Six-Second Science Fair and color-changing Polly Pockets spark an eventful week of exploration and learning

Starting two weeks ago, I decided to try an idea gleaned from a local homeschoolers' email list, in a discussion about record keeping. One mom used a teacher's plan book to keep track of her kids' studies -- one column per kid. I used teacher plan books for four years as a secondary teacher (one column per class), and I'm comfortable with that format. The next day I saw a teacher plan book on the $1 rack at Target, so I bought it and gave it a try.

I set things up with one column per general subject area, so I could see how our activities and learning were balancing out across subjects. The first problem I noticed was that teacher plan books only go Monday-Friday! That's okay -- I had a column left over, so we use that for overflow: Saturday and Sunday activites, and anything I can't fit in the regular columns for the week.

I leave the plan book on a coffee table by the couch where I frequently take little rests during the day, so it's easy to jot down whatever's happened most recently. This is also nice because instead of being in front of my computer in the kitchen when I'm making notes, I'm closer to whatever the kids are doing, and off my feet!

So this week, my summary will be loosely organized by subject. Some things overlap -- we Read about Science or History, for example. It's all good.

Science

• One morning, P brought me a small Lego construction: a buoy with a flag on top, easily recognizable. We tried floating it in a bowl of water, and it floated on its side. Throughout the day, both kids and I tried different things to try to get it to float upright: adding more weight on the bottom, etc. P found that it would float upright if she removed the sideways-pointing part of the flag, which was making its weight distribution asymmetric.
• P asked me how her Polly Pocket's hair was able to turn pink when warm and purple when cold. I didn't know, so we looked it up online. We found two possible mechanisms: thermochromism and halochromism. P was game for an explanation, so I drew diagrams to talk about different colors of light having different wavelengths; constructive and destructive interference resulting in crystals looking the colors they do, and how a crystal whose plane spacing changes could look different colors as the path length difference for diffracted light changes. These were in ascending order of complexity, and I think P grasped about the first half. Then we looked at halochromism and looked up the materials typically used and their relevant stats, especially the melting point of dodecanol, which turns out to be very close to that of coconut oil! When the dodecanol is liquid, salts in the halochromic microcapsules are dissolved, which changes the pH of the package and results in the protonation (or loss of a proton) by a dye molecule, which changes color as a result. I put a small lump of solid-at-room-temperature coconut oil on P's fingertip, and we watched it quickly melt; so it was easy to see how a transition from ice water to warm breath could change the color of a doll's hair if it had halochromic microcapsules on board. Again, I think P grasped the melting point and solubility parts, but the finer points of pH-driven reactions are a bit beyond our current level.
• We all watched a great video, which we found on thekidshouldseethis.com, full of 6-second science fair videos. One bit showed putting eggs into vinegar and dissolving the shells, so the eggs end up squishy sacs of yolk and white. P and I decided to do that, and watched the bubbling surfaces of the eggs. I know calcium carbonate was a major constituent of eggshells, so we also put a Tums in some vinegar to see if it would behave similarly, which it did (until the reaction stopped, probably because there wasn't enough vinegar in the little bowl we were using -- this led to a little talk about limiting reagents in reactions). I looked up the chemical reaction between calcium chloride and acetic acid, and P and I talked some about that, drawing diagrams of the molecules and noting which parts would dissociate or connect. The partial charges on the ions in the reactions needed more explanation, so I drew some atomic-shell diagrams to talk about why an atom might be inclined to gain or give up an electron. I used the ionic bonding of NaCl as an extreme example of this, and we found a cool video showing NaCl dissolving. The shape of the NaCl crystal in the video as it dissolved, first becoming pitted and then coming apart more completely, was reminiscent of what we'd seen in the dissolving antacid.

