When Does This Ruckus Die Down?

Yesterday I spoke with a parent of another child in P's choir, and she mentioned going recently to nearby Rocky Mountain National Park to see the aspen in their fall colors, to see the elk in rut, and to hear them bugling. We didn't have anything scheduled today, so this morning I proposed a day trip and the kids agreed. After lunch we took our warm clothes, snacks, water, and a take-out dinner, and headed up to the park.

On the way, we talked about other things: Why kids can't have credit cards of their own (because they can't legally sign contracts promising to pay on time). How interest on credit cards works. These came up because of an Arthur clip the kids watched on the iPad shortly before we left. Then, as we got out of town, P asked what the difference was between mountains and foothills, and we played around with that, talking about possible ways of making the distinction. Then we talked about National Parks -- why they exist, and how their rules are different from those of city parks (for instance, that those who run the parks leave things closer to their natural state, and that guests aren't supposed to take things away from National Parks), and that there are usually park rangers who live in the National Parks.

Then we reached the visitors' center just outside the park, and the fun gained momentum. We briefly checked out the displays on seasons in the park and saw stuffed local fauna: weasels and ptarmigan in their winter coats/plumage, a badger (P asked if it was related to a skunk because of its stripy markings; we agreed to look it up later), a chickaree, a marten (cute!), and others. We looked through a Discovery Room with local clothing and artifacts from three eras: When the Utes and Arapahoes were the humans living here, the early period of white settlement, and the present. P tried on a sunbonnet and realized why Laura Ingalls always wanted to pull hers off to get her peripheral vision back. We petted pelts from elk, beaver, and squirrel. We smelled beaver castorium (yuck! But it must smell good to beavers), used to bait beaver traps during the settlement era. We felt replica spear heads and arrowheads and saw an atlatl. We checked out a raised-relief map of the park showing alpine tundra, subalpine forest, montane forest, and riparian biomes. We talked about treeline and how it marks the boundary between the first two.

Then we drove into the park and found a good place to watch an elk harem or two do their mating-season thing. I don't think we actually saw any mating take place, though it wasn't for lack of anyone trying. The alpha bull was too busy chasing away satellite bulls to get busy with the cows, most of whom were probably already pregnant anyway, since the mating season is almost over. One bystander said that alpha bulls lose a lot of weight during the six-week mating season, since they have very little time to rest or eat, especially if they have large harems. The one we were watching most was trying to keep upwards of 30 cows to himself, and he had his work cut out for him! I got to listen in on a naturalist speaking to a group of people he'd brought in, and I passed along interesting tidbits to P about:

• Harem size (from a few cows to the larger group we saw): in larger harems, more cows are mated by non-alpha males, which increases the genetic diversity of the herd
• Dominance (alpha male tries to pass on his own genes; other males sneak in to mate if they can get away with it)
• Scent marking of females by males (the males pee on their own front legs, and then mount for the sole purpose of rubbing those legs on the females' flanks. This would explain some of the smelly reputation elk have, I guess!)
• Cows get to decide whether to allow an approaching male to mate them; most cows try to get pregnant early in the season so their calves will be born earlier in the year and size up better before the next winter.

We also talked about aspen, since we could see some beautiful stands of them, some still with their golden foliage: How they are fast growers but individually not very long-lived; but how this doesn't matter much, since they send out runners and spread so successfully that an individual aspen organism can have hundreds of trunks. Some of our neighbors have aspens in their front yards; we'll check next time we walk by for nearby volunteers. We talked about pine bark beetles, about which there were many informational displays in the park, and about how we may have to remove our Ponderosa pine this winter, since it appears to have become infested (we should be able to tell for sure and get it removed before the next generation of beetles flies and endangers neighbors' trees). The ranger on hand talked to us for a while. I asked her if there was an hour when the elks' ruckus tended to die down. She said nope, she lives in the park, and those guys bugle all night long.

Oh, the bugling. It's quite an eerie noise. My mamma mind kept switching between enjoying its strangeness, filtering it out as if it were the sound of kids playing a rowdy game in the distance, and being startled at the apparent sound of someone getting mauled by a bear! Last night when I was hatching my day-trip plan, I searched for YouTube videos posted in the last week of elk at Rocky Mountain National Park and found one posted just two days earlier. When I played it, after the kids were asleep, UnschoolerDad was nearby but not watching my screen. He just about panicked, wondering who was screaming bloody murder in our house and why.

