building a lot in Minecraft, too. Recently she designed a cruise ship (grounded). It's very large and includes a secret door to a secret-agent office. She used sticky pistons to open the door.
• Once or twice recently, P asked me for some practice at adding 2-digit numbers in her head. She did well, including with carrying (e.g., 68+17).
• P was looking over my shoulder when I saw a friend's Facebook post of a 5-pointed star drawn using an equation in polar coordinates. She asked about it. I started explaining Cartesian and polar coordinate systems. She moved on quickly to other things, so she doesn't really get it yet, but we sowed a seed, I think.
• Both kids played Robo Rally, a board game, with UnschoolerDad. I have not played this game personally, but he says it involves skills in common with programming (and since he makes his living programming and was largely self-taught, he should know). T asked to play it again a few days later.

Science

• T has been asking for Magic School Bus chapter books pretty regularly for bedtime reading. He likes to interrupt with his own ideas and questions about the story and the real-life things it tells about. His recent reading has included books about food chains and food webs, and about dinosaurs and fossils.
• With all the recent thunderstorms, we've had some good conversations about lightning. P and I talked at length about lightning rods (how they're constructed and why they work), and about why being inside a house or car is pretty safe in a lightning storm, as long as you're not in contact with the conductive elements of either. I talked about how both houses (because of their plumbing and wiring) and cars (because of their metal frames and body parts) act like metal cages, and how people have used metal cages (I couldn't think of the term Faraday cage at the time) to isolate people or objects from electrical hazards.
• The kids and I watched a video about skeletal preservations (for museums and such). This included using dermestid beetles to clean all the flesh off the bones. This came up in a book I was reading, in a conversation with a taxidermist about how flesh-removal has progressed from boiling to beetles, so I told the kids about that too. I know all this made an impression on T, because he asked me to remind him of the name of the group of beetles, days later.

• Another video showed us a blue button jelly which, though it acts a lot like a jellyfish, is actually a community of small animals serving specialized purposes. We compared this to coral colonies. And we enjoyed a video about basking sharks, the second-largest fish. This one blew me away -- their mouths are so big, you could almost fit a piano inside!

• Another video was about the nature of pain: nociceptors, plus a lot of variables, including subjective ones like mood and previous experience.
• We also watched a video about optical illusions, specifically those that make things of the same color appear to have very different hues or values.
• A SciShow video told us about Evolutionary Life History Theory, which says that we have limited energy to spend on reproduction, and each species or individual must strike a balance between spending that energy on courtship and mating, and spending it on caring for young. Apparently a recent study has showed an inverse correlation in male humans between the size of a man's testes and the energy he spends caring for his children. SciShow's often on the colorful side with the terms used, so be warned if you're watching this with kids around:

• Another SciShow video described three inventions or discoveries growing from work done on the International Space Station. One of these had to do with microbeads, which related back to my exploration with P of how color-changing Polly Pocket hair works!
• And, of course, see above for science related to flooding.

History, Civics, Geography

• We read a right about the Civil Rights movement in the United States, emphasizing cooperation between African-Americans and Jews. We talked about some of the things that were being protested, such as poll taxes and literacy tests, and about how new Voter ID laws can have a similar effect on the ability of people of color and poor people to vote.
• P perked up when Syria was mentioned in our Theodosia reading (in an ancient context, there) and immediately identified it as a place with current conflict. We talked a little about why everyone is talking about Syria -- the regime's apparent use of chemical weapons, especially against civilians, and why chemical and biological weapons are taboo.
• P and I had a brief conversation about the custom of wearing white at weddings. I mentioned that traditionally, wearing white was a symbol of purity or virginity for the bride. We went on to define virgin, and to talk a little about why virginity has been valued more for women than for men (because without modern paternity testing, it's much harder to determine who the father of a child is than who its mother is, because her having only one sex partner makes this simple, and because this becomes important if a man is expected to care and/or provide for his children but not for the children of other men). 
• And of course Theodosia gives us nice tidbits of English and Egyptian history and customs, sometimes explicity, and sometimes more implicitly, in the ways that characters treat each other.

Reading, Language

Lots of reading has been described above. Here's what's left over:

• T ended up with a copy of Diary of a Spider as a prize from the library summer reading program. We enjoyed reading it, and his appreciation of it was enhanced by our recent reading of a Magic School Bus book about insects and spiders. He enjoyed the pictures -- there's something funny or interesting to notice in them on every page, independent of the text, so the book is very engaging.
• One day T asked how to say "two" in Spanish, and P answered him correctly. That evening I read him a library book called Gracias, Thanks in both Spanish and English. He asked me to point at the words I was reading so he could see the Spanish and English text. He liked it more than he has liked bilingual books in the past. He also picked up on the theme of being thankful for everyday things small and large, and we talked about people and things we appreciate.