• Meanwhile, we kept an eye on the eggs. They were brown eggs, and we were surprised to see that the brown color didn't go all the way through the shells, but was the first part to dissolve away, while there was still plenty of hard shell left. We wondered whether tasting the solution the eggs were in was okay, so we looked up the reaction products and researched the one that wasn't familiar, calcium acetate. Safe enough, we decided. The next day, when the eggshells were fully dissolved, I tasted them (we had one hard-boiled and one raw; I cooked the raw one first) and, based on my review of the experience (yuck; vinegary, but not in a pleasant way), P decided not to taste them.
• We all read some Magic School Bus chapter books this week, about insects (predation, digestion, spider webs, compound eyes, speedy motion, and more) and electric storms (T only for this: cloud formation, types, and evolution; buildup of charges at top and bottom of a storm cloud; formation of hail).
• P and T watched Magic School Bus videos about decomposition, eggs, and dinosaurs.
• One day when he tired of Minecraft, T sat down with me to look at our big anatomy book. He wanted to see the heart, then the brain. We looked at the cardiac cycle and at the brain's sensory, motor, and language functions. Each time we saw a brain region on a diagram, I'd touch T's head in the corresponding place. He was telling me about some of the areas himself before we were done, so he was clearly engaged.
• In conjunction with our atomic-shell diagrams, P and I looked at the Periodic Table of the Elements and talked about why it has the shape it does (outer electron shells accommodate more electrons, so more different elements go by as you fill them) and what it would look like if it didn't have to fit on a standard-shape piece of paper (lanthanide and actinide series inserted, making the table much wider).
• Inspired by another 6-second science fair bit, P drew an arrow and wrote her name backwards (mirror-image) on a small piece of paper, and we held it behind a glass full of water, seeing how at short distance it magnified, while at greater distances the images were reversed. That called to P's prior experience with magnifying glasses.

Math and Spatial Skills

• Both kids did a lot of building in Minecraft this week. One day I went to the basement for maybe half an hour to deal with laundry, and when I came back, both kids had built rather impressive roller coasters with mine carts! They spent hours over the next few days embellishing these, adding new shapes and underground sections, adding powered track sections to boost speed, playing with block foundations to adjust slope, and so on.
• Both kids have also been experimenting with TNT in Minecraft. Simple experiments result in near-simultaneous explosions of multiple blocks, leaving a very satisfying hole in the ground. After watching a video about TNT cannons, P built one, using redstone wiring to produce a simultaneous explosion of a ring of TNT blocks, propelling her character (on a stone block in the center of the ring) straight up, well above the clouds. They do these tricks in Creative mode, so their characters don't get hurt by the explosions and so they'd have a ready supply of TNT.
• T asked me one evening, while I was reading to him, to say what the page number said. It was 79, and he seemed amazed it was so high. In the days since, I've asked him about a few two-digit page numbers, and he has interpreted them correctly. For 41, he also thought about what it would be if the digits were reversed, but he needed me to tell him that 14 was fourteen.
• P and I made a number line for T from string and construction-paper rectangles. It goes up to 21, which is his favorite number. We used paper color and other markings to facilitate skip-counting of evens, odds, fives, and tens. T likes it and has gone to it spontaneously a couple of times to count out loud and look at the numbers. We hope this will help him through the teens, which are a little hard to remember how to write, and where he usually skips a number or two when counting out loud.
• When P and I were talking about constructive and destructive interference of light waves, we discovered she didn't really know what negative numbers were. So I drew a number line that went both ways and showed her how to add positive and negative numbers on it. She quickly grasped this, so I also showed her subtraction of positive and negative numbers, both on the number line and in algebraic notation. She got it easily. We also looked a bit at algebraic notation for variables (e.g., the many ways to write multiplication), and how to write and evaluate simple expressions with variables. During this whole process, I could see P getting excited about these concepts in the same way I remember doing when I first learned them. It was so much fun to share concepts I love and have P share the feeling! 

Reading and Writing

• We finished reading out loud the Olympian Gods section of D'Aulaire's Greek Mythology. Both kids still listen closely to this.
• We checked out an e-book version of Theodosia and the Serpents of Chaos from our local library. P was delighted that we could do this late in the evening, when the library was closed, and without going anywhere. It's a book about the daughter of two Egyptologists who own a museum of antiquities in London, around 1900. We get snapshots of life in that period, bits of the political scene in Europe, bits of Egyptian history and mythology, and some British slang along with this interesting story. P was also delighted to see that my new Kindle has a built-in dictionary lookup function, so if a word is in its downloaded dictionary, we can just look it up as we're reading. There's a lot of good vocabulary in this book, so I pause to check if I think a word is unfamiliar to the kids, and give them a definition or explanation if they need it. Sometimes they ask, too, about unfamiliar words. Interestingly, Theodosia does not go to school -- her parents don't pay much attention to her, and when she didn't return to boarding school after a dreadful term there, they didn't force the issue. She is now an autodidact, well versed in Egyptian writing and magic from her readings in the museum library, and learning as she goes about Egyptian history.
• P read quite a bit of Theodosia out loud as I was giving T a bath this week. I haven't heard her read out loud much recently (though she does read to T beyond my hearing sometimes), and I was pleased to hear her fluency and expression as she read.
• UnschoolerDad has been reading more of The Burning Bridge to P.
• See Science for Magic School Bus reading this week.
• A local unschooler, considering buying tablets for her kids, asked about the differences between Minecraft versions for PC and tablet. P knows a lot about this, so she helped me write an email about the most important differences. The information was very useful to the person asking the question.
• When we were having sandwiches for lunch with my parents visiting, and I was dealing with dietary differences for many people, P wrote a list of what she would like on her sandwich so I wouldn't get confused.