On the way home, after a joyful time browsing the gift shop, we discussed high-beams and the etiquette of using them, as well as the uses and geometry of reflectors. We stopped at a dark pullout to check out the sky, and we saw the Milky Way, which we can't see in town. Aaaahhhhhh.

This was definitely our densest day of learning this week, but there have been several other highlights. Here are some:

• P went through a couple of days of scanning maps, finding places she wanted to know something about, and asking me questions to research online: "How many pyramids are there in Egypt? What can you tell me about the Congo? What kinds of animals live in South Africa? What kinds of houses do people live in in Australia?" We found pretty good answers to those, though she moved on quickly to other questions. Another map examination was punctuated with, "Hey, did you know there are two Russias on this map?" (Like most world maps, it wraps at the International Dateline, so there's a bit of Eastern Russia up there by Alaska.)
• P is sewing up a storm, crafting odd little things with lots of buttons to satisfy T's button mania, and making plans for bigger and more complicated things every day. She wants to sew by hand, not machine, and rejects many of my suggestions, but she's making very interesting progress without much guidance. Halloween costumes are in the bag with pretty much no input from me, which is a nice change!
• P is interested in helping T finish learning his letters; he's a highly motivated learner right now, as he starts to recognize and/or sound out the occasional word. This is prompting a certain amount of regularizing of her own writing, as I gently point out places where she's substituting a capital for a lowercase letter, writing something backwards, etc. P went through a period of not wanting her writing to be governed by outside rules, but she understands why I'd want T to be exposed to a less eccentric version of writing. I enjoy the fact that real-life considerations are motivating her to change where my earlier exhortations could not.
• At pottery class this week, the teacher gave T a lump of clay to play with on the way home when we picked P up from class. P enjoyed showing T some of what she's been learning and wants to get some play-dough going at home again so they can try it all out together. T loved the feel of the clay, and the difference the next day when it had dried and hardened, and getting to play with some of the fired items P's been bringing home.
• T checked out more than half the books on trucks, airplanes, and cars from the kids' section of our branch library this week. He has me read him the steps of the diesel-engine cycle over and over. I think there's something he's missing that he keeps trying to find there: he keeps telling me, "No! Read the whole thing!" even when I've read every word, and sometimes provided additional explanation where it seemed helpful. Perhaps we can find or build a model of an engine (or at least a cylinder and piston) we can play with, or barring that, an animation we can run and stop and talk about as much as he likes.
• P had two good play dates this week with friends from her former school, which was good, since we decided to skip Park Day because of a potty-training snag. Fortunately, things are getting better again with T's potty use. Knock wood!
• Both kids enjoyed a Magic School Bus DVD from the library. It included nice episodes on athletic performance (the relationships between oxygen, lactic acid, muscle performance, and the jobs of the heart and lungs); forces (types of forces, friction, and what life would be like without friction); and archaeology (how archaeologists use available information to form hypotheses about artifacts and then test their hypotheses using logical deduction and additional information).
• The kids discovered another show to love on the PBSKids iPad app. It's called Wild Kratts, and it's a fun exploration of lots of animals and their special "powers." The imaginative play between the kids has taken a turn toward the spandex-clad and superhero-themed recently, and now animal powers have been added to that mix.
• Both kids are enjoying shadow play with flashlights and hand shadows. T is finally starting to get the hang of tracking down the origins of scary-looking shadows in his room at night, as the concept of shadows-as-areas-of-blocked-light gets more solid for him.

I'm beginning to think this ruckus is never going to die down. And that's fine with me!

P.S. I ran across this blog post, which does a nice job of gathering together thoughts on why one might decide to unschool, what it's like, and why we might reasonably expect it to successful and way more fun than school. Also, this other post is a great explanation of why "child-led learning" is a misleading characterization of unschooling. Going to hear elk bugling today was not my kids' idea. It took a little selling to make the trip sound attractive enough that they wanted to go. But everyone was glad to have gone, and so (I hope!) my stock as a suggester of cool experiences, rich in learning opportunities, goes up.