Other Things

• T continues using the mini-trampoline a lot, especially on days when are stuck inside or otherwise not exercising in other ways. 
• We've had a couple of big pillow fights between me and the kids: we have a bag of small, light pillows that are great for throwing, and this gets us running around to pick them up as well. Sometimes I start a pillow fight when the kids are crabbing at each other, because I can usually get them to team up against me, and this shifts their interaction with each other positively.
• P is taking a new (to her) recreational gymnastics class. It was touch-and-go at first in her new class, which takes place at a much noisier time in the gym than her previous aerial dance class. She's sensitive to very noisy environments and is more easily upset in them, and the first and second classes were emotionally very stormy for her. But after crying with me through most of the second class time, she had a good conversation with me about what was going on for her. I hadn't been aware that noise was such a big part of the problem. We talked about what would help, and now we try to make sure she's well rested and recently fed when she goes to gymnastics, and that she has some quiet time in the hour or two before the class, so she isn't already fed up with noise before she gets there. So far, so good -- after her most recent class she was very excited to have made a leap forward with her cartwheel skills. She's also looking much more confident on the beam than I've seen her in the past.

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

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

Reading

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

Doing

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

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

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

Making

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

Writing

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

Watching

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

Listening

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

Talking

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

Visiting

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

Thinking, Asking Questions, Planning...

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

All of It Has Always Been Big Stuff

Another monthly sampler of what we've been up to! For the past week, I've been trying to get a new housecleaning regimen in place, so I haven't been taking notes. Here is what made it through that process in my memory or previous notes:

Reading

• On a recent library trip, we picked up a book about Leonardo da Vinci. It's a picture book, but with lots of words on every page, so it took a good half hour or more to read aloud. It's written from the point of view of an apprentice in Leonardo's studio in Naples. We learned how apprenticeship worked, got a glimpse of the artist-patron relationship, saw things that connected to our visit to the Da Vinci Machines exhibit a couple of months ago, learned about the city-states that once comprised present-day Italy, and enjoyed a good story.

• We've been reading Little Women out loud as a bedtime book, interspersed with more from the Little House books. P is enjoying Little Women a lot. It connects with fantasy play she's been doing for years about living in long-ago times, being poor, having sisters, and more.
• We just read the part in On the Banks of Plum Creek in which the grasshoppers come and eat every green thing for a hundred miles around. Coincidentally, we also have a book out from the library about the Passover story, which mentions the plague of locusts among the others. UnschoolerDad was around while I was reading the grasshopper chapters, and we took a break to hear about grasshoppers and locusts (different phases of the same thing). We're hoping to talk to my mom, next time we have a chance, about her experiences with locusts in the Middle East when she was a child.
• P has been reading more in the American Girl books about Molly, set during World War II. She's finished two books and launched into the third in the series.
• Anatomy books continue capturing both kids' interest. T asks a lot about the diagrams in one that show the effects of asthma. Fetal development and birth pictures are a perennial favorite. Sometimes we look at photos of P and T shortly after birth and talk about why they looked the way they did, compared to the photos in the books. One of them was frank breech and stayed folded in two for many days after arriving by C-section, whereas I was able to convince the other to go head-down and arrive in the more traditional way, so they looked pretty different as newborns!
• We recently started subscribing to National Geographic and National Geographic Kids. P enjoys the world records page in the latter, and it provided a chance to learn how to parse some large numbers (5 and 6 digits) as she told me about some of the records that caught her eye.
• We've been reading a Sherlock Holmes book written for young readers. We're learning about accents as I try to get some of them right (I watched a few voice-coaching videos to get a start, and my Cockney accent as I read is beginning to sound like something other than a U.S.er imitating an Aussie), and bits about Victorian England via the setting and circumstances of the story (it includes a scrivener's apprentice and several orphaned street children as major characters, the "Baker Street Irregulars" who help Holmes in gathering information and sometimes reach valuable deductions of their own). I like it when the kids get exposed to different accents (via videos mostly, though I play with them sometimes) and learn to understand them. I've run into people who have a really hard time with that, I would imagine from lack of exposure to varying accents. I also think accents become an interesting part of the study of language, when you look at the features of Languages A and B that will cause native A speakers to have a certain accent when speaking B.

Doing

• The day after P and I built a snow fort, T wanted to try his hand. The snow had gotten wetter and stickier, and together we built quite a wall. I piled snow on with a small shovel, and T patted it into place to make it stronger. It melted just in time for the next snowstorm. Both kids and I had conversations about why the snow was sticking better or worse, in terms of the ambient temperature and how it, as well as our actions, affected melting and refreezing.
• P and T have greatly increased their attention span for playing with each other. Sometimes they can play peacefully for hours on end. They've both noticed their relationship is going better than it used to, and it spills over into treating each other better in other ways, though they still have their moments, especially when hungry or tired. P is also noticing my work for the house and family and my feelings more than she used to, so she's more liable to volunteer to help by making some food, getting T dressed, or in other ways. 
• P has done work recently to earn several badges in her Girl Scout troop. Most recently, she learned to make change (for cookie purchases); role-played customer interactions (and had a number of real ones); and researched the needs of cats and fish for food, human contact, and healthy living spaces, including making a budget for their care. We've been considering starting a fish tank, so that was useful information to find generally. (We found that starting up with fish would cost about $200-250 for the 20-gallon tank recommended for beginners, and monthly costs would be about $20-25 per month. That's a lot, but it's cheaper than $40 or more per month for one healthy cat -- or much more for our two ailing ones!)

