Do Unto Others

I got a whack on the head the other evening. I was reading Kim Stanley Robinson's book, Forty Signs of Rain, and one of the characters noted that being a good person to work for was possibly the ultimate test of a man. I don't even remember anymore, exactly, how this led me to the realization about parenting that it did, but the upshot of my train of thought was that if I wanted P to be helping out more willingly around the house, it made sense to help her first, to show how a loving family member can just help, without it being a big tit-for-tat deal.

So the next evening, when P was cleaning her room before bed, I offered to help, without putting any conditions on it except that T needed to be allowed to come in, since I was in charge of him at the time. And the next day, she helped me in the kitchen without being asked. She still doesn't want to help every time it's needed or every time I ask (I'm experimenting with not insisting unless I actually need her help, which occasionally happens but isn't super-frequent), but I seem to be building up a slush fund of goodwill by helping her when I can and not expecting my requests to jump to be answered with, "How high?" Sometimes, when she's been no help to me during the day and I have more to do in the evening as a result, I don't end up helping her with her room; but more often than not, I help at least a little.

So far the resulting trend is good. P went from resisting helping clean up one morning, to sweeping and scrubbing floors later in the day. Today I asked P if she'd clear the table for dinner, since I was cooking a more elaborate dinner than usual and expected to be working on it until the moment we sat down to eat. At first she said no, and I expressed mild frustration about that but let it go without trying to force the issue. Very soon after that, she said that if I'd let her set the table with things in the order she wanted (yesterday I tried to show her a standard place setting arrangement, but she wasn't interested), she would clear and set everything. And she did a very nonstandard but thorough job of it, even finding a candle for a centerpiece and dressing in a fancy dress for dinner. We'll keep trying to find our way, as I try to be a better person to work for, in a mom sort of way.

School starts Monday at P's former elementary. Our notice of intent to homeschool didn't get processed before class lists came out, so P was placed in a class with several friends, and she had a brief change of heart, but soon decided again to continue unschooling with me. Play dates for long stretches on weekdays will be a thing of the past soon, but some of her friends are available for after-school play dates, and we live very near the school, so it should be pretty easy to keep seeing them.

UnschoolerDad strewed a copy of the Calvin and Hobbes book, Scientific Progress Goes "Boink," in P's path recently. As with many things, she wasn't interested at first, but a few hours later she was buried in it. That evening I ran across, and showed P, a web site focused on photos from around 100 years ago. Of course nearly all the photos are black and white. P remarked on the Calvin and Hobbes strip where Calvin asks his dad why all the old photos are black and white. This is a classic strip, so I did remember, and simply replied, "And his dad gave him a pretty bad answer, huh?" She laughed and agreed.

Both kids still enjoy watching old Pink Panther shorts, but I get tired of that being what they always ask for, so I look for new things to suggest. Recently I ran across the series, The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That. This discovery has been a mixed blessing. The show's aimed at a pretty young, unsophisticated audience -- more appropriate to T's level of knowledge about the world than P's -- but they enjoy it, and it feels better to me than watching the Pink Panther and Inspector Clouseau chase each other around with guns and bombs yet again. The Cat has mostly eclipsed the Panther in the kids' requests for videos, and they've watched episodes about bees, bird nests, desert oases, whale songs, and other topics. Onward and upward.

I keep trying to make more sophisticated media available, and sometimes the kids are interested. P really got into a BBC science web site, where she enjoyed interactive games on classifying materials, the parts of flowering plants, marine and land-based food chains, and many other interesting topics. I was impressed with the quality of the activities, compared to some other "educational" web sites I've seen. The BBC site's not everything I could hope for, but it's far more engaging than many, and P's enjoying it a lot. Today I found a made-for-IMAX film about beavers, which have been a recurring theme with both kids lately, and they watched it with me, with stops to explain things and talk about what was going on. There are several similar films on different topics, so we'll probably get back to that thread soon.

I've been on a Grey's Anatomy kick for a while, and sometimes P ends up watching part of an episode with me. Recently this has led to good questions from her and ensuing discussions about the relationships between brain function, heart function, life and death; the fact that hypothermia can allow drowning victims' brains to recover from long periods with no heartbeat; the existence of crystal methamphetamine and its hazards to users and manufacturers; and more generally the phenomenon of drug addiction and the harm it can do to the body and to lives and relationships.