Social Studies: History/Geography/Civics/Economics

• See Reading for what some of what we learned this week in history.
• UnschoolerDad was on a business trip this week, so T and I took a look at our world map to see where he was compared to where we were.
• One one longish drive home, P asserted that she already knew the rules of the road and just needed to learn how to drive when it was time. I asked if she would like for me to quiz her on that, and she said sure. So I did, and it turned out she still had some learning to do, though she has absorbed quite a bit. She enthusiastically talked laws and defensive driving with me the rest of the way home.
• On the 50th anniversary of MLK's famous speech at the March on Washington, I didn't get it together to show them the speech, but at bedtime we talked some about what people were fighting for, and I sang them "We Shall Overcome" as one of their bedtime songs.
• In connection with checking out e-books, P wondered why only one person could check out a given copy of an e-book at one time. We talked about the economics of publishing, and how publishers who have been making money on printed books still want to make money on library books (which they do, since the books can be lent to only one person at a time and eventually wear out and require replacement), and how those publishers have made e-book deals with libraries that mirror those for print books, because they're afraid they'll lose their revenue stream otherwise. We also talked about how, technically, e-books could be much more widely available, and how this would be desirable from the consumer's point of view, but might lead to problems for publishers.

Everything Else: Art, Music, PE, and Miscellaneous Learning and Exploration

• With UnschoolerDad out of town and calling us most evenings, both kids have finally learned how to carry on a conversation on the phone! It's easy to forget how weird this situation is for little kids. It requires not only thinking about a person they can't see, but also thinking a little about that person's perspective: what would they be interested to hear about? What can they sense, and not, about your surroundings as you talk with them? P was pretty good at it already, but she's getting better, too.
• P started a new weekly gymnastics class and is enjoying it.
• T has been making good use of our mini-trampoline, jumping often when he has excess energy to burn.
• I've been playing guitar and singing at bedtime most nights. P has been joining in as she learns songs, and also starting to harmonize a bit.
• With my parents visiting, we rented a canoe and a paddleboat at a nearby lake and went boating for an hour. We saw little trees that had grown in the spring and early summer while the lake was empty, some of them now far out in the lake. We saw fish jumping and speculated about why there are many bubbly places in the lake -- oxygenation for the fish, perhaps, or maybe that's where the lake gets filled? P learned a little about how to cooperate in paddling a canoe.
• P did some nice drawings while I read to her, working on shading to produce some three-dimensional effects in drawing hair in particular.
• T came up with an original (I think) idea in Minecraft. Since some blocks stick to others sideways while others fall when unsupported beneath, he built a tall shaft for crushing things (chickens, mostly). It has windows on one side for putting in whatever he wants to crush. He puts a sticky stone block with some sand blocks on top of it near the top of the shaft, and then he destroys the stone block so the sand falls all the way down.

Spanning a Summer

Whew! It's been a long and mostly pretty lazy summer. I have not been keeping notes. When the local schools started back in, I bought a teacher plan book and have been using it to keep a diary of what kinds of things we're up to. So this entry will be an experimental amalgam of a few notes left over from May and my first-week-of-the-school-year notes. Enjoy!

