Agriculture, Economics, and Iwo Jima

Our biggest outing recently was yesterday morning: we went to an Agricultural Heritage Center in a nearby town. The place was a homestead starting in the 1870s, and several subsequent buildings and improvements were made before the land was given to the county as a museum. The farm still keeps some animals and has a small garden, but no big field crops. They have added an area of hands-on, museum-type exhibits in one of the barns. One of my favorites, which the kids also liked, was a wooden birthday cake divided up into 8 wedges that you could pull out and examine. Each wedge had a picture of a typical cake ingredient (butter, eggs, honey, flour, etc.) on one flat face, and a picture of where that ingredient came from (cows, chickens, beehives, wheat fields, etc.) on the other. There were higher-tech exhibits, but that one just tied things together so nicely in a way that isn't obvious to young kids raised in the city.

The exhibit-area experience was a little loud and overwhelming because we were sharing the area with two first-grade classes on a field trip. Much more relaxed and enjoyable were our self-guided tour of the farmhouse, outbuildings, and grounds, and some opportunities to ask questions of a friendly volunteer. After the school groups left, the volunteers let the chickens out, and we hung out with the chickens and watched them hunt grasshoppers; judging by the mad dashes the chickens made to try to catch the grasshoppers, they really like to eat them! P has been around chickens before, but this was T's first opportunity. He was tickled pink. One chicken nipped curiously at the sleeve of P's dress but did no harm; she was tickled as well once she got over her surprise. We saw bunnies that lived in a woodpile, checked out the crops in the war garden (noticing the striking similarities between the chard and beets, which are different varieties of the same species) and the damage that had been done to them by various pests, and reflected on the meaning of "loafing shed," as one building was described on the map we had.

Some of the things P and T got a chance to learn about or try were:

• Tools and implements from the early 1900s or so, including lariats, lots of tack and farm implements,  water pumps, windmills, iceboxes (the pre-refrigeration type that used blocks of ice), wood-burning heating and cooking stoves (including air inlet for controlling temperature), corn sheller, grain grinder, older stone grinding setup for grain, and some initially mysterious things like calf weaners. 
• Other stuff related to lower-tech ways of living, like outhouses (there was an old wooden one on the site, plus a newer, better-ventilated one for actual use); milking areas with stanchions for hand milking of cows; and a wooden yoke for draft animals that we could take apart and reassemble.
• Bits of history, especially war gardens/victory gardens and why they were important.
• Changes in building technology, and adaptations to the weather here: The old barn was built with unusual mortise-and-tenon joints that allowed it to flex in the high winds rather than breaking down as so many old barns in this area have. The silo at the farm was built of concrete staves with a tongue-and-groove shape, encircled by metal hoops to hold it all together; this was a new technology around 1900. (P noticed another concrete-stave silo on the way home and remarked on it.)

It hadn't occurred to me before that silo and silage are probably related by more than sound! I'd encountered both, but not previously encountered the one being used to store the other. P got to hear about silage (partially fermented grains and/or grasses -- it stinks to high heaven, but if it's made right, the cows love it!). She also learned where mules come from and that they generally can't reproduce. (We're not sure whether the animal we were watching was a donkey or a mule, but it was still a good conversation.)

On the way home we talked about a silent-auction school fundraiser we were attending that evening. P had never heard of an auction, so I described how a live auction works, and then how a silent auction accomplishes the same thing without the noise and more quickly. I hope she'll be willing to talk more about it -- I can show her a silent auction bidding sheet, since we won one item -- and how it ties in with her recent yearnings to sell things. She's been wanting to sell her outgrown and unwanted stuff for money, and begging to go out and set up in the driveway to try to sell it garage-sale style. The problems with this have been that 1) she gets this notion at odd times, like a chilly 6 p.m. on a Thursday night, and wants to do it right then, and 2) we live on a street that gets very little non-resident traffic, since it doesn't follow a useful path for anyone else. I've tried explaining how essential advertising and location are (not to mention having desirable goods) for a sale, but she says she doesn't care and just wants to go do it. The deal I made with her was that she could do it on a Saturday morning when we could plan to hang around and wait for people (and maybe run an ad on craigslist the day before); or I would help her try to sell stuff on eBay if she wants. Maybe having the auction as a bit of background will help with the eBay idea, which seems to me like her best bet at actually selling her stuff, albeit not for much money.