Making

• We bought a kit for making recycled paper at our local botanic garden's shop. We're looking forward to some playful and/or beautiful crafting with that.
• Yarn is getting used in fun ways here. The kids tie it to stuffed animals or baskets and lower them over the balcony into the living room, transporting things back and forth and playing games and tricks thus. They make harnesses so their tiny dolls and stuffies can ride larger stuffies.
• We bought a bunch of same-sized plastic boxes to organize small toys (Polly Pockets, cars, Lego, etc.) in the kids' rooms. Several of them have been pressed into service as habitats for small dolls and stuffies, elaborately furnished to scale with available objects from dollhouse furniture to Lego-built furniture and fabric scraps, as well as bits and pieces of nature from outside. These are transient playthings, but the care and thought that goes into them is apparent.

Writing

• P has been making notes about things she wants to remember (like the name of a movie we saw most of, so she can finish it another time) in a notebook she carries with her. She's also working on her cursive writing; she likes the aesthetic. I honestly think I don't see most of her writing when it happens. Whenever I help her clean up her room, there are papers with writing that we recycle or save -- house plans with labeled rooms, board games with instructions, and so on. Her writing is resourceful and useful. I can deal with that!

Watching

• P has started enjoying Cosmic Journeys, an astronomy show we discovered accidentally on YouTube. We watched a show about plasma (including auroras and plasma cannons) and one about the origins of black holes. I think we got there from a question about what a supernova is (UnschoolerDad remembered learning different things about this, and it turns out we were both right, as there are two different kinds of supernovas), which came from discussion about what the Star of Bethlehem could have been.
• On The Kid Should See This, we came across a video of a musician wiring up fruits and veggies to his synthesizer and then using that setup to loop the instrumental parts of "Teardrop," a song by Massive Attack. After watching that with P and T, I played them the official video for the song so they could hear the original instrumentals. The video is made to look like the song is being sung by a fetus in utero. Armed with our knowledge of fetal development from all the anatomy books, we were able to talk about things about the video that were realistic (fetus opening and closing mouth, moving about, sucking on fingers, etc.) versus those that were preposterous (a fetus with features and body proportions almost like a newborn having lots of room to move inside the uterus, having an adult-sounding voice, etc.). We also talked about what might be going on at the end of the video, when the lighting gets bright and erratic and the fetus looks startled. Here are those two videos:

• We watched the first 10 minutes or so of Microcosmos, the movie that gets super-close-up on insects and other wonderful tiny things. We watched a ladybug climb up a plant stem and start munching aphids; farther along the stem it encountered ants protecting groups of aphids, and the ants successfully fought off the ladybug. Afterward the ants milked the aphids and drank the honeydew they made. I did a mock voice over for the ant/ladybug fight: "Hey, you! Get away from my cows! That's right! And stay out!" P commented gleefully that to the ants, the ladybugs were like wolves eating their livestock. I love seeing connections like that getting made. She said the ants and the aphids were in a symbiotic relationship. We also talked about how, since the aphids can hurt the plants they feed on, ladybugs are considered beneficial insects by people growing those plants.
• We watched a series of videos from a company that makes processing machinery for obtaining juice and essential oils from citrus fruits (Fratelli Indelicato, if you'd like to look for them). No one video had enough images or explanation to get the whole process clear, but by watching several, we were able to piece it together. In the process, we talked about the qualities of different parts of a citrus fruit (zest, pith, juicy insides), what kinds of parameters the machine designers must have had to experiment with to get it right (time on the rasp, spacing of rollers and blades, etc.), separation of oil and water through gravity and through centrifuging, and more. Then we found a video of a set of machines for harvesting and processing mushrooms. Wow! That one was much more fully explained. Here it is:

Listening

• I was listening to T and P playing one day, and thinking about what they might be learning with their many sessions of free play. (They call them that: sometimes if I ask them to go somewhere, they'll say something like, "but we haven't had our morning play session yet!") They do spend some of their play time acting out and thinking through ideas related to things they've learned -- natural disasters they've been asking about, historical scenarios, and so on. But I think they're also learning a lot about talking and listening. Especially now, as T gets a little older and sticks up for himself more in the face of P's attempts to control the play situation, they're both needing to listen to each other more, so they can find the middle ground where each gets at least some of what s/he wants out of the game, so that both are willing to keep playing. They're also exploring a little bit of rougher play, and finding their comfort zones for play fighting and other roughhousing. There was a time when I would have been firmly against any kind of play fighting, but now I think they can both enjoy it and learn from it if they're allowed to try it out with adults nearby, ready to intervene if one of them is pushing too far. If nothing else, they're learning to communicate quickly and clearly about what they do and do not want in a play fighting situation. For example, they've made their own rule that no one should get hit in the face or head, even a little.