Reading

• T is doing an interesting thing with Scribblenauts. He doesn't know how to spell many words, so he asks for us to spell them or type them in for him. But the memory holds the last 5 items typed in, and I think, from watching him play, that he can read at least some of those words, from seeing them and using them repeatedly. He'll scroll through to SHOVEL, for example, and say, "I'll delete SHOVEL" (to type in the word he now wants). Something I thought odd until now about the game is that while the keyboard is labeled in capital letters, what you type shows up in lowercase letters unless you capitalize it. So there's a subtle nudge to identify capital with lowercase letters, which seems to be working out for T.
• I was looking at the Union for Concerned Scientists' top 12 political cartoons for the past year. P saw them and was curious about what they meant, so we talked about the issues they covered: global warming, climate change deniers, and the tendency for politicians to deny climate change or move slowly to do anything about it. We talked about what kinds of things cause climate change, and P decided on the spot to bike instead of driving to her gymnastics lesson, which required a speedy departure to be on time! I jogged alongside and got a nice workout, and we both enjoyed it.
• Both kids and I signed up for our local library's summer reading program. A lot of our reading has been out loud, though P does some reading on her own. We're powering through the end of the Little House series together. I've also been reading Barbara Kingsolver's latest and some Neal Stephenson -- the latter mostly out loud to UnschoolerDad, who also loves Stephenson. He and I learn new words frequently, as Stephenson never skimps on the vocabulary he uses in his writing. Even my downloaded dictionary doesn't go far enough, so we search the web and ask friends in relevant fields to try to track down what the heck we're reading about.
• We finished the summer reading program, all of us reaching the top goals for the program. We read the rest of the Little House series, several American Girl books about history around WWII, a book called Willow Chase (a fictional diary of two days in a journey by wagon train from Ohio to Kansas in the 1860s), and much more. The kids, in exchange for logging 1,440 minutes of reading time, got some cool prizes, like books to keep, passes to a local amusement park and free frozen yogurt. I, in exchange for reading at least 1,440 pages and writing three book reviews, got my name entered in a drawing for a Kindle, which I won! That was a good day. I've been reading a book about the history of Islam on my Kindle.
• UnschoolerDad has been reading the Ranger's Apprentice series to P. Having finished The Ruins of Gorlan, they're now on to the second book, The Burning Bridge.
• I read the kids a poem about vultures after we watched a great video about vultures -- see Watching below.
• T continues to show signs of reading. When he asked what RUSSIA said on the map and I told him, he immediately spotted the other RUSSIA at the other side of the map. He also read a sign in Minecraft that said, inexplicably, "PLEASE ENJOY YOUR FOOD." His self-expression is also getting very precise. I asked him the other day if he was all dressed to go out. He said clearly, "I have on night-time underwear, but I can handle that." 
• We've read some Magic School Bus books recently, covering fish (coral reefs, camouflage, defenses, ecosystems, damages from fishing, coral reproduction, global warming, cleaner fish); sharks; and insects (exoskeletons, predator/prey relationships, coloring as warning and as camouflage, the differences between insects and arachnids).
• We've read about half of D'Aulaire's book of Greek Mythology, which I found very strong recommendations for on homeschooling sites and then on Amazon. The book is in accessible language, but it's not dumbed down; it's a rich text for kids and adults both. Both kids seem to enjoy it quite a bit. We've read about all the Olympian gods now, and some of the stories connected with them. We still have minor gods, nymphs, satyrs, and so on to read about.
• T and I enjoyed the book The Moonlight Kite from the library together. 
• With P, we also read First Day in Grapes, about the child of Latino migrant fruit pickers, how life was for him in school, and how he dealt with bullying from kids making fun of his ethnicity and food. We talked about how, during the Great Depression, some of my grandparents worked picking fruit.

• We all read One Hen, a story about microfinance in West Africa and how a small loan allowed a family to grow an egg business into the largest in Africa.
• One morning when UnschoolerDad was out of town, I woke up before the kids and wanted to run on the treadmill in the basement. I wasn't sure they'd realize where I was, so I wrote a note and put it where they'd see it. P read it easily of course. T didn't think he could, but he figured out some of the words when we looked at it together. I had added a couple of drawings to help him figure it out if he woke up before P. He liked that -- I think I'll be leaving more notes.