On the literature side of things, we had a great trip to the central library this week, shortly after P announced that she is done with all her Magic Tree House books and is ready to give them away (I'll keep them for T to read when he's ready). I figured we'd better start looking for other books she'd enjoy, and the library didn't disappoint. P came home with a few different flavors of chapter books about fairies, and we found some DVDs we're looking forward to watching together. T also found lots of books he wanted to bring home, and I added some to the bag for further strewing.

T continues to blossom into early reading. He's noticing and looking for rhymes and other similarities between words, actively learning letters and numerals, and asking to play and enjoying a phonics game on my phone that used to go frustratingly over his head. Getting to play games on my phone is something he always enjoys, but it's great to see him enjoying and understanding the content, rather than just wanting phone games because they are phone games. He's also eagerly absorbing just about anything I'll tell him about the letters and words in books we're looking at together. Today when I popped in to keep an eye on him in the bath while UnschoolerDad went to get something, he pointed out and identified a foam letter X that had been stuck to his back, and then asked me questions about how dolphins sing and swim (Dolphins IMAX film on deck!). It will be fun to see where he aims his curiosity next, and how reading develops for him.

I am the Gluer

P just came into my room after T went down for his nap and said, with the most irresistible expression on her face, that she wanted to do a big art project with me. I asked her what she had in mind, and we settled on making a picture frame with decoupage decorations. I cut the pieces of the frame from cardboard and fixed them together while she looked for stuff to cut out and glue on. She chose Sunday funnies and food photos from grocery circulars. The result hardly resembles what I had in mind at all -- and I think that's the best part about it. I was the gluer, applying Mod Podge and putting her chosen images on where she told me to. We did the project together, but it is mostly her creativity that shows in it. At first I tried to steer her to a different vision, but realizing that 1) it was her creative baby and 2) the beauty of decoupage is that if you decide you don't like the first version, you can put new things over it as many times as you like, I managed to stop steering and keep my mouth shut. P got a chance at self-expression, and that is where I draw the line between an art project (what she asked for) and a craft project. Good stuff. (Now, as the glue dries on the frame and I write, P is experimenting with sewing doll clothes. I gave her a needle and thread, and she's using fabric we had around and coming up with some nice, simple stuff with no instruction needed or desired so far -- she knows I can help if she wants to know how to do something more elaborate.)

Being the gluer is a pretty good metaphor for at least one aspect of the primary role of an unschooling parent. The kids are the ones who decide (as much as I can give them the slack to do so) what they want to accomplish, from the many possibilities they can imagine or I can offer; I'm in an auxiliary role, helping them find the materials, information, or other resources they need to get it done, and sometimes doing part of the work/play along with them. I do sometimes layer my own desires for outcomes or bits of learning onto what they're doing: I'll insist on putting a final coat of Mod Podge on the picture frame to give it a bit of gloss and make the pieces stick together better, or I'll try to get P to do a relevant bit of arithmetic with me rather than just making the process of figuring something out invisible. The kids are mostly tolerant of this, but I'm not always sure it adds much to their learning or enjoyment. I try to strike a balance between their desires and needs and my own desires and needs, so we all get some autonomy and satisfaction out of what happens from day to day. Some of my desires involve a certain amount of keeping up with the concepts in the basic elementary school curriculum, both to ensure a satisfactory evaluation for P in third grade if we keep this up (which would allow us to continue unschooling), and to make a possible return to school less difficult should P choose that.

This past week was our time to decide whether P would start second grade at our local school, or continue unschooling with me. She'd been on the fence all summer, though I didn't ask about it often, not wanting that to be our main focus and not wanting her to cement a decision in place before she needed to. My sense was that starting second grade and then dropping back out would be easier than starting a school year partway through, should she change her mind; but even more so, I think that unschooling has great potential for us, some realized and some still to be worked out, and that P would be happier (and we would all be less stressed) unschooling than dealing with the time demands of school. I wanted the decision to be P's, though. So I took her through the best way I know to make such decisions: for about a week in late July, both of us tried to notice and say out loud things that we'd noticed would be different depending on which choice she made. Then, with a few days to go until the district deadline to declare our intention to homeschool, together we brainstormed lists of pros and cons to both possibilities (starting school or continuing to unschool). When we felt we had all the important stuff on the lists, we picked the list items that seemed most important and underlined them, so we wouldn't base a decision on sheer numbers of less-important or redundant items. When we'd finished our lists, I asked P to think about all this and decide with her head and her heart. She changed her mind three or four times between then and our deadline, finally deciding she wanted to continue unschooling. I think the last deciding factor was that she wanted to take classes in both gymnastics and pottery this fall, and she saw that fitting those in along with school and homework would leave little time for other, more spontaneously chosen activities. I'm feeling good about the choice. Instead of gearing up for school's early mornings and bedtimes -- always a challenge for all of us night owls -- I can gear up for supporting more of what P wants to do and learn this year. For one example, it's probably time for her to have more access to a computer than she can get by borrowing mine, so we have some buying decisions to make.