Talking

• T is getting interested in road signs. He tells me things like, "I saw a speed limit sign with two fives." He's learning to read two-digit numbers by keeping my informed of the speed limit when we're driving.  One day we saw a 70 mph speed limit, and he was stumped, since most of the speed limits end in 5. P said, "It's seven-oh. Do you know what that is?" T said he didn't. I said, "Well, if it were seven-five, it would be seventy-five, but since it's seven-zero, it's just seventy." T turned to P and said, "It's not an oh, it's a zero!" as if that explained everything. P claimed they were the same, so in the ensuing discussion, she learned something, too. P sometimes tries to actively teach T about numbers or other things. I've tried to be clear with her that he'll learn when he's ready, and that we can help him more by offering bits of interesting or useful information and by answering his questions than we can by drilling him on a skill when he's not asking for that kind of practice.
• We had a family meeting, just me and the kids. On our agenda were chores, concerns, activities, and gratitudes. We brainstormed a list of jobs that someone does fairly regularly around the house, listed the jobs the kids already do, and then they had a chance to say which others they might like to take on as a regular job, or occasionally for money. I don't think the discussion changed things much from the status quo, as far as what jobs I expect them to do; but perhaps having seen the whole list will change their perspective a bit and encourage more willingness to help. I don't plan to push much. I'd rather have their willingness to help spring from within, as empathy for me and UnschoolerDad or a desire to do something positive in the family. We'll see how it goes. Under Concerns, each person said something about how things were going (interpersonally, as it turned out) that they thought could use some change. We talked about possible solutions to each concern. Again, no definite solutions, but perhaps some things that will help, including more shared vocabulary for talking about certain issues. The kids had pretty much run out of gas by the time we got to Activities (what we'd like to do soon) and Gratitudes, but we did agree on one place to go soon (a museum, new to us, with a cool new exhibit on), and I did express my appreciation to P for suggesting we have a tea party to talk things over. Because of her suggestion, we had tea, cookies, and trail mix along with lunch for our meeting.

Visiting

• We visited the new temporary exhibition on Mammoths and Mastodons at our local science and nature museum. We learned how tusks form in conical layers. We saw the sizes of various types of large and pygmy mammoths, and we watched a great video (repeatedly) about how isolation on islands tends to cause species to decrease in size. Another video and model showed Lyuba, a month-old baby mammoth found preserved in permafrost in Siberia. We saw a man working on cleaning and preserving a mammoth or mastodon specimen found here in Colorado. Then we enjoyed the permanent gems-and-minerals exhibit, which the kids haven't wanted to visit before. They enjoyed hands-on displays about density and hardness, and they marveled at the beautiful crystals. It was a good day.
• We went to our local Botanic Gardens for a homeschool day with a "plant detectives" theme. We looked at how plants are used in fabric, construction, school/office supplies, foods, and more. The kids planted four varieties of lettuce seeds to try growing. They dug in a compost pile that had been seeded two weeks before with various kinds of disposable products (chip wrappers, paper cups and plates, compostable and non-compostable plastics, etc.) and got a look at what was starting to break down and what was still like new. They looked at paper products made with hardwoods vs. softwoods, and tried pounding nails into each. They played at length in the three-acre children's garden, digging in the dirt, running, climbing, playing in makeshift shelters, meeting new friends and playing with old ones. We ran into several homeschoolers we know from other activities. It was good to feel connected.

Thinking, Asking Questions, Planning...

• P doesn't like to take baths. I do insist on her bathing at certain intervals so that she looks and smells like a healthy, reasonably cared-for kid. She was asking lots of questions about this the other day, wanting to find more pleasant ways to get the job done than a tub bath or a shower. We talked about sponge baths. She also wanted to know why her hair gets to looking or smelling dirty when it does. We talked about oil-producing glands on the skin and scalp, why they're there, and the effect that shampoo and soap have on them -- they strip the natural oils away, so the skin produces more oil than if you hadn't shampooed. I told her that some people wash their hair with baking soda instead of shampoo, because it can do a good job of cleaning without stripping oils, so over time the scalp produces less oil. She immediately wanted to try it. We did, and so far the results look and smell good. For that bath, she also chose to sponge-bathe and then rinse off with the hand-held nozzle in the bathtub (I washed her hair with baking soda first, as she hung her head into the tub), and she liked it, at least for a change. I am encouraged that she keeps asking questions and pushing the boundaries when she thinks there's room for a change that would make things better for her, and that we usually have the time for me to talk things through with her, rather than pushing to do it the usual way. She's assertive enough, and I'm relaxed enough, that we can find better ways to make things work. And as a bonus, she's probably found the least water-intensive method for getting clean, which appeals to her developing environmental sensibilities.
• On several mornings recently, I've been downstairs, P has still been asleep, and T has come down and started talking to me. A lot. If I listen actively and participate appropriately, he'll carry on for a while, and then eventually get interested in something and do that instead of talking. I see so much more of his thought process when I do this than when I stay engaged in whatever I was doing (cleaning, cooking, etc.) and half-listen. It seems obvious, but it's good for me to notice: I can understand a lot more about where he is, his interests and his cognitive abilities, when I really tune in. He sometimes does something similar at night, after lights are out, if there's an adult in the room to listen. He'll talk and talk and talk, sometimes asking questions, and then suddenly he'll be asleep. I've put a quote up on my wall that helps me remember what to do about this phenomenon:

Listen earnestly to anything your children want to tell you, no matter what. If you don't listen eagerly to the little stuff when they are little, they won't tell you the big stuff when they are big, because to them all of it has always been big stuff.
~Catherine M. Wallace~

Snow Forts, Board Games, Handwashing in Space...

