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!)

Midwinter, Mountains, Music, and Minecraft

Wow, more than two months gone by! I don't have many notes from this period, so this will be a fairly skeletal sampling of what I can remember. It's been a busy time and a slow time, on different days and weeks.

An astonishing video, with music by Tchaikovsky, of a composite European city built in Minecraft.

Reading

• P has been reading a lot of graphic novels, since getting a good introduction from a friend (who gave her some Amulet books) and our local children's librarian (who pointed her at Akiko). She devours them solo and sometimes reads them out loud to T. She's anxiously awaiting her next Amulet installment!
• After reading Little House on the Prairie out loud, I searched for a book that would give a more balanced or positive view of Native Americans around the same time. I found Sign of the Beaver, which everyone enjoyed. It was a good information source and conversation starter about Indian woodlore, social structures in Indian and settler life, betrayals of Indians with bad treaties, and more.
• Then we read Farmer Boy, which was a lot of fun. I enjoyed thinking about the quantities of food being produced on the farm for the humans and livestock living there, and how they would translate to a smaller farm such as our family might someday have. The kids were very engaged as well, and asked many related questions while that book was in progress. T was especially interested in whether the characters in the books were real people. (Most of the major characters are; others are composites.)
• P has been playing Minecraft a lot, and she's learned to do her own research on the Minecraft wiki when she doesn't know how to craft something she wants to make. She surprises me frequently with things she's learned there; even T (through watching her use what she's learned) knows a lot about Minecraft! She and I, separately and together, have discovered amazing videos of other people's Minecraft constructions, including the London Bridge, Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water house, and a HUGE composite European imperial capital (see video linked above), showcasing architectural styles from various European cities.
• T has been asking a lot about what the signs on storefronts say; he seems to be on an active information-gathering expedition, working toward cracking the code.
• T got a hand-me-down cash register with play money, and he reads the numbers to sort the bills.
• At a recent game night at a friend's house, I found ten-sided dice for 4-digit numbers: one die was numbered from 0 to 9, one from 00 to 90, one from 000 to 900, and one from 0000 to 9000. Both kids, but especially T, enjoyed arranging the dice (sometimes removing one or more) and having me say what number the dice represented.
• We've started reading Savvy, a Newbery Honor Book by Ingrid Law, who lives not far from us, out loud. It's a funny book, with tween-friendly jokes and vivid writing. It centers on the coming-of-age of a girl in a family where most of the family members have special powers, called savvies. These appear on their thirteenth birthdays, and that's the day it is a few chapters into the story. P wasn't satisfied with eight chapters read aloud in one evening, so she took the book to bed to read more on her own.
• On a quick trip to the library to pick up Savvy, which was recommended by an unschooling friend, T wanted to play with trains, but he asked me to find him some books about cars and trucks. It took me a while to find the right section for those, and on the way I found an armload of books about things the kids have been asking about lately: boogers, kite making, origami, volcanoes, airships, and old fairy tales (P recently picked up a book of medieval tales I bought at a library sale a year or so ago, and she's been asking for bedtime stories from it and reading some on her own. We've also been enjoying a really colorful book of Aesop's fables discovered on another recent library visit.)

A gem of a book about boogers, belly buttons, tornadoes, and an astonishing number of things
the kids have already been asking about! P has already spent an evening with it.

Doing

• P just started an aerial dance class at our newly local gymnastics gym, and it's going well.
• T is getting back into gymnastics after a fall hiatus. He didn't initially want to take classes at the gym near our new house, but after a parents' night out there, playing with the equipment and the instructors, he was full of enthusiasm, and he's enjoying it.
• P took a class late last year about the physics of music, through our local university's science discovery program. She made instruments, learned some musical notation, and had a lot of fun. This month she'll start a class on the science of toys through the same organization.
• The kids are playing together for long stretches, getting along better and better. I try to be nearby, listening and sometimes offering information or suggestions when things get tense. Both kids are using thoughtful language about how they are getting along. P commented recently that she doesn't feel like herself when she acts mean toward T. T speculates out loud sometimes about why P is still mean sometimes, and what he or others might be able to do to make that happen less. We spent some time talking about P's idea, considering in what senses it might be true, and what might help keep the peace.
• We've gone swimming at our new local rec center, which we can walk to.
• P and I attended a presentation sponsored by the local historical society. An archaeologist living in town had excavated the historic privy in her backyard, finding hundreds of artifacts, and a group of students in archaeology at a nearby university had analyzed the glass and ceramic artifacts. They spoke about what they found and how it related to the history of the area. Perhaps the most intruiging aspect of this was that people tended to throw things in their privies that they didn't want others to know about. The privy was in use throughout prohibition, and there were patent medicine bottles thrown in during occupancy by middle-class folks (furnishers and preachers), and liquor bottles from the mining families' occupancy. They explained that patent medicines usually derived any actual benefit from their high alcohol or opioid content. Sometimes this had unfortunate results, such as children taking a cough syrup that stopped their coughing but left them addicted to opium. This led to an interesting talk with P afterward about the history of prohibition and patent medicines, and the nature of addiction. We talked about physical addiction, peer pressure, and how a lot of people start smoking or using other addictive substances in their teenage years, when their friends' opinions often seem more important than anything else; and how once you get through those years to young adulthood, it starts getting easier to know what you want for your own life, independent of what your friends think. I told P I wasn't sure if her teen years would look like this, given that unschooling is encouraging a much more cooperative and relaxed relationship between us than many kids have with their parents. It will be interesting to find out.