P will be in both gymnastics and pottery classes in the fall, and miraculously, we got T into a gymnastics class he wanted to take (it's hard to get new students into the crowded program at our local rec center, which is well taught and organized, and far less expensive than other nearby gymnastics centers). 

T is hitting some fun milestones. Through playing with the rest of us with letters on the fridge and in the tub, and by getting lots of stories read to him, he's learned most of the alphabet and many of the sounds the various letters make. He has some Brain Quest booklets of questions and answers left from when P was little. He asks for these instead of a bedtime story almost every night -- he really seems to enjoy being quizzed, and getting things explained patiently when he doesn't know the answers to the questions. Our three different sets are leveled for ages 3-4, 4-5, and 5-6 respectively. Having gone through the first two sets, he now prefers the 5-6 year old set, which spends a lot of time on letter sounds, rhyming, and numbers. He's also making great progress on using the potty, with many dry and clean days, and even some good series of them, in the last few weeks. One day, after he'd used the potty in the morning, I said he could wear big-kid underpants for a while; he finds them more comfortable, which is great, and we'll do that for a couple of hours before I start worrying about the couch and carpets. That evening I realized I'd forgotten to have him switch to a pullup, so he'd spent an entire successful day in big-kid underpants. Hooray! Both letter sounds and using the potty are things he was scarcely interested in a few months ago, so these developments give me confidence that he will actually learn these things and many others on his own initiative, in his own time, given the help he wants.

T has also had fun with a three-dimensional puzzle that UnschoolerDad brought back from a gathering of software developers. It goes together into a cube, and T carefully studied how to do this and learned two different solutions, with no prompting. He does love his spatial puzzles and challenges.

P's been going to a lot of birthday parties recently, so she writes birthday cards and gets more accurate with her spelling on that set of vocabulary. Today she floated the idea of making a movie, which I would film and narrate while she and T acted things out. I suggested she think about writing a script for it. We'll see where that goes.

This week we watched The Black Stallion. The kids didn't find the idea of the movie very appealing and were lobbying to watch something else, but I was tired of The Cat in the Hat and The Pink Panther, so I just started the movie and said they could watch it with me if they wanted. They were impatient with the first 20 minutes or so, but as soon as the ship fire and consequent emergencies began, they were riveted for an hour or more. The Black Stallion is a great movie to watch with inquisitive kids, as the middle hour or so (and much of the rest) have very little dialogue, so questions and answers can go on almost nonstop without losing any of the movie or needing to pause. We talked about what on a Mediterranean island might be edible for humans and horses, how wild horses can get used to humans, some of the methods of training horses, Alexander the Great and his horse Bucephalus, and a bit about horse racing rules, jockeys, and poker. After the movie ended, both kids volunteered that they liked it a lot.

This week was County Fair time, and the whole family went on Friday. We went just after lunch, not realizing the midway didn't open until 4:00. But that gave us lots of time to check out chickens of many breeds, goats, pigs, cows, bunnies, antique tractors, and the contest winners in fiber arts, baked goods, cake decorating, model making, and lots more. P had a good conversation with a beekeeper about her demonstration hive, wanting to know where those bees could get pollen or nectar (they couldn't, but wouldn't be there long and had stored honey and nectar).

When the midway opened, we measured P and found she was just barely tall enough to ride anything she wanted (first year of that!), so we sprung for ride-all-you-want armbands for P and me, and she was very daring. We both wanted to skip the very scariest ride, and I persuaded her not to ride the loop roller coaster after there was a power outage (a breaker tripped) and we got to thinking about being stuck upside down for an extended period. But otherwise she tried everything, and it was fun riding most of the rides with her. We got to talk a little about how some of the rides worked, particularly those where you go in a circle and get pinned to the outside of the circle by your body's tendency to go in a straight line while the ride forces you to go in a circle instead -- you know, the stuff that people usually call "centrifugal force." 

(Yes, the concept of centrifugal force is a real one, but it's singularly unhelpful in helping kids learn physics, in my experience. It describes without explaining, and it only makes sense with the other concepts of physics when you're working in a rotating reference frame; so I touch on it, but try to explain things in ways that will be more helpful. What I loved most about teaching physics, when that was my job, was seeing understanding bloom in response to good explanations and related experiential learning. It's still fun!)