Time for another sampling of what we get up to in a month of unschooling!

Reading

• One day we were having a particularly grumpy morning, and once I'd fed everyone and it was still going badly, I got myself and the kids all into the big bed with a stack of library books. We read about the Hindenburg, the fall of Troy, The Three Golden Oranges, how to make kites, and a bit about airships in general. P read a bit more of Savvy when she wasn't fully engrossed in the other stories, but that was a minority of the time. She's also been reading Savvy in bed some nights.

• One night I was trying to get the kids to bed early because both had colds. We did toothbrushing and such right after dinner so we wouldn't leave it too late. When it was time to hop in bed, I said, "T, I have a book about volcanoes here!" (from the library). He replied eagerly, "I want to read it!" So all three of us read the book together, with many, many pauses for questions and for puzzling out the diagram of the Earth's tectonic plates and what their motions were. We talked about oceanic spreading centers (the mid-Atlantic ridge and the East Pacific rise) and how new seafloor forms there, and the abyssal hill shapes that form as the plates spread apart. We talked about earthquakes, volcanoes, and mountain building as activities that all are common along plate boundaries.
• P and I read part of a graphic novelette (long for a picture book, but short for a graphic novel) about events in the Netherlands around World War II. I think it was going to intersect with the story of Anne Frank, but we didn't make it through before it was due back at the library. 
• I'm reading On the Banks of Plum Creek out loud to both kids. The Little House books are evergreen here!
• After a couple of failures, I finally found an anatomy book aimed well for us. It includes the anatomy of various body systems in quite a nice level of detail, and it has sections on how body systems work and on common ailments. It's close to what I was looking for, a sort of owner's manual for the human body. It's missing a troubleshooting section, but the Internet's probably a more complete and up-to-date source for that than we'd find in a book, between WebMD, the Mayo Clinic, and many other sites of varying reliability. One day I was looking at a disarticulated view of the skull, and P asked me about it. We talked about skull sutures, and how many of them form well after birth, and how this relates to fontanelles, the safe handling of babies, and how strange their heads can look immediately after a vaginal birth. We also looked at the bones of the middle ear and how they connect to each other, the inner ear, and the eardrum.
• At a 5-for-a-dollar children's book sale at a nearby library, we bought 51 books. The kids weren't into looking through the many tables, so mostly they sat and read together (P reading to T, or both looking/reading silently) while I picked out things they might like. For that price, you can do a lot of throwing everything to the wall and seeing what sticks! One great find was a 1962 volume from a Collier's junior collection. My parents had this collection as a companion set to the 1966 encyclopedia I grew up with. I have fond memories of the whole set. The volume we found, Gifts From the Past, contains long and short excerpts from classic novels -- Twain, Austen, Swift, Dickens, Kipling, Alcott, and more. They're mostly at a level (because of vocabulary and complex sentence structure, or archaic subject matter) that works much better read out loud, with chances to ask questions and discuss, than P reading to herself. I was surprised at how much the kids enjoyed the excerpts I've read to them so far (from Little Women, Tom Sawyer, and The Swiss Family Robinson). We decided to read Little Women out loud in its entirety, since we have a nice version with illustrations and P found it particularly entertaining. P noticed that one of the illustrations of the Marsh family, all gathered around Marmee in an upholstered chair, was strikingly similar to an illustration in Meet Molly, an American Girl book we found at the sale (set during WWII) that P has been reading on her own. We compared the two and wondered whether one might be a model for the other, or both based on some other illustration we haven't seen.

The set I had as a child. Gifts From the Past is #10.

• Other books from the book sale that have seen some use already: a book on the musculoskeletal system; one on making and performing stage magic tricks; a long picture book entirely in iambic heptameter; several picture story books, including one detailing how to make a hat from wheat straw and an exquisitely illustrated version of The Emperor's New Clothes; a book of riddles (in the style of those in The Hobbit, rather than the usual childhood Q&A puns); and a Barbie book with cleverly-done sliding pieces that change the pictures.
• T is interested in reading. He's noticing and paying attention more to how words on the page match up with what we read aloud, and when UnschoolerDad reads to him, T likes to read some of the words himself. It's fascinating to watch the interest unfold without direct instruction. We show T what words say sometimes, especially when he asks. Sometimes he wants to write something and has us write an example he can copy. Recently I was making signs for a cookie-selling booth, and he wanted me to pencil one for him to color in, too, so I did. When he's sitting next to me and playing on an iPad, he'll often ask which button does what he needs, and if I tell him what the right button says and how to spell it, he likes finding the right button by looking at the words on the various buttons. He plays a game called Kinectimals sometimes, and there's a screen in this game that tells you the status of the virtual animal you're playing with (Dirty, Lonely, Happy, Playful, etc.). Sometimes T holds up this screen and asks, "Is Sandy dirty?" He's usually right when he guesses.