Making

• T continues to build lots of Lego creations, both from instructions and from his imagination (he calls it "building with my mind," which always reminds me of Richard Feynman fixing radios by thinking). At Christmas we bought a Lego Mindstorms set for the family, and UnschoolerDad, T, and I enjoyed building one of the models together and testing the sensor probes (touch, light/color, distance via ultrasound, and perhaps others I'm forgetting) and motors attached to its computer. T is already thinking about what kinds of things he wants to program the robots to do -- sneeze when they catch a green marble, for example, or turn in circles when they catch a red marble.
• P is slowly learning more about preparing the foods she enjoys. Sometimes she makes food because she wants to, and sometimes because I am busy with something else and not getting to it as fast as she'd like. 
• P happily builds things with many methods: origami, cut paper, glued craft sticks, cardboard, drawing, painting, and combinations of these and other creative methods. She makes settings and props for playing with small toys mostly, but sometimes other things as well. When T expresses a desire for a toy or costume piece he doesn't have, P often jumps in and makes a reasonable (to an imaginative mind, at least) facsimile from materials she can find around the house.

Writing

• P insists that she wants to write her thank-you notes for Christmas presents herself, in her own handwriting, "So people will know they really came from me" and so people who care about her could feel good about her writing skills. Only one has gotten done so far; we'll see how that goes! Her spelling continues to improve.
• P wrote down some measurements for me, so that we could cut the right size shelves for her closet, and in the process learned the abbreviation for inches (") and how to write a mixed number with a fraction (22 3/4).
• P occasionally works on her own comic book, inspired by the superhero genre. Sometimes she shows it to me to see if I can understand what's going on, and that has led to her learning a bit more about the conventions of comic books, such as using lines to indicate motion.

Watching

The 2012 election results, had our electoral laws stood as in 1920, when women could vote,
but racial minorities still faced significant obstacles (e.g., poll taxes) to voting.

• I shared with P a web page that analyzed election results by demographics and gave maps showing what the results would have been if, say, only men, or only whites, or only people over 21 had voted (corresponding to various phases of U.S. law regarding who had the vote, and who faced significant barriers to voting). It was an interesting walk through the history of democracy in the United States.
• After we read Farmer Boy, T asked for more Little House on the Prairie videos, so we checked out the next 4 episodes from the library, and he's been watching them.
• Both kids have watched the three seasons of Avatar: The Last Airbender, and a few episodes of Avatar: The Legend of Korra. They enjoy playing games inspired by these, and talk a lot about the four elements (earth/water/air/fire) around which the world of these series is based. P has been curious about what the real elements are, so we've had several short conversations, talking a little about them. At the science museum in Oklahoma City, the table numbers for the cafe were elements, with cards showing all the stuff you'd find in a standard periodic table of the elements. We talked a little about what those numbers and symbols meant. Sometimes I pull out our Elements coffee-table book when a picture seems to be in order.
• The kids enjoy looking up YouTube videos to watch together; so far they are mostly on Minecraft and funny cats :)
• The whole family watched A Child's Garden of Poetry, which is a lovely HBO special we have on DVD about poetry, with beautiful animations and reading by children, poets, actors, and musicians. Kids in the video also talked rather eloquently, and at least seemingly unscripted, about understanding and enjoying poetry, as well as what it's like to write poetry. Both our kids were rapt.