...Aaaand then it got rich again.

We go along and have these lazy days and weeks, and then things take off again. Here we go!

The kids and I watched a couple of TED talks online together this week. One was about flowers and the tricks they've evolved to play on their pollinators. P, who is beginning to understand the role sex plays in reproduction with humans and animals, was ready to enjoy this and has mentioned it to me unprompted since then; she remembered the flowers that smell like carrion, enticing blowflies to come in and lay their eggs there, meanwhile getting coated with pollen for other such plants. The other was about a new ultralight robot that flies like a bird, flapping its wings. That had the whole family grinning from ear to ear, probably all for different reasons, but it was delightful and memorable nonetheless.

P and I also watched some old TV together online. We watched the first few episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which has always been my favorite Trek series (though the first season is a little hard to take!). P referred to some of the technology in the show (e.g., transporters) as magic, so we talked about the nature of science/speculative fiction as the creator's idea of where science and technology could go in the future, and how that might change the world and the ways people interact. Of course it also reminded me of the Arthur C. Clarke quote, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," and I shared that idea with P as well. 

A library book, Twelve Snails to One Lizard, was a fun story about the nature of measurement and why measurement tools are so useful; and it repeated some key numbers for the English system and some arithmetic enough to let them sink in a bit.

We watched The Secret Garden on DVD and talked a bit about the British empire (the movie is set near the time of its greatest extent and begins in colonial India, and a map puzzle the children assemble in the movie provides a great visual for that). A day later, P asked me if it was a real story. I said no, I thought it came from a novel. She asked me how you could make a movie that wasn't a real story. In hindsight, maybe she thought that true-story movies were actually filmed in real time -- I'll have to ask her. But it led to a great exploration on YouTube of making-of videos, particularly for a Transformers movie that we haven't seen, but that was beautifully documented on YouTube. We saw an outdoor set, complete with beautiful building facades and plain-as-dirt, unfilmed backsides with security guards keeping folks off the street during takes. We saw cameras on cranes, cameras on go-karts, and cameras on trucks outfitted with cages to protect them from flying cars in chase scenes. We learned how a scene in which a giant robot ripped a bus in two was filmed -- not in miniature, but with exploding bolts and air cannons to blow the bus apart, and CGI robots inserted later. We saw gas flames turn on near destroyed cars just before "Action!" in a street scene. We also saw some stop-motion videos that Transformers fans had made themselves. Maybe we'll talk more another time about screenwriting, acting, directing, editing, and more. Maybe we'll go to Universal Studios sometime. It was a lovely trip behind the curtain today, though.

In the car on the way to the science museum today (more on that below), P started writing a get-well-soon card to a relative. I've explained that this relative may have a harder time than most folks with unconventional spelling or messy (or overly fancy) handwriting, so P was careful to check her spellings with me.

And the museum. I could write pages and pages just about the 5.5 hours we spent there today. Here are some highlights:

• A "Real Pirates" exhibit documented the history of the Whydah, discovered off Cape Cod after a maiden voyage as a slave ship and, following her capture, a short career as flagship of Sam Bellamy's pirate fleet. We learned about the trans-Atlantic trades in slaves, gold, coffee, sugar, tobacco, ivory, etc., and how those markets depended on each other, as well as a bit about what life was like for African captives in slave forts, on the Middle Passage, and on Caribbean plantations. We learned why sailors wanted to become pirates -- greed played a part, yes, but what I hadn't known was that pirate crews were so democratic. Sailors who had experienced the duress of navy or merchant service, often having been press-ganged into it, could trade that for an equal share of the booty and an equal vote on a pirate crew, regardless of their race or social station, if they didn't mind the danger of battle or the death penalty for piracy following possible capture. Big "if," yes. But still. P recognized scurvy and its cure from a Magic Tree House book. We learned that Vitamin C gets its scientific name, ascorbic acid, from Greek and Latin words meaning "no scurvy." And to cap it off, P got to figure out how many fake doubloons she could buy at $1.49 a pop with her $5 cash on hand. (I think I need to be more patient with P's incessant shopping and desire to spend ALL her money when she hits a great shop. She gets so much good math/money/value education by figuring out whether she can afford this? Or this? Or this? Even if I sometimes want just to cut her short with, "No, you can't afford that, either!" or "No, it's really not necessary for you to find something to spend that last dollar on!" She still hears enough from me to know that I value spending money on things you actually want or need as opposed to whatever in the store is cheap enough, and maybe she'll soak that up someday. But in the meantime, I think it's valuable that she learn arithmetic and the value of money herself through using her own money according to her own choices.)
• From an exhibit on mummies, we learned the story of Osiris, which is why mummies got made. We scrutinized a model of the temple of Ramses II, including tiny depictions of animal sacrifice. We learned about how CT scans of mummies can be used to reconstruct the appearance of the person in life; this came up with concretions discovered on the Whydah as well.
• In the Prehistoric Journey exhibit, which is a perennial favorite, today the take-aways were about how bone ridges facilitate the reconstruction from fossils of animals' appearance and behavior; the emergence of camel-like mammals in the Americas, and how they evolved into llamas, alpacas, and the like in South America; the differences between mammoths (ate grass and had finely ridged teeth) and mastodons (ate branches and had coarsely ridged teeth); the movement of continents and where the inland sea was in North America compared to Colorado; P noticing the similarities (general shape) and differences (size and proportions) of the vertebrae in different parts of a sauropod skeleton; and early humans' appearance and adaptations compared to other primates. I'm probably missing a lot here. This is an incredibly rich exhibit.
• In the little kids' area, both kids danced and jumped around a lot in an area intended and well designed for just that. T got to play with magnets, attraction and repulsion. P, while playing with some magnet blocks, got to make sense of the different-shaped triangles on their faces (scalene right, isosceles right, and isosceles acute; matching the same shapes made the blocks stick together better). P and T both decided to give their cardboard souvenir pirate hats to two younger boys who hadn't gotten to go to the Real Pirates exhibit. T got to brush "dirt" off "fossils" in a nice little excavation-play-pit. Both kids had fun with funny-shaped mirrors, noticing how things looked different in them. It was one of the best kid-friendly museum areas I have experienced.
• And we didn't even enter the exhibits on Space, or Gems and Minerals, or natural history sections. We'll be back!

Summer Smorgasbord

It gets harder, after a while, to pick out the learning opportunities from the rest of life. Partly this is because P has become such a strong reader that I am often unaware of what she's taking in, especially when it's in magazines like Highlights that she snaps up and reads voraciously to herself instead of asking me for help. (One example: We were out letterboxing one day, and a clue called for finding the face of Shakespeare. P was the first to recognize it on a sign. It turned out she'd learned it from a Magic Tree House book.) Partly it's because I'm relaxing a bit about the whole keeping-track thing. And partly it's because we've been slacking for the early summer and not getting out on lots of trips with high learning-new-things potential of the easily recognizable kind. The inescapability of learning, however, keeps popping up.

There are the conversations that come seemingly out of nowhere and lead to new understandings. P found an advertisement for her in the mail recently that said she must "Send your card back TODAY to take advantage of this special offer!" She told me about it a day or two later, figuring that she'd missed her chance since she hadn't returned the card, and we had an interesting little talk about how advertisers like to create an artificial sense of urgency, because if you don't do it now, you'll probably either forget about it or realize you don't really want or need what they're pushing, and they won't get any of your money. (She already has a good grip on the fact that the main purpose of advertisement is to get you to want what you don't need, and might not even want if you just saw the thing instead of the flashy advertisement.) I told her a story about when I was about 7 or 8 and my sister, two years younger, saw one of those "Call NOW!" advertisements on TV when we were watching -- so she picked up the phone and started dialing. The fact was, of course, that if she really wanted (and could pay for) the thing being sold, she could call anytime. P and I also talked about how rarely "free," in advertisements, really means free.

Another little economics lesson came after we bought some ice cream at the grocery store to take home, and T wanted to stop at the outdoor restaurant tables between the grocery store and our car (we had parked at the hardware store a block away for another errand) and eat it there. Aside from our having no spoons, the restaurant was open and busy, so we talked about why they wouldn't want us eating our ice cream there. We talked about what kinds of flowers were planted in the shopping center's planters and why those were good choices. Recently T and I have talked about why traffic lights work the way they do and why it's important to obey them (an adult version of taking turns!).

P and T both have a lot of questions about the world. I've noticed that many adults view these incessant questions as an annoyance -- as if the kids were asking them just to see how much we could take before we deflect or explode or run away to get some peace. But it's come home to me more than ever in recent months that these questions are very real for them. The questions are the kids' way of using the nearest available resource (me) to sort out how the world works, and why. If I want them to keep learning and keep showing me their curiosity, I'd better give them answers that make sense to them, and I'd better have a good attitude about it!