A Complex, but Robust, Balance

A little over a week ago, I was waiting during P's gymnastics class and sitting next to a parent I know and his daughter, who's in third or fourth grade. She was working on a school assignment, and he was clearly anxious for her to make as much progress as possible during her sister's gymnastics class. He was pushing hard, and when she resisted (she seemed tired and not interested in the assignment), he moved on to belittling statements and questions. I was feeling really awkward, since I don't know this family well enough to have a good defusing intervention ready. I was glad when a relative of his came along, saw the stress, and talked to him long enough to give his daughter a break. But during that interaction, a funny thing was happening. I had an unschooler's voice in my head with an answer to every word out of his mouth. A lot of the answers had to do with this assignment being too involved for its purpose. She was supposed to draw several pictures representing events in a chapter book she'd read, then write several sentences about each picture. And he was having her do a rough draft, in preparation for a more perfected final draft later. This project, taking hours of her life, would probably have an audience of one -- a teacher, probably bored with grading 25 similar assignments. This girl was tired and in no way primed to be doing creative work, especially on a project not of her own choosing. Oh my gosh, I could go on and on.

But the other thing happening was that I could hear myself, a year ago (before I started thinking about unschooling our kids) and in some cases more recently, saying many things similar to what this dad was saying. It was painful to hear, both that way and in the moment for the daughter's sake. But it helped me see how far my thinking had come on what was useful for learning. It made me intensely glad I wasn't having to flog my own kids through long, involved school assignments in which they had no interest -- this seems like the surest way to produce adults with no interest in reading, writing, creativity, or whatever is being forced. And for the first time, I felt a deep sense that we were on the right path. I was high for days, and it was hard to tell anyone, since most of the non-parents I know wouldn't get it, and most of the parents with kids in school would feel bad. I finally got to tell it a week later at an unschooling park day, where it made no splash -- these parents already know this stuff -- but it felt good. I feel I'm finally starting to find my balance and stride as an unschooling mom. And as the rest of this entry will reflect, it's a balance with a million little parts, like a huge Alexander Calder mobile. It looks like it shouldn't work sometimes, but it's actually quite sturdy, and the whole picture created is so beautiful.

Today I read a John Taylor Gatto essay, "The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher," in which Gatto enumerates the soul-crushing, conformity-enforcing lessons of school that make it an efficient way of producing interchangeable parts of a permanent underclass. The essay built on the feelings of that gymnastics-class episode, and added the feeling that my evolving beliefs about how learning happens have ruined me as a future classroom teacher in any conventionally structured school. This is probably fine. But if I'm looking at going back into education (I taught public and private school for a few years here and there), I'll be interested to read more about Gatto's free school, and whether what he does there reflects a very different vision of school.

In other school-related thoughts, I read something this week on my favorite unschooling email list (AlwaysLearning) about how kids in school often learn to bluff their way through, appearing as though they know more than they really do -- and that this translates into being reluctant to ask questions. This resonates with my own experience of school (though I also sat near the front and asked lots of questions by the time I got to grad school, having decided there was something I wanted from school other than looking good to my instructors), and it totally fits with my observation that P has become more willing to ask questions -- about all kinds of things -- the longer she's been away from school. I love that she asks questions, and it shows; I'm sure that helps. Now the value in bluffing by avoiding questions is gone, unless she's so engrossed in something (a good story, say) that she doesn't want to interrupt it with a question and answer. When I listen to the rhythms as UnschoolerDad reads to P from the Song of the Lioness series, which they are both enjoying and have almost finished, I hear lots of pauses for questions about unfamiliar words or about why the story is unfolding the way it is.

These last two weeks have been curiously lean on notes to add to this blog, and yet I have the feeling that learning is happening at a terrific pace. It's an odd feeling, probably rooted partly in the fact that both kids have sources of information beyond my direct knowledge and control, including books, videos and games they're experiencing without me right by their sides. Sometimes that learning surfaces, as when P spotted the title of a sci-fi novel I'd just picked out from the library (Galileo's Dream) and asked about it -- it turned out that the PBS Kids show Martha Speaks (note: this link makes noise!) had included a segment on Galileo, from the apocryphal point of view of his dog, who'd inadvertently inspired some of his discoveries about physics. We talked a little on the walk from the library back to the car about Galileo's contributions to science, and also his heresy trial, and we talked about how the Galilean moons (the biggest four moons of Jupiter) were all eventually named for people Zeus (aka Jupiter) had abducted or otherwise misappropriated -- we looked them up later at home to find the story of each. Unlike P's knowledge about Galileo, some of what the kids are learning may never become obvious to me. Still, though, there's been a lot of learning I could observe and participate in.