P is getting more confident and effective at interacting with people in the world at large. Lately she's been very willing to ask adult strangers questions or make requests of them when it's appropriate. Sometimes I suggest she do it (asking for something she wants in a restaurant, for example, or asking if she could play with the pump at the Agricultural Heritage Center), and sometimes she takes the initiative herself (asking her choir director if her sparkly black shoes would be okay for her concert uniform). She used to do this only reluctantly or with a lot of coaching, but now she's pretty good at deciding to do it and using an appropriate tone and level of politeness for the situation. This is the sort of thing we get more opportunities to try because of unschooling, since she sees a wider variety of people in different situations than if she were in school all day most days.

Here are a slew of other recent bits of learning:

• We've been seeing a particular ad a lot, one promoting Obama's jobs bill with an excerpt of his speech to Congress. P knew who was speaking -- she remembers Obama being elected, as it was something we cared about and worked on a lot. In the speech, he mentions "the people who hired us to work for them," and I asked if she knew who he was talking about. She didn't, so I explained it was people like us, who voted for Obama and the members of Congress he was addressing, since they wouldn't have their jobs without winning those votes.
• P and I took a wrong turn on the way home from her pottery class the first time and ended up driving through a cemetery, so we got a chance to talk about how cemeteries work and some of the alternatives (cremation, for example, and different things people do with the ashes, including entombing them in a columbarium). P liked going there and wants to go back, so we may have more chances to talk about the end of life and the many aspects of the "what happens afterward" question.
• We talked a little about the portrayal of Indian language in the Peter Pan musical we'd watched recently -- almost the entire song was made up of "Ug-a-wug" kind of noises. I told her at the time that this was a gross mischaracterization, but more recently I was reminded of the Navajo code talkers who provided rapid transmission of undecipherable messages during World War II, with particular value in the Battle of Iwo Jima -- Navajo was chosen because it has a highly complex grammar and because it was mutually unintelligible with even its close linguistic relatives. P was interested to hear about that. This led into a discussion of war in broader terms. We talked about the international effort to stop "ethnic cleansing" in Yugoslavia as a war many people consider justified. P is of the firm opinion that war is stupid and people should talk about their problems and work them out. On a certain level, I couldn't agree more. We talked a little bit about how diplomacy works (ambassadors from countries to other countries, with the job of communicating between governments).
• We've been continuing to read the Song of the Lioness books to P, and she hasn't been shy about asking the meanings of unfamiliar words we run across there. She's more forthcoming with such questions than she was when in school, maybe because we just tell her the meanings as straightforwardly as we can, without launching into a lecture (unless she's interested in the topic) or handing her a dictionary. 
• On another reading level, T is starting to ask what some words in books say, and sometimes sounds them out after I tell him. Exciting stuff!
• Adventures continue with sewing and cloth. P has been making things with buttons on them for T, who is still in love with buttoning and unbuttoning his clothes, and starting to branch out into zippers and snaps. P and I investigated one of her dresses with a magnifying glass to determine whether it was woven or knit -- I thought it was knit because of its stretchiness, but P didn't believe it until she saw the stitches up close, at which point she recognized it clearly as a knit fabric. P and T have also done some counting and sorting of buttons from a big bag of inexpensive buttons we had from the fabric store. I think more button acquisitions are in our near future.
• Recently P mentioned a "thousand million billion" of something, so I asked if she know how many zeros were in a thousand. She knew that a hundred had two zeros, and we talked about a thousand having three and a million having six. Then I started asking questions like, "How many zeros in ten thousand?" She did pretty well at using that concept, especially considering we were in the car and had no visual reference. It's still an emerging concept for her, but it was a good start.
• A week or so ago, P and I were talking about how mountain lions are naturally nocturnal, but how some of the lions around here have adapted to their prey, as house cats adapt to their human caretakers, and are hunting during the day. Then just a couple of days ago, I overheard P telling T, "When we got them, our cats were probably nocturnal. Do you know what that means? It means they mostly like to sleep during the day and be awake at night. But they like to get lovies and food from us, so they wake up during the day. But they still sleep a lot." I added that cats, big and little, sleep a lot more than us (16 hours per day or more).
• P has not been wanting to talk about choir. It's been seeming like she wasn't having much fun. But when I told her I had really enjoyed singing in choirs and missed the chance to do it now, she perked up and taught me a couple of the songs she's been learning. I'm hoping the sharing of the music will increase the fun for her. We'll see. She still wants to stick with it through the first concert, so we've ordered her uniform, which fortunately was on deep discount.
• Last time I wrote that after hours of a sore leg, P still said she preferred the flu shot to the nasal mist. The next day, though, she told me unsolicited that two days of soreness was too much, and next time she'd choose the mist.