Humor helps with getting things across and keeping it light. Today P asked me how long until it was time to leave for her first slumber party, tonight. I figured I'd probably hear this question a lot, so I asked P to bring out her toy clock so we could talk about it. She worked with me for a few minutes, learning the basics of telling time beyond just the hours. When she started getting just a touch impatient, I launched into a totally singsong recitation of the quarter-hours between the current time and the end of the slumber party tomorrow, throwing in some landmarks like dinner, movie, various people's bedtimes, and so on. She was giggling the whole time. We'll see if it sticks -- but at least I think we took some of the "learning is dreary work" edge off that particular bit. She's come to me for help with telling time a couple of times since then, whereas previously she avoided it. I've also noticed an increase in my ability to use humor to defuse an emotionally fraught situation, without making anyone feel bad. I've never felt very good at that kind of gentle humor, so it's good to discover I can still learn, too!

Some good opportunities for P's social learning have come with several play dates with friends. P really likes playing with T, and part of the reason seems to be that T, four years younger, will put up with a certain amount of dictatorial behavior from his sister and idol. P is learning from her friends, though, that most of the people she wants to play with will not put up with the bossiness that her adoring little brother will. P said something peremptory and unkind to a friend who was visiting a few days ago, and he replied, "I don't like it when you say that to me. It hurts my feelings." I was awed by how articulate and composed he was (I made sure to tell his mom when she picked him up), and I'm looking forward to more opportunities to play with that family, so P and T can learn from the kids and I can pick up some tips from their mom on how to encourage such emotionally intelligent behavior. I've been through Nonviolent Communication training, but helping children learn such emotional skills is, so far, a humbling endeavor for me. We are making some progress, however, and when I am patient and can model the appropriate behavior myself, of course that helps.

P has been continuing her gymnastics lessons, and when I can get the kids both to agree, we go on walks, short hikes, or bike rides together. We also visit new and familiar parks most weeks. For this past week P went to a gymnastics day camp every weekday afternoon, and she'll go to a gymnastics-themed birthday party this afternoon. She's been having a lot of fun and making some good progress with her gymnastics skills. She's also champing at the bit to learn to ride a two-wheeled bike with pedals (she is quite adept now on her pedal-less two-wheeler, and most of her friends ride regular bikes now), so there's some cycling in our near future. We've taken a couple of short bike rides with me helping her balance on the two-wheeler, and she's soooo close!

Here's the media roundup, from the library, Netflix, and the Internet:

• Magic School Bus DVD on the mechanics of flight and comets/meteors/asteroids
• Tractor Adventures DVD, with lots of information on different jobs tractors do and also how milking machines work
• Donald in Mathmagic Land: not a lot of depth to this, but it had a nice video intro to conic sections.
• A DVD on Monet (I can't find a link to it, but it's a very kid-friendly, humorous production with lots of good information) and his impressionist contemporaries and how they influenced art in their time
• A Little Princess: a bit of Indian myth, how boarding schools and pauperism worked in early 1900s England (We read a plot summary of the Francis Hodgson Burnett book afterward, and the movie took some huge liberties with the plot.)
• Awesome Animal Builders DVD: How several kinds of animals (spiders, caterpillars, termites) build using their own bodily secretions; naked mole rat burrows and their adaptations for digging; beaver dams and lodges; weaverbird nests and their function in mate selection; migrations of wildebeest, tundra swans, and some others; animals (e.g., rattlesnakes) that move into houses built by others. This one was a lot of fun for both kids. P recognized a trapdoor spider based on previous learning (this time a Magic School Bus book). We also got some books about beavers from the library recently, so we are looking at beavers from several angles.
• We watched several videos online of Atlantis's final liftoff, from cameras attached to the solid rocket boosters. For half an hour of video with no sound, this was riveting. We talked about how the SRBs and the big fuel tank help the shuttle get into orbit. We saw how the color of the sky changed as the rockets left the lower atmosphere, and then as they re-entered after separating from the shuttle. We saw the view tumble between the earth and space (and sometimes the sun) as the SRBs fell to earth. We saw parachutes deploying as the SRBs neared the ocean, and how this slowed and steadied their motion. It was a beautiful way to point out and answer questions about both the physics of the situation and the history of the space program -- previous disasters having motivated the use of those SRB cameras! After the liftoff videos, we watched a short piece about the NASA food lab and how they prepare ordinary and special foods for the astronauts' use in space.
• P's been reading Magic Tree House books, Fairy Realm books, and a book called Ida B, given to us by friends, which is about an unschooled child and how things change in her life when her mother becomes seriously ill. We've discovered that grocery shopping trips are much easier when I get a double cart so the kids can sit next to each other, and P reads a book aloud to T. They read most of Lions at Lunchtime this way during our last major grocery shopping trip.