On a car ride somewhere, UnschoolerDad was saying something about Sputnik, and T asked what a satellite is. We talked a little about natural and human-made satellites, and about how some satellites send pictures of the earth from above. In a short internet search for information about satellites, I ran across a photo of an infrared astronomical satellite whose data I had crunched a bit during a summer astronomy internship in college! Later, the kids and I used Google Maps' satellite view to look at a lake nearby where we've played, at our house, and at the houses of some family and friends. We followed our walking routes on streets on the map, from our house to places nearby that we knew, using what we knew about each place to find exactly the right houses -- a beautiful way to relate maps to reality. Then, at T's request, we followed the railroad tracks from where we usually see them to the southeast until we found a train. That took a while! T has continued asking where things are on maps -- he now has Colorado located on the huge world map that was a gift from grandparents this year, and several times a week he asks what something on that map or some other map is. P has asked fewer questions about geography so far (though as I edit this post, she is poring over maps and asking me questions about places she sees on them), but she follows along, and sometimes she and T make up adventures in which they sail or fly between distant points on the world map, following tortured routes. I think I'd like to find some maps at different scales showing where we live, from the city level to the region, so we can trace our travels together on a finer scale than a world map provides.

While we were mousing around Google Maps, we were also building a matchbox-like container from cardboard to be a dresser drawer for a doll (this involved drawing patterns on graph paper and estimating how much extra size the outer layer would need -- we estimated a little tight, but P adapted the technology to make many doll-size treasure chests and wastebaskets with lever-action lids, which T gleefully filled with tiny bits and bobs) and letting white glue dry on the pad of my finger so the kids could see the fingerprint after it was peeled off. They liked seeing the stages of drying and feeling the roughness of the fingerprint-impression. This mixed-up day was one of the best in my memory for following the kids' desires where they led.

Last night we spent the evening at the library, as P read the last third of a chapter book she really wanted to finish that was due that day, and T played with the puzzles and looked at board books in the kids' area. I got more time than usual to browse the kids' books for interesting stuff, and came up with three books I thought would catch P's interest. They were all quite successful; P was engaged, making links to prior knowledge and taking in new information, even pointing out inconsistencies between text and illustrations that were relevant to the stories.

• Giants in the Land is about the giant pine trees that used to grow in New England, and how they were harvested to make masts for the British navy. At the end of the story, 1775 brought the end to the shipping of American mast trees to England; this meshed with Revolutionary War on Wednesday, a Magic Tree House book P recently read on her own.
• Shibumi and the Kitemaker is a wonderful view of the class disparity in an imaginary feudal society similar to imperial Japan, and how the emperor's daughter decided to change the squalor and suffering in the city surrounding her walled garden. P and I talked briefly while reading it, about how feudal society was structured, and how there is still class disparity and concentration of wealth under capitalist systems. 
• Songs from the Loom: A Navajo Girl Learns to Weave gave a culturally-grounded view of some of my favorite crafts, spinning and weaving. It included some of the Navajo stories related to weaving and described the processes at a perfect level for P to absorb (though I, as a weaver, wanted more detail about how the loom worked -- but that's information I can find!). It also included a brief history of the Navajos' being expelled from and later regaining the rights to their ancestral lands in the Four Corners region, with associated information on Navajo-U.S. relations and tribal governance. In several more years, P may have a chance to go on a yearly trip to tribal lands in this region with youth and adults from our church. I hope that some grounding in Navajo and Hopi culture will make that a welcome and rich experience for her. [Note Oct. 15: just noticed and corrected some sloppy editing in this paragraph. Sorry about that!]