Doing 

• P and T have been playing with Marble Math on the iPad, the multiplication version. T is still learning to recognize all the numbers, so he needs someone to tell him what numbers to find and roll his marble over. P is learning some multiplication facts through playing the game. She asks for lots of answers, but not all of them. They also play Rocket Math together, with P doing most of the math, T entering the answers, and me supplying the rapid-fire answers in one stage of the game.
• P went to a week-long Girl Scout day camp with a focus on things related to the movie Brave. She's been having fun with archery in particular, but also on offer have been Irish dance, rock climbing, needlework, cooking, and more. This is her first time at Girl Scout camp, so she's also learning songs, customs, etc. related to scouting.
• P got a generous birthday check from a grandparent. Without any prompting, she decided she wanted to spend a good deal of it on a Heifer International donation. We perused their online catalog, and she decided on a flock of chicks. Then she spent the rest on a Lego set for herself and was happy.
• There's been lots of Minecraft playing here. P and T figured out they could play in the same world if they used their iPads on the same wireless network. UnschoolerDad also set up a Minecraft server so they could play together (and be joined by their cousin) on the PC version of the game. P has been a fast and prolific Minecraft builder for some time, and now T has joined her. I'm awed by what he comes up with and executes. It's creative, beautiful, and large! And there's some reading going on; he can tell me what many of his building materials are, partly based on the names that appear when he mouses over them in his inventory in the game.
• P and T are both playing Dragonvale on their iPads. They are getting some experience with reading large numbers (into the tens of millions) as they keep track of their gold and gems and what they can buy with them.
• T went to the rec center for badminton with UnschoolerDad a couple of weekends, and T helped look for the right locker number when they were done. Locker numbers there are three-digit numbers. T doesn't really understand three-digit numbers yet, but he's working on it. He's been asking about two-digit numbers in his Lego instructions, and I think those are starting to make some sense to him. P and I made him a number line to hang on the wall so he could see what the numbers look like in order, with odd and even numbers on different-colored paper rectangles, and special markings on multiples of 5 and 10 so we can start skip-counting when he's ready. 
• Both kids are doing a lot of building with Lego, and buying Lego when their allowance builds up high enough. They are thinking about numbers in terms of what they can afford. Sometimes I pay half the cost of an item, such as something I might have bought them anyway, but it happens that they want a fancier, more expensive version. P easily figured out that her share of a $5 headband would be $2.50 plus tax.
• P and T have each ridden their bikes to church with me at least once this summer. It's about 1.5 miles one way.
• Both kids, but especially P, have enjoyed hitting badminton birds around with UnschoolerDad at home and sometimes at the badminton gym.
• We now have a mini-trampoline in our living room, and I often see T jump on it for a while, when bouncing would feel good or when he has some excess energy to burn off. P uses it too, though less frequently.
• I've been paying more attention to the kids' pretend games, especially when I know I will soon need to ask something of them. Often we can accomplish things like cleaning the living room or brushing and flossing teeth by incorporating them into the games. We had a particularly successful living-room cleaning session as peregrine falcon fledglings tidying up our nest.
• P continued her aerial gymnastics classes through the summer. For the fall, she's switching to more traditional gymnastics, because the aerial program is moving several miles farther away, and P likes riding her bike to the gym, which is less than a mile away. 

Making 

• Inspired by our Lego store visit (see Visiting below) and her new door acquired there, P made a Lego house for her Lego Friends figures. It's quite a creation. Some of the furnishings are made in the same ways as in kits she has built, but others are quite original. 

The house, with sleeping mat upstairs, new front door from the Lego store parts wall,
jewel used as front porch light, and tree trunks forming one corner of the building. That's a bit of a
dojo-kit wall by the sleeping mat. P tells me that she is pretending the Chinese characters say "Sleep Tight."

The back of the house, showing the flower doorknob and
salvaged cafe-kit parts for window and wall portions.

• T has created a small Lego wheeled creature he calls Speedster. Speedster "helps" T when things need to be put away. Speedster's form changes from one day to another, but he always comprises a small Lego platform or chassis of some kind with a single wheel.

Writing

• P has been writing little stories in books in Minecraft, populating the libraries of the grand homes and churches and schools and hotels she's building. She's also been playing Scribblenauts a lot, and helping T write words when he's playing the game.

Watching 

• We enjoy the YouTube channel SciShow. Especially wonderful recently was a video about vultures' defenses: acid, poop, and vomit. We watched it together a few times and greatly enjoyed the parallels between vulture poop (which they poop down their legs on purpose, so its low pH can kill germs on their feet and the ground) and hand sanitizer, as well as mental images of acid projectile vomit.
• P and I watched a TedEd video on gas laws (Boyle, Charles, and Avogadro). We talked afterward about some scenarios with balloons, and she understood the majority of what the videos were saying. I was fascinated to realize that hot air balloons are inflated not by blowing air into them, but by heating the small amount of air in them so that it expands and draws more air inside to be heated, etc. P actually realized that before I did, from the video.
• The kids watched several Magic School Bus videos on photosynthesis, rain forest ecology, erosion, recycling, air pressure, cells, wetlands and their positive contributions to human well-being, and the types and life cycles of stars.