P told me a week ago that she wants to go back to school, because all her friends say they want her to come back when she sees them on playdates. What I think is important is what she wants, but I'll support her if she wants to go back, and I told her so. We've given ourselves until August 1 to make a decision, since until that point we can still either enroll her or give the district our notice to homeschool. (I started to write, "to make a final decision," but of course either course of action is alterable.) Now she says she doesn't want to go back. We'll see where she comes down in another week. I bring it up occasionally, to get a reading on where she is, and to provide a chance to talk about it if it seems useful. I have mixed feelings myself. Though I still think that unschooling works better for us, on balance, because of the freedom to pursue our own schedule and interests, school does provide the feeling of a safety net. The cost of that net is high, though, if by pushing P through the list of standards, school blunts her interest in learning. She's had enough of a taste of it to know that going through curriculum at the class's pace is sometimes fun but often, really, not something she enjoys.

Holiday Hodgepodge

It's been a long time since I wrote. The last few weeks have had the feeling of being on holiday here in some ways -- we've slowed way down and not done as much on as many days. This is partly the summer heat and inertia slowing us down, partly a visit from family, and partly my having some health issues that have made it hard to get far from home for several days. But at any rate, we've been taking it slow and easy, and I took the week of the family visit off from writing. So here we go with some serious hodgepodge....

P had her birthday party in early June. She got several nice presents from friends and family, and thank-you notes seemed in order, particularly for family living far away. In the past, P has written thank-you notes with some reluctance and difficulty; we've done 2-3 per day until they were done, with me helping her figure out what to say, and her doing most of the actual writing.

Well, now that P's had a taste of freedom from being told what to do every hour of every day in school, she was really digging in her heels after a few notes. I started to write a message to my favorite unschooling listserve, asking how people dealt with giving their kids more freedom and still meeting the expectations of extended family regarding social niceties. This list really picks messages apart (often in a helpful way), so I was being careful to describe what we'd already tried, and I realized what I hadn't tried yet was separating the composition of the notes from the physical pushing of the pencil or computer keys (including spelling). I figured that while relatives might appreciate seeing how P's handwriting is coming along, more important was hearing her gratitude in her own words, and receiving something created by her hands. So I offered P another way: she could dictate the words, I would type them out, we would print them out, and P would glue them into cards, sign her name, and create stamped or drawn designs on the cards for a personal touch of beauty. She accepted, and we completed the task with relish and in record time. P said some things in composing the messages that were unmistakably in her own unique voice, and I preserved her wording as best I could, while offering a little guidance for etiquette and clarity. P does enough writing for her own reasons (notes to family and friends, writing stories, etc.) that she has lots of chances to practice handwriting and spelling in contexts where she's self-motivated, so I think this is an excellent step toward keeping writing an ongoing pleasure rather than a dreaded chore.

Postcards have started coming in from other countries via our postcrossing.com exchange. On our profile page, I ask for postcards that show something beautiful from the place the sender lives, and for recommendations of books (for children or adults) that tell the truth in some way about the speaker's country. We've found out about some fun books we've been able to get on interlibrary loan in English translation. So far most of the books haven't been about the home countries, but the illustrations and parts of the text have given clues to traditions of those countries. For example, a Finnish correspondent recommended Santa and His Elves, and we saw Christmas decorations and traditions from northern Europe in the background of the story. It's a fun way to pick up some of the flavor of different countries. A Thai writer told us a bit about how many Thai children go to Buddhist temples for a few months to learn Buddhist teachings, and the postcard showed one such temple. It's fun to see what people send and write, and to think about what to tell them about our area that they might not already know. We've also put up the wonderful, huge world map P got for her birthday on an equally huge corkboard in the hall, and we put the postcards near the countries they came from. Both kids check and/or ask about things on the map pretty frequently.