In my previous post I wrote about P wanting to set up in the driveway and sell stuff. One Saturday morning recently, she decided she wanted to set up a free face-painting booth in the driveway. We were in good shape to hang out, so she did. I showed her how to clean the face crayons with alcohol between faces to prevent passing germs; she made a sign and gathered her materials, and then she went out to sit. I took a book out to her to pass the time on our oh-so-out-of-the-way street, though mostly she looked around at squirrels and such so she wouldn't get too absorbed in her book (her phrasing! I love this kid!) and miss a person going by. T went out to sit with her after a while. As no one continued to come by, they got interested in crushing rocks to powder with harder rocks, and drawing on the driveway with rocks, to see what kinds of colors they could get. After a couple of hours and zero potential customers, P decided to close up shop. She'd had a good time, and she hasn't yet asked again to set up a garage sale. It felt good to me to support what she wanted to do without trying to reshape it too much (but after being her ally by telling her what information I could about what it might take to succeed). And the little geology lesson was an unexpected bonus. We tried mixing the rock powders with water and found the resulting paints unsatisfactory. We may try making milk paints or oil paints from crushed rock at some point.

Other recent highlights:

• P spotted an articulated bus and tried to point it out, but she ended up saying "crenellated" instead. I said "articulated" so she could remember the word she wanted, but then it led to a discussion of medieval fortifications, with photos on the Web when we got home. In an unusual moment, P said of crenellated, "Thanks for teaching me that word, mama!"
• P asked for some big paper to put up on the wall so she could write down word families to show T. She misspelled some of them, but she let me write the correct spelling of one word per family so she could correct them all. It was fun brainstorming words in each family and noting some homonyms (e.g., code doesn't belong in the family with toad and road.)
• T continues to ask lots of questions about what sounds letters make, what words say, how to spell words, and how to write letters. I gave him a composition book with big triple lines for writing. He can't use the lines very well yet, but he likes it when I take story dictation from him and write it down, and sometimes he asks me to guide his fingers to write a letter. Today as we settled down for a nap together, I was reading a novel, and T asked me to read it out loud to him. He seemed to enjoy it even though I was pretty sure he didn't understand much of it. At a couple of points he pointed with his finger, following along as if pointing at what I was reading, though he was on the opposite page. I took his cue and pointed where I was actually reading. He asked about the page numbers and how to say them (e.g., 63 is sixty-three), and also about how to pronounce combinations of letters he could see on the page. He also loves Super Why (noisy link), a PBS Kids series about letters, spelling, and reading.
• Both kids are enjoying watching Word Girl on Amazon video. Recently P watched several episodes while I folded laundry and watched with her. After some episodes we'd check and reinforce the meanings of the words emphasized. Some of these check-ins also led to discussions of civics concepts like candidates and elections (one episode included a student council election and a local election for District Attorney) or literary contexts like a school Shakespeare play.
• Both kids are also enjoying Sid the Science Kid (another noisy link), which we find on Netflix. It's very schooly, but they find the information interesting, and some of it (the importance of brushing teeth and balanced nutrition, for example) is helpful in the family.
• UnschoolerDad found the Toontastic app for iPad, and P has been making some of her own cartoons with it. It prompts for different parts of the story arc and provides music choices authors can pair with their cartoon scenes. It's fun to see the kids becoming multi-literate in different computer platforms -- touch-screen tablets, laptops, iOS, Windows, Android -- I get the feeling they'll be more comfortable than I am with a lot of technology before long.
• P and I did the experiment of filling a bowl to the brim with ice and water, and then watching the water level as the ice melted. It stayed the same -- water really expands a lot when it freezes. We'll see more of that in our environment as winter comes; yesterday I winterized the swamp cooler, and P asked why, so I talked about water pipes bursting or the swamp cooler reservoir cracking if we leave water in them during freezing weather.
• P and I found about four different ways to think about the question, "How many cups are in six quarter cups?" (we've done this before, but we found more ways this time) as I was cooking some quinoa recently. She's doing these little math-storms with me much more willingly than she used to, with almost no anxiety. It's good to see.

And then there's daydreaming. P recently said she'd like to have a whole room full of cool stuff she could use to learn. With a gate on it to keep T out. T has mastered baby gates, so that's not going to happen, but I sympathize with the desire to have more stuff -- electrical parts, microscopes, Cuisenaire rods (whether they use them for math or not, these were great fun for me as a kid for their catapult-building potential, and I still think of short distances in centimeters easily because of them), more kinds of building toys, and whatever else we can think of. It's fun to daydream of what we can do when we have an income again. Until then, there are bargains, libraries, free museums, and many possibilities afforded by our existing possessions. T's current favorite is a hand-cranked popcorn popper with conical gears on top for turning the stirring rod. Good stuff.

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.