Listening

• I bought a new guitar recently, and so along with lots of reading out loud, bedtimes now usually include some guitar music. We had done this before, but the new instrument is very motivating for me to keep it up. We have a couple of songbooks we've been referring to, and P is reading along with some of the music. Both kids are learning lyrics and tunes and sometimes singing along, which is how I learned to sing and harmonize, so I love to see that happen. When I play a new song T likes, he often asks the title so he can ask for it again. He's been requesting songs in Spanish a lot. He also asks questions about the songs. In John Prine's "Paradise," Mr. Peabody's coal train keeps getting mentioned. T wanted to know where Mr. Peabody got his name. He was thinking of peeing. I said I thought that probably wasn't what it meant, and I'd look it up and get back to him (since it was late and I wanted him to be able to get to sleep). I found a good web page with some probable etymologies, and we talked about them the next day.

Talking 

• When I have one-on-one time with either kid, it often turns into a good opportunity to talk. T is much more voluble when P is at camp, and he asks lots of questions and tells me about things he sees and his thoughts about them. He's a pretty insightful guy -- often he has things pretty well figured out when he tells me what he's thinking. Sometimes I can offer more information that makes the situation clearer, and he listens and incorporates the new information, sometimes taking the same subject farther the next day.
• After hearing a radio report about the implementation of Obamacare, P and I talked about how health insurance works.

Visiting

• One night, I learned of the existence of Lego stores. We found one in our area, and the next evening we went to check it out. The salesperson I spoke with was a Lego enthusiast herself and told us all kinds of things about the store and activities there. P and T had spent most of their allowances already, so we didn't buy anything, but they had fun window-shopping and building wish lists from the huge inventory -- much more complete than anything we've seen in toy stores. Since we were using my Amazon app to build the wish list, it was easy to notice which products were more or less expensive in the Lego store than online. P asked to buy a single part from the Pick-a-Brick wall, but the salesperson gave it to her, choosing to interpret the reason P said she wanted it as "missing part" and invoking their policy of replacing missing parts for free. P is sensitive these days to the idea that she is getting stuff free or at a discount "because I'm cute," and she doesn't like that idea. She told the salesperson she would feel guilty about taking the part without paying anything for it. Fortunately the salesperson had given me the same answer earlier about buying individual parts, so we could both corroborate that as the general policy, not just a favor to P in particular -- and the salesperson added that she didn't have any way to scan individual parts into her register, so even if she wanted to charge for it, there wasn't really a way to do that (except by requiring P to purchase an $8 container of bricks, she graciously omitted to say, though I had told P that earlier). We talked a little on the way home about how stores use such policies to build loyalty among potential customers, so even if it costs them a little money, they usually gain from it in the long run.
• The mall in which we found the Lego store was also pretty fun. There was a carousel, a train that carried people around the mall, a food court, and stores and kiosks with lots of fun things to look at and get demonstrations of. There's an RC helicopter kiosk we might well revisit when more money is available! The indoor mall near us doesn't work nearly as hard to attract kids, so that was a pretty new experience for P and T. P asked why they would have a carousel in a mall, and we talked about what kinds of things could get people to come to the mall often and spend money -- such as kids wanting to ride the carousel or train, or eat ice cream or other food-court food, or parents liking to have a place they could rest their feet while their kids had fun. We never found out if the train was free or a paid ride, but T took off after it, and when he caught up, he walked purposefully behind it all the way to the Lego store, which was enough of a draw for him to give up the chase. Next time maybe we'll find out more. (We did -- it's a paid ride.)
• On the way home from errands in the next town, we saw a sign at a fire station about an open house that was just about to begin. We turned around and went to the open house. T and P loved sitting in all the fire trucks (two wildland trucks and one city truck; the ambulance was absent). We looked around the station inside and saw the kitchen and dining area, the computers where firefighters write up their reports after each call, and more. T said he wanted to be a firefighter when he grew up, so we asked one of the firefighters what kinds of things one needed to know or be able to do to be a firefighter. There were quite a few: chemistry (for types of fires and how to fight them), math (for budgeting and such), building construction, medicine (they're all EMTs), how to use all the equipment, and to be in excellent physical condition. We learned that the firefighters are 48 hours on and then four days off, year round, though they can trade shifts if they need a specific day off. We also asked why we so often see fire trucks at the grocery store, and we learned that firefighters often make one grocery trip per shift to get what they need, and they take along the truck and the equipment they would need to drop everything and go on a call if necessary. The firefighter who told us this said she'd had ice cream melt in the truck more than once because a call came before they got back from a shopping trip.
• We've been helping out a nearby relative who is going through breast cancer treatment. One afternoon when her son X was already playing at our house, she called me, stressed because some friends had decided to visit for dinner that evening and the house was a mess. After checking it out with her, I talked to the kids and said we were going to go over and help. I helped clean, and after a little while, P and X got involved, scrubbing floors and cleaning glass furniture. (I had offered to pay them a little if they'd help out.) They earned their negotiated pay, and my kids and I split before the company came. P said afterward that she hoped we could do that again soon. I said, "So you want to earn some more money cleaning?" She replied, "No, I'd be glad just to get paid in fun. That was a lot of fun!" T wasn't an active helper with cleaning, but he did keep track of what he played with while there, so we could make sure all of it got put away before we left.
• The kids and I have had some really pleasant, spontaneous outings. One day I took a wrong turn on the way home from the chiropractor, and we ended up pointing toward a different town than I'd meant to drive to. The kids really wanted to go there, so we did, and had lunch out and a little toy-shopping trip. They were very resilient and willing to change plans as the situation evolved; they even decided not to stop for frozen yogurt on the way home, which I'd promised we could do if they did an errand I wanted to run; they wanted to get home and weren't that hungry.