P seems finally to be formulating a more complete understanding of cash and how it works for buying things. She's just about gotten beyond what seems to be a notion that she needs correct change (sometimes it's hard to be sure I understand her thinking) and realizing that as long as she has more money than an item costs, a store will make change. We continue to count out cash together when it's relevant, and P's getting better at thinking of piles of coins in mixed denominations as representing a single amount of money in dollars. She relishes spending, and sometimes saving, her allowance; when our next-door neighbors had a garage sale recently, she made about 12 trips to the sale and spent her last $5 or so, triumphantly announcing each purchase and choosing several things for T as well as herself. Garage sale items, incidentally, are fun in that they are low-stakes for potentially destructive disassembly; when T wants the 5-cent snowman doll not to have a hat, P can clip the threads holding the hat on and find out how he's put together, and nobody will get mad if it turns out there's no top to his head. (We were happy his head did have a top, though!)

Speaking of taking cheap things apart: this evening when P was going to bed, I remembered that her bedside lamp switch wasn't working well. She was early getting to bed, so we decided to try to take it apart and see if we could fix it. It turned out not to be repairable without some pretty major replacement parts, and it's an $11 lamp, so we just stripped the whole thing down to parts, and P got to see why it failed -- turning the switch the wrong way had chewed up parts of the switch mechanism. We learned all we could about how the switch and lamp socket work(ed). Then I gave her a quick lesson on an identical lamp in feeling which way is the right way to turn a twisty switch -- the sort of thing that has to be learned by doing, and sometimes with destructive testing -- but the sort of thing, I've found, that greatly increases confidence and facility in fixing things and figuring out how to use things.

Coal mining continued as a theme. I was driving P somewhere without T recently, and as I thought about all we'd learned recently about the local history of coal mining, I remembered Merle Travis's song "Dark as a Dungeon," (this version has a verse I didn't know, the one about getting buried alive) which I learned from my dad when I was a teenager. I sang it to P, who (uncharacteristically) listened willingly and attentively to this unsolicited musical offering. It got a conversation going about why people might be drawn to mining or to continuing to mine, and why it's so dangerous (both accidents and illnesses). I told her about the rescue of the Chilean miners who were trapped for more than two months and then rescued last year, and about the technology that got them out as well as the mutual support and leadership that helped them survive the ordeal. She was intrigued.

On the social side, we had a good park day one week recently. There was a paved path around the playground, and we took both kids' bikes. T enjoyed practicing his gliding over and over and over again, much as a baby practices walking, but with considerably fewer falls. P also biked, and I appreciated the level of care she exercised in playing with T, keeping track of him, and letting me know if he needed my help, if I hadn't already noticed. Her caring behavior toward him can drift too far toward policing sometimes (I like to keep the policing of behavior for safety as a mainly parental job, when it's necessary, so P and T can have a relationship based more in the bonds of love and friendship than in the exercise of authority), but we're finding our way to a balancing point with enough monitoring and gentle guidance, but not too much bossiness.

P's also having play dates with friends from school, making friends at church (World Religions day camp helped a lot with that, as I'd hoped it would), and seeing other kids at badminton when she goes there with UnschoolerDad. T is getting good at interacting with other kids, but if he's ready to make lasting friendships (P wasn't quite there yet at his age), we haven't yet discovered the right way to foster that. There are some hints of it in the way he remembers and talks about his interactions with younger siblings included in some of P's play dates. We'll keep watching for opportunities for him. Church is one place where he sees the same kids often from week to week, and that may be the natural place to start, with noticing who he's enjoying and making more connections with them where we can.

Here's a roundup of some of our recent media enjoyment and learning:

• P's still reading a fair amount, with A to Z Mysteries heaving in the mix lately. She's also enjoying How to Train Your Dragon and various chapter books from the library, especially those about fairies.
• We watched The King and I, which spawned some interesting discussions about slavery and the history of arranged marriages and polygamy vs. romantic, monogamous pairing. 
• P and I watched The Secret of Kells, an animated film with some decent historical grounding and some charming fiction about the creation of the Book of Kells, and also about Viking raiders. Afterward, we looked up images from the Book of Kells and were pleasantly surprised to see that the images in the movie were based closely on real illuminations. We learned a bit about the traditions of illumination, the tendency of local documents like land deeds to get incorporated in the same tomes with religious manuscripts, and how the latter has helped clarify the history of the former. The Northmen in the film were represented in such a distorted way that P thought they were meant to be monsters rather than humans, so we also read up a bit on who the Vikings were and where they had raided and/or settled. P wondered aloud about the map we found of this, "Why did they only go along the coasts?" We talked about how some groups in history have gotten especially good at travel by sea (building boats, navigation, etc.), while others have done better with land travel (horsemanship, caravan routes, good carts or sleds, etc.), and that the Vikings clearly were boat people!

World Religions, Wild Birds, Wooly Animals, and more

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It Never Rains But It Pours

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

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

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

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

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

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

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