 Listening

• We bought a new car recently that came with a Sirius XM subscription. We discovered the channel called Book Radio ("Where the pictures are inside your head!"). P often finds the novel excerpts riveting and asks about checking out the books. We haven't done that yet -- there's so much we want to read that's written for young people and more enjoyable for T -- but I think it will happen before long. T is often engaged by the stories as well, but mostly not to the same degree as P.

Talking

• T asked, out of the blue, how you stop when you're riding a zipline. He also wanted to know whether people ever went uphill on ziplines, and if so, how. I told him what I knew, which was very little, and suggested we ask my mother, since she went ziplining on a vacation in Costa Rica last summer. We did so later, and she had some better answers. But in the moment, T asked if it would be possible for us to throw something far enough that it would hit Costa Rica. I said I didn't think we could throw anything that far. I loved his thinking -- he doesn't know much about units of length measure on that scale, so he handily placed the conversation in terms he could understand. We talked about how long it would take to drive to Costa Rica, compared to our recent driving trip to Texas. T often asks about where we are; he's working on wrapping his head around the ideas of city/state/country/continent/planet and how they are related.
• Other conversations have ended up in other sections. :)

Visiting

• On our trip to Texas, we visited Capulin Mountain, a dormant volcano in New Mexico. Before we got there, we noted the lava rocks scattered around the countryside for miles around and contemplated the force of an eruption that could throw so much weight so far. We drove up to the crater rim and walked down inside the crater, talking about the rocks there, how they formed, how fertile the soil was because of the minerals in the lava rocks and what plants predominated there, how long ago it had erupted (about 60,000 years ago) and whether it was likely to erupt again (no, according to what we read there). We speculated about whether a wall-like structure of lava rocks at the bottom of the crater was natural or human-made; we'd noticed several good places to get out of the weather among the jumbled rocks along the trail and thought that wall might make pretty good shelter too. While P and UnschoolerDad walked part way around the rim trail to see the view of several surrounding states (!), T sat on a bench near the trailhead and took a position for meditation. He couldn't remember the word meditation to tell me what he was doing, but he described it well enough that I could guess and supply the word. (I've been noticing that he's picking up multisyllabic words on one hearing and pronouncing them very precisely these days, though his Rs and Ls are still a little hard to distinguish; and although he shortens a lot of consonant clusters in words he's used for a long time, he says them well in new words; his once-problematic speech is cleaning itself up in a hurry, and he really enjoys being able to talk to almost everyone he runs into and be understood.) He was so peaceful, soaking up the sun on that chilly day.
• On the way back from Texas, we visited the science museum in Oklahoma City. T got to drive a Segway; we stood on moving plates simulating different kinds of ground motion from earthquakes; P and I spent some time in a hall full of optical illusions; both kids played a long time with jets of air and plastic balls, finding many things they could do with them; and I'm sure there was much more I'm forgetting. It's a great museum that we've visited before, and I'm sure we'll go again at some point.
• Also on the Texas trip, we visited the Prairie Museum of Art and History in Colby, Kansas. We looked around the collections of wedding dresses, military uniforms, dolls, fine china, and more rather quickly, since we got there close to closing time. The real fun started when we went outside to look at the other buildings. We visited a dugout house (and got to see exactly how the latch described in Little House on the Prairie worked, since it was the same type), where there were settler-style clothes to try on and cleaning tools we were welcomed to use to clean the place up (the kids were happy to do their part). We visited a one-room schoolhouse, looked through the readers and spellers, and thought about where the kids would sit based on their age and sex. We visited a church where we were encouraged to ring the bell in the bell tower (harder than we thought it would be) and got a look at hymn books and Sunday clothing, as well as the style of the building and its furnishings. But the highlight for me was visiting the huge barn, where a small stage has been added to the hayloft to use for weddings. Since we were the only ones there, P and I sang "Bright Morning Star" in  voices in full voice in the hayloft, enjoying the acoustics of the huge space. It felt like the right song for the place, and P knows it, since it's been one of our lullabies for years.
• On the Texas trip, we visited my family and met my parents' new bloodhound, a dog rescued last year from starvation and neglect at the hands of a breeder. The kids got to see how amazing a bloodhound's sense of smell could be when in the service of a total obsession with food. The dog was gentle and friendly when no food was available, though, and the kids loved her. They also enjoyed my sister's dog, a huge Great Pyrenees, totally unflappable and calmly friendly. T is losing his fear of big dogs, though he's