Thinking, Asking Questions, Planning...

• Scribblenauts is the source for interesting exploration sometimes. Recently T looked at the word "UFO," which was in his Scribblenauts cache, and said, "That's like F-F-O, off." I said that off was actually O-F-F, but he wanted to try typing in FFO, so he did. We were offered "did you mean?" options, including TAHO, which I'd never heard of. So while T tried out the other options (FOE and TEA, I think), I looked up "Taho," and we found out about a Philippine snack made of silken tofu, brown rice syrup, and sago pearls, which, to judge from a search on Amazon, are often confused with tapioca pearls, or perhaps are considered the same thing depending on where you live. It might be fun to make this at home, though I suspect P and T would like the taste and abhor the texture.
• As homeschoolers and night owls, we usually sleep until everyone wakes up naturally in the morning. I try to keep bedtime happening at a time that will allow me to get enough rest before morning; letting it go as late as anyone likes turns out with me very grumpy and underfunctioning as a mom. But that can still be pretty late compared to many schooled kids' bedtimes. P's camp week was an exception -- we needed to be up about 7:30 a.m. to get her there on time, which meant bedtime around 8:00 (before dark, as T reminds me every evening) to allow for reading, music, and enough sleep. Both kids have made progress over the week in getting up and doing what needs to be done to get going, and also in understanding that getting to bed on time is helpful for making early mornings more pleasant! One morning T was dragging his feet more than usual, and I said that this kind of trouble getting ready was why I had not yet signed him up for a Lego camp this summer that meets in the morning. He perked up and took notice; he would like to try that Lego camp! I guess it makes complete sense -- both kids are more focused when they're preparing for something they're really interested in doing. As it turned out, I offered T a different option instead of morning Lego camp: I would set a budget and he could pick out Lego kits at the Lego store, which he and I could build during the afternoons when P was at Lego camp. This worked beautifully, it cost less than camp, we didn't have to do early mornings, and T got to keep his Lego kits, which would not have been the case at camp: win-win-win.

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

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

Reading

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

Doing

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

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

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

Making

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

Writing

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

Watching

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

Listening

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

Talking

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

Visiting

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

Thinking, Asking Questions, Planning...

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

All of It Has Always Been Big Stuff

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

Reading

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

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

Doing

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

Making

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

Writing

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

Watching

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

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

Listening

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

Talking

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

Visiting

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

Thinking, Asking Questions, Planning...

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

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

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

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

Reading

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

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

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

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

Doing

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

Making

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

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

Writing

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

Watching

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

Listening

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

Talking

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

Visiting

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

Thinking, Asking Questions, Planning...

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