Doing

• P continues to enjoy playing Minecraft and researching how to do interesting things in the game. She watches videos on the Minecraft wiki and enjoys telling me about them. They show things like how to build an elevator using a quirk in the interface for using a boat; or another elevator design using sticky pistons to push stairs together. P has done most of her Minecraft play so far in Creative Mode, in which all basic resources are provided, so you can build at top speed; but lately she's been playing in survival mode (where you have to find your own resources for building and crafting things), and showing a lot of pride in the things she manages to build there. She still plays only in peaceful mode, with no monsters and therefore no dangers aside from falling or drowning (she's been steering clear of lava). From my experience in the game, I know that some useful objects can only be obtained by killing monsters, and some mineral resources can only be mined near lava. It'll be interesting to see how her risk tolerance within the game evolves if she continues playing in survival mode.
• P and T have both given the mobile game Dragon Box a try. It's a game that introduces concepts related to simplifying algebraic equations, but in pretty non-mathematical looking form (unless, like me, you're a former math teacher who's played a lot with concrete and symbolic approaches, and not only the conventional abstract approaches). Gradually things get more complex, and more mathematical symbols get introduced. T reaches his frustration level pretty fast. P goes a little farther. It's fun to watch -- I actually improved my own scores in the game by watching what P had figured out.
• I've been drying several different kinds of fruit in our dehydrator. T has been hesitant to try most of them, but P is enjoying them so much, perhaps he'll catch some of her enthusiasm. P doesn't like pineapple, but she loves apple slices that have been dipped in pineapple juice and then dried. Dried banana slices have gone over big not only with P, but with some of the other girls in her Brownie troop; and just about everyone likes our current form of fruit leather, made from an antioxidant-rich berry blend plus bananas.
• P has decided to sign up for the next term of her aerial dance class. She's having fun, and I'm glad, partly because I find the parents at the aerial dance classes much more laid-back and friendly than those at the gymnastics classes at the same gym. I shared this observation with another mom at aerial dance, and she heartily agreed. I think the kids are also more motivated by fun, learning, beauty, and personal improvement than driven by competition with each other.
• P is selling girl scout cookies. It's her first year in scouting, and this is her first experience with door-to-door sales. Her first day out was successful, and once she quit selling for the afternoon, she went bike riding and made a new friend on our block: the granddaughter of her biggest cookie customer, as it happened. Before setting out, P wrote down what different numbers of boxes of cookies (up to 12 boxes) would cost at $3.50 each, doing the math once so she wouldn't have to do it on the fly, and we role-played some scenarios she might encounter going door to door. We talked in between houses, refining her pitch and approach. She's also done some booth sales more recently at grocery stores, working with other girls from her troop.
• P and I built a snow fort after a snowstorm that left 10 inches or so of powdery snow. It didn't pack as easily as I'd hoped, but P turns out to be better than I am at building snow walls, so it still worked out.
• We've been playing lots of board games, especially games with a cooperative theme. I'm finding I have much more patience for complicated board games when they are cooperative rather than competitive. Getting to the end and winning or losing together just seems like a a better use of time than establishing a winner and losers, and the experience is more shared. Some we've played recently are Forbidden Island, Castle Panic, Pandemic, and Dixit. Forbidden Island is a simpler version of Pandemic (which we already owned) by the same game designer with a different theme (destruction and collective loss occur by flooding rather than the spread of disease). P went to a workshop run by a friend of mine, who uses the game as a way to spark creative writing with kids 8 and up. Dixit is not cooperative, but there's a lot of potential for creativity in the game. T doesn't always have the attention span to finish a game, but as he understands the game more, he gets more interested.

Making

• We found a site where there are paper patterns you can print out and assemble into various toys. We built a paper trebuchet from there, and both kids enjoyed trying it out with different projectiles. P has a large collection of craft sticks and likes building things with them, so since the paper trebuchet wasn't very robust, perhaps we'll try with craft sticks next.

• P has been folding origami, sometimes of her own design and sometimes from patterns. She asks for help a lot when working from instructions. Sometimes we fold a model side by side, with me following the instructions and P following me. I try to point out how the instructions show what I'm doing, so she can eventually follow them more easily herself; but I try to make sure I help when she's getting frustrated. Recently P and T have come to me a few times, when I was working in the kitchen, and said that they're having fun folding origami from instructions on their own. Origami books from the library have been great for this, so they can try new models.

Writing

• P persisted and finished her Christmas thank-you notes, all but one handwritten (I scribed the other in email according to what P asked me to say). She is noticing out loud how much easier it is getting to spell the words she wants to use, and she is proud to show off her handwriting. She wants to hand-write party invitations, too (see last category below).
• As noted above, P did a creative writing workshop with the board game Forbidden Island.

Watching

• In the past few months we've bought two DVD sets of shows for the kids, and just recently they've been watching lots from both sets. One set is the complete Magic School Bus episodes. They've watched the majority of them now. T likes to watch the same one several times, especially certain episodes like the one about salmon migrating. Based on comments he makes about things later, I think he's picking up a lot of information. P definitely is. 
• The other set is Be The Creature, a Kratt Brothers series aimed at a slightly older audience than Wild Kratts. The episodes are longer, and they're all live-action, about real animals, rather than fantasy-cartoon plots related to the animals. P is more interested in them than T at this point, though sometimes T watches too. One day we were trying to think of an animal that wakes and sleeps when it wants to, without a particular nocturnal, diurnal, or crepuscular pattern. Lions came to mind -- I don't know whether they are awake much at night, but they sleep 20 hours most days, and given that they're successful only about 30% of the time on their hunts, waking hours may be opportunistic. P supplied the hours-of-sleep figure based on a Be The Creature episode about lions.
• We got a great recommendation for a curated website, The Kid Should See This. We've enjoyed watching many short videos here, and sometimes following up with more detail on the subjects they touch on. Recently we've watched videos about life on the International Space Station (how to wash your hands in space was particularly mind-blowing for me!), elaborate marble runs made from just cardboard and cardstock, gut microbes, various dance styles, huge art installations, bird flocking behaviors, and many other topics. A couple of the videos came from TED-Ed, which has also been fun to explore.