And one more nice thing happened. P told me out of the blue a few days ago, "I don't resist when you want me to help clean up. It's not my favorite thing, but I do it when you ask me to." This was news to me! I do a lot of the cleaning myself or with occasional volunteer help, but I ask for help for 15 minutes or so every few days in the living room, which gets strewn with toys. The next day I asked for help, and P helped cheerfully. She did ask to change from the CD I was playing to one of her own, and since we both know the songs on that CD, we danced and sang our way to a beautiful living room, ready for play dates. It was actually fun, and I don't normally enjoy cleaning up (I know, that's part of the problem -- I'm working on making it look and be more fun so maybe I won't pass that attitude along). I'm looking forward to the next time! 

Forays Into Fantasy

Life has been busy enough that I forgot to keep notes for this blog for several days. On the one hand, that's great -- life is too busy and interesting to remember to write! On the other hand, I like keeping track, for our own benefit, for friends and family keeping up, and in case we need to report to the school district what we've been up to educationally. So here goes with what I can remember!

P and I watched The Wiz together this week, mostly while T was sleeping, since we thought he might be a little too scared. (He did join in right after the flying monkeys, and he did fine.) I wanted P to see this other vision of the famous story and to get an introduction to some of the famous black performers of the Motown era (Michael Jackson is fantastic in this film -- his performance of "You Can't Win" is a heartbreaking contrast between the upbeat song and the optimistic scarecrow's visible, physical anguish at being forced to sing such a pessimistic anthem). P enjoyed the film and songs a lot. We talked a little about racism in Hollywood, and how although this movie offered hundreds of roles for black actors and dancers across a broad spectrum of types (rather than just the stereotypical villain/crook/clownish roles), its commercial failure meant there was a dearth of such roles for some time afterward.

UnschoolerDad (UD) has been continuing to read the Song of the Lioness books to P at bedtime. A happy side effect of this for me has been that UD is involved in the kids' bedtime more consistently than he has been for some time -- he's been head-down on a programming project for several months, but the work is easing up now, so he's more available, and the kids and I all appreciate seeing more of him during our evenings. In the second book, In the Hand of the Goddess, the main character Alanna came of age, became a knight (without her secret of being a girl becoming generally known), and started falling in love. The writing is PG, but UD had me read one evening's worth of slightly steamy stuff to P, thinking she might be more comfortable asking me questions about it if the post-pubescent romance material was confusing for her. He was right (though the key difference may actually be that I am more comfortable eliciting and answering such questions), and it was a good conversation. P's first question was why Alanna was so scared of falling in love. We talked about how strong, unexpected new feelings can feel scary to anyone, and how a girl in Alanna's position (pretending to be a boy to almost everyone in her life) could be especially threatened by such feelings putting her into awkward positions.

I also started reading the first Lemony Snicket book, The Bad Beginning, to the kids. On the surface the content of these books is simply horrible; but I sense (and hear from other adults who have read them to the beloved young people in their lives) that there may be some insights about the real world, some interesting conversations about the conventions of fiction, and some good fun in store. We'll see. One thing is certain: the vocabulary in these books is scrumptious!

Our other fantasy foray this week was buying and beginning to play the game Minecraft. This game does not have a specific plot and cannot be won; it's a sandbox game, with huge creative possibilities, and optionally monsters to be fought. So far the kids want to play in Peaceful mode, in which other beings, when present, leave you alone. P and T both have their own Minecraft worlds they can play in. They're learning the interface, which involves a lot of fine-motor dexterity and procedural learning and memory. When they play with me nearby, they ask questions about the real-world correlates of game elements, like mining, smelting, wood harvesting and milling, cartography, and music-making (!). We're just dabbling so far, but this game has an amazing array of things to explore. I have heard from many other unschooling parents that their kids love Minecraft and have learned a lot from it, including math, reading, and other skills that translate well to the real world.