Listening

• I find that the kids, particularly P, quickly start echoing songs if I sing them as I clean up around the house and the kids play. Even if they're not fully tuned in, they're picking up the melodies. If they like the songs, I sing them while helping brush teeth, so they can pick up the words for themselves.
• I've been noticing recently that P seems more attuned to my thoughts and feelings than she used to be. She is quicker to pick up on my meaning when I talk to her, and more readily apologizes when appropriate. I think she's passing a developmental milestone and getting better at seeing others' viewpoints, without their needing to be spelled out completely. She's also getting better at playing peacefully with T, at least when she wants to. Sometimes fatigue or hunger or the desire to do something else still sends the games off the rails; I try to step in with food or other aid before things go bad when I can see those times coming, or step in quickly afterward if I miss the early signs. We're all getting better at keeping the peace, bit by bit.
• On Sirius Book Radio in the car recently, we heard a couple of excerpts from Danielle Steele's book, Echoes. The parts we heard were about the experiences of a young Christian woman (a Carmelite nun, actually) sent to a concentration camp in Poland during WWII, and later rescued and recruited into the French Resistance. P was very disappointed to turn off the radio when we reached our destination and needed to go inside. She really wanted to hear the end of that story. I assured her that we would be able to find a similar story, or that one, sometime soon. I wonder if she'd enjoy Marge Piercy's Gone to Soldiers, my favorite WWII historical fiction so far. It spans Jewish ghettoes, concentration camps, Jewish refugees in the United States (and how few of them were allowed in), WACS, the French Resistance, and other facets of experience in different places during the war.

Talking

• Or not talking, as the case may be. We're in a phase now where one or both kids often have a hard time answering the question, "What would you like to eat?" Often, if I know they're likely to be hungry, I'll fix up a plate with one to four different things, at least some of which I'm pretty sure they'll enjoy, and just put it down where they are, without asking whether they want food or if so, what kind.  This is usually met with hungry enthusiasm. One evening recently, I set down a plate with two toasted-cheese sandwiches, a bunch of baby carrots, and some dip. P said to T, who reached for the carrots first, "Don't eat all the carrots!" Discouraged as I get sometimes about their eating enough fruits or veggies or a wide enough variety of food, it really is happening that sometimes they prefer carrots to toasted cheese sandwiches. Or apples to sweetened dried fruits. Or smoked salmon with cream cheese on crackers to... whatever other food it was they were considering before I got out the salmon. When I stay on top of their hunger so they don't get carb-desperate, the proteins and plant-based foods do make it in. (Note to self: Breathe in, breathe out.)
• T continues to ask questions, and sometimes to talk about his own ideas, concerning volcanoes, how they form, how and when they erupt, etc. P likes talking with him about what she knows, and I help out when I can contribute more information or clear up confusion. 
• In a recent conversation about the planets and their orbits, we talked about the geocentric and heliocentric models of the solar system, and how things like the apparent retrograde motion of some planets made it hard to justify the geocentric model, once people started considering the heliocentric model. (Retrograde was the only one of these big words that actually got used in the conversation.)
• Both kids have been talking about their dreams a lot. They compare notes on efforts to turn bad dreams into good dreams, or at least get themselves to wake up from them. Both seem to have predominantly pleasant dreams, and they enjoy telling the stories of them.
• I ran across the parlor game "Coffeepot" in the book Unbored. In this game, the word coffeepot stands in for a secret noun or verb, and questions are asked to discover what the word is. For example, one exchange tonight when only P knew the secret word (window) went, "What do you do when you're too cold at night?" "I make sure the coffeepots are closed and turn up the heat." It's fun to decide how obvious to make the hints, and to watch the reasoning process involved in the questioning and guessing. I floated the idea of playing "Coffeepot" via email -- it could be a fun asynchronous game to play with friends far away, and email threads could preserve the history of questions and answers, so total recall over several days wouldn't be important.