Other tidbits and highlights from the past several days:

• Both kids continued their gymnastics classes. P took a day off when her leg was sore from a flu vaccine. Interestingly, she chose the shot instead of the nasal mist vaccine, preferring some soreness to the drippy nose; and even after she got sore, she said she'd do it the same way again.
• P is on the cusp of losing a tooth, and she is curious and un-freaked-out about the occasional bleeding as its connections loosen. I am thrilled.
• We took a long walk (2.5 miles round trip) to the nearby shopping center one day. T rode in the stroller a lot, but P walked the whole way without difficulty. There were lots of short stops to check out interesting plants, animals, and especially bugs.
• We went swimming, trying out a flotation device for T. He liked it a lot, and it made it more possible for me to be in deeper water where P could swim (not wade) and get better at it. T is exploring ways of moving himself around in the water now that he doesn't have to cling to me. We'll get to both kids swimming somehow!
• P started her youth choir and learned some good tricks for improving tone, as well as the first part of "Alouette," complete with pretty good French diction. That's one of the things I like about this choir -- lots of opportunities to sing in other languages, and they don't do diction halfway. My own ear for languages is pretty good, and I think it has a lot to do with singing in many languages over the years, usually with skilled diction coaching from choir directors.
• P started a pottery class on handbuilding with terra cotta clay. They're learning basics construction techniques, as well as painting as glazing their items. This class can lead into many more ceramics classes if P chooses.
• Both kids have been enjoying videos: Reading Rainbow (dinosaurs and paleontology), Magic School Bus (Bats, Spiders, Sound -- a repeat, but they learn more each time), and Sid the Science Kid (skeletal system/joints).

Puzzles and Tactics and Books, Oh My!

We are delinquent newspaper readers. We take a newspaper four days per week, but recently I went to bring the trash cans in after collection day, and there were three newspapers in the driveway. I tried to remember what I liked about getting newspapers, and hit on the puzzles in the section with the comics. I thought maybe P would enjoy doing a puzzle or two with me, so I got out the page with the Ken-Ken puzzles. Ken-Ken is a little like Sudoku, but some basic arithmetic is also required. P's getting enough of a grip on her small-numbers arithmetic that I thought it would be fun, and indeed it was. We did two of the "easy" (4x4) puzzles together, with P taking more of a role as we went. She's asked to do them again once or twice in the days since, and our lackadaisical newspaper reading means there are many more in the recycling pile.

Not long after that first Ken-Ken session, P asked me to play tic-tac-toe with her. She knows the rules, but we haven't played very much before. We played about a dozen games, stopping when she'd gotten good enough to reach cat's game most of the time. (It does get old at that point!) She was psyched about learning good enough tactics to keep me from winning, or sometimes win if I made a mistake.

(Writing this blog post, I got curious about whether there was an etymological link between the word "tactics" and the name "tic-tac-toe." Isn't that uncanny? A brief search makes it look like they have completely disjoint etymologies. Too weird! It's still fun to notice and learn new things myself!)

A real-world puzzle got interesting today. P wanted to watch a DVD on our portable player, which has to be plugged in because its battery no longer holds a charge. She took it to her room,  but came back to tell me that the DVD was stopping suddenly in the middle of a video. I asked if she could tell why, and she couldn't, but she went back to her room and put in a different DVD to see if the disc was the problem. Same thing happened, so she decided it must be a problem with the player. I said the suddenness of the shutdown sounded like the power was being interrupted, but she said she'd checked the plug at the player and at the wall, and both were securely plugged in. Out of ideas, I asked her to bring it out to the living room and let me take a look at it. She said that first she'd try plugging it into an outlet in the living room, in case the problem was with the outlet in her room. The same thing happened, so she rechecked the cord connections, and discovered that a connection in the middle of the modular cord that was loose. Problem solved! As she waited for her DVD to rev back up, I said I thought that had been a very scientific approach to the problem -- checking and changing one thing at a time until we found the problem. P said, "Wait a minute. Are you saying you think I'm a scientific girl?" I said yes, and she looked pleased. She knows I think of myself as a scientist (my education and work history center around physics), so "scientific girl" was clearly a compliment. 

Reading goes on, with more reading out loud as we get into the fall and there's less time to play after dinner and before dark. I finished reading Ida B to P, and I was pleased to see that while Ida B would have preferred to stay out of school and learn as she had been doing, she found things to love about school, too. I'd hate to demonize school to my kids and then find ourselves in a situation where they need to go! We started two out-loud books this week: The Borrowers for when both kids are listening, and Alanna for when it's just P. Alanna is our first joint venture into traditional fantasy fiction -- it's about a girl who really wants to become a knight, so she disguises herself as a boy and begins training as a page. UnschoolerDad, who has a very hard time putting down any sci-fi/fantasy book, has taken over reading to P around bedtime so they can enjoy that story together, and he's already put the sequel on hold at the library. P's loving it, too. Both kids are absorbed in The Borrowers. P is also reading on her own, though honestly I don't know what she's reading this week. She did find a couple of new-to-her Magic Tree House books (related to the Revolutionary and Civil Wars this time) at the library last time, plus some Flower Fairy Friends books, so it's likely those.

P got into her children's chorale, with some very appreciative remarks from the director about her ear and her tone/intonation. P was pretty nervous just before and during the first part of the audition, but she warmed up to the director and enjoyed getting the outside-the-family feedback. We now have some very busy weeks ahead. We're trying to fit in a family road trip before winter hits, and it's getting challenging to find a slot where nothing we would miss would lead to trouble, like not being allowed to sing in a concert. But I think we'll manage it. I was thinking that more activities would be okay since the school schedule wasn't such a factor, but we'll have to see if we've overshot the right balance.

One fun set of activities this week was an impulsive on-sale purchase from Barnes and Noble, a kit called Magic School Bus: Back in Time With the Dinosaurs. It has a number of activities with associated short bits of reading about dinosaurs, fossils, paleontology, etc. So far P and I (sometimes with help from T) have put together a wooden T-rex model, sequenced text and drawings showing the steps from live dinosaur to fossil in a paleontologist's lab, buried a plastic dinosaur in sand and plaster to dig up after it hardened, and made a diorama of roughly Cretaceous-period dinosaurs and plants. P did the diorama almost completely independently, enjoying the chance to mix paints and make aesthetic decisions about how to put it all together. We also assembled a timeline from the late Triassic period to modern times and read about the theory that an asteroid impact caused the mass extinctions at the end of the Cretaceous period. It was interesting to contrast this with the dinosaur-extinction story in Fantasia, which P and T had watched earlier that day. Scientists in 1960 would not have known of the asteroid-impact theory, since the K-T boundary was discovered about 1980, and the Chicxulub crater became well-known in the 1990s following early evidence in the 1970s. We still have a couple of activities to go in this kit; it's been a fun one. We have another kit lined up to try, with various electrical things to build. More on that when we get to it.

On the peaceful parenting front, I was reminded this week of the need to look beyond off-track behavior to what it is communicating. We parents often respond too much to the bad deeds themselves, without realizing that pretty much everything a child does or says is some form of communicating the child's needs to us, directly or indirectly. I've been trying to practice looking beyond the behaviors and see what the feelings or needs behind them are, and respond to those rather than simply reiterating and enforcing rules (which have obviously been insufficient to deal with the behaviors, given how much the behaviors have been repeated despite the rules!). 

This kind of looking-beyond is one way I've been trying to use an idea from Sandra Dodd and Pam Sorooshian about making better choices: When I'm deciding what to do in a given moment, I try to think of at least two possibilities, and make the better choice. What's better? Right now my guiding stars are what leads to more of a harmonious, partners-in-learning-and-growing relationship with my kids (rather than the adversarial relationship that comes all too easily, particularly when their behavior is headed off the rails); and what leads to the most interesting learning possibilities. Of course I have other values, but these have been good ones to work with.

And finally, some media the kids have enjoyed this week from the library and Netflix:

• The Way Things Work videos: Cooling and Screws
• Dora the Explorer: Cowgirl Dora DVD. Both kids enjoy the little nuggets of Spanish Dora offers. T has been asking a lot for me to read him books in Spanish and bilingual books. I'll be looking into other Spanish-learning possibilities for me and P when our cash flow improves.
• Peter Pan, the Broadway play with Mary Martin. P and I have fun talking about the demands of staging a fantasy story without movie-style special effects, as well as how the depictions of people like pirates and Indians jibe with what we know from other sources.
• A kids' world music CD from the library. This one is weird, mixing instruments and rhythms from other cultures with well-known tunes from the Euro-American tradition. We comment on what's familiar and new to us, and if I recognize particular elements from other musical traditions (an instrument, a drumming style, etc.), I point them out sometimes.
• Lots of short clips in the PBS Kids iPad app. I was disappointed to discover that this app doesn't include many full episodes; those must be purchased for download. But the short clips help the kids discover what they enjoy most, so we can buy appropriate downloads. When we take our road trip, we won't be able to use streaming content in the car, so the right downloads (and other non-electronic fun stuff, of course) will be key.

Can We Do Some Math? Pleeeease?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other fun bits lately:

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

Interests in the Driver's Seat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!)