Visiting

• We visited the zoo and had a chance to see the lion feeding-time demonstration -- two male lions being fed and going through the behaviors they are trained in to allow veterinarians and keepers to care for them without ever being on the same side of the fence or glass with them. P and T saw primary (food) and secondary (whistle) reinforcers in action and saw two very different lions, litter mates, in action. The first, who was highly motivated by food, was intensely focused as he went through his paces. The second, who was motivated more by his brother, was more relaxed and less in touch with the keeper. Both got their food (nine pounds each of raw meat plus whatever was mixed in with it), and we got to see two lions do some truly awe-inspiring stuff, like standing up against the barrier fence to give the keeper a look at their bellies and paws -- they stood seven or eight feet high! Later that evening I was reading a story about wildlife with T. On hearing about an animal who was scared of humans, T reminded me that the lions' keeper had told us the lions were scared of "two-headed people," meaning adults with children on their shoulders. I think it really made an impression on T that an animal so large and powerful could be scared of him.
• T and I had a rare chance to take an unhurried trip together to the grocery store. We scrutinized the baked goods and found some delicious goodies made of ingredients we could live with. We looked at the fish counter, learning what mussels, oysters, and clams look like, and bought a whole trout to bring home so we could get a better look. We learned that trout have even spinier tongues than cats, which must be handy when you have no hands or claws to help hold the prey you've caught to eat. (P tried a taste later, when it was cooked, and said it wasn't bad; T really didn't want to taste it, saying he wanted to get the fish for me and Daddy to eat.) T considered spending some of his allowance on something from the toy aisle, but there was nothing he really loved, so for the first time in months, he was willing to save his money for something he'd really love, and he left the store without being upset about it and enjoyed the treats we had bought. I try hard to let him have experiences on both sides of the spending/saving choice, but ultimately the decision about whether to spend his allowance is up to him (though sometimes we leave without buying something because we're out of time), and mostly he chooses spending. Now he'll have a data point on the other side, of what it felt like to save his money for something he wants more, without being coerced to save.

Thinking, Asking Questions, Planning...

• T has been asking lots of questions about space and astronomy. One evening he wanted to know how long it took a rocket to get from the launch pad into space. So we looked up how high space was considered to start (around 100 km above sea level was a good reference point). Then I said different rockets might take different amounts of time to get there, so T said he wanted to know about the most recent Mars rover mission. I looked up the launch sequence for the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), and we found that it took around 3.5 minutes to cross the 100-km altitude. We talked about how heavy astronauts would feel if they rode on a rocket accelerating so rapidly. Then T wanted to watch several videos about the MSL. He also asked whether all planets had day and night, and I said they did, but some were very long (Uranus's day is the same length as its year because of the extreme tilt of its axis, so its days and nights are akin to those at Earth's poles; and Mercury's day is 176 Earth days long because of Mercury's slow rotation). Later that night I overheard more talk about planets and their orbits as UnschoolerDad was putting T to bed.
• P and I watched an episode of Little House on the Prairie, one in which both Nellie and Laura/Mary had parties at their homes. We noticed that neither party had special activities planned, though there were special foods; the parties just took advantage of the greater number of people to play games that work best with several people involved. I suggested that, instead of trying to have a grand theme for our next party, we simply come up with a list of things P and T like to do that work better with more than three people (which is typically what we have available here), and invite over some people we'd like to do some of those things with. We made a list, both adding items. I added two of my favorite six-or-more party games, Pictionary and Taboo. P didn't know what they were, so I explained them. One thing led to another, and we ended up talking about what the word taboo means, some examples of taboos in our society, and the concept of sacredness as it relates to taboos (e.g., one might not say certain words to a priest, though one might use them frequently among friends). Now we have a list of activities, a list of friends, and a growing list of possible party foods; we're just waiting until we all get over our colds to plan a party.
• One day, on a longish car ride, P and T suddenly had a slew of questions about reproduction and marriage. Can people marry in threes? (We talked about legal marriages, extralegal arrangements that the folks involved might consider similar to marriage, marriage in other countries.) T asked if the laws about marriage were different in different states, and we talked about the changes in same-sex marriage laws in recent years. They asked about how two men could have a baby (we touched on adoption, surrogacy, and sperm donation, finally summarizing that the creation of a baby requires an egg, a sperm, and a woman to go through pregnancy, but that these could come from two to three different people, and sometimes those who parent the child aren't any of them). We talked about the differences between adoption and fostering children, and why children might need foster homes. That led to questions about the age at which you go from being a child to an adult (we talked about differing laws for drinking, voting, serving in the military, getting a job, and generally being considered a legal adult, and also about terms like baby/child/teenager/adult vs. legal dichotomies like child/adult and the idea that one is always the child of one's parents, even when one is an adult).
• We finally bought a globe this month, to add to our large world map hanging on the wall. This has led to interesting explorations and questions. Why is Boulder on the globe and not the larger world map? What does Antarctica look like? Which way does the Earth turn? What are those lines all about? What about the historic ships pictured in the oceans? When it's daytime here, where it is nighttime? T also likes the slight bumpiness on the globe in mountainous regions. One day, at a big library, we found a larger globe, mounted in a gimbal, so it could rotate along two axes, unlike our globe. He wanted to know what would happen if the Earth really spun on both those axes. That led to interesting talk about how the Earth isn't really rotating on a pin, but just spinning in space. (Having watched the space station videos helped with this idea -- T could imagine setting a globe just spinning in the air on the space station.) We also tried spinning the globe at a fairly uniform rate on each of its axes simultaneously, and saw that it sort of appeared to rotate along a third axis as a result, but it was hard to tell for sure. (I think you can just add rotations as vectors, but my physics is a little rusty there, and I'm not sure how it works when one of the rotations is along an axis that is itself rotating. This will bear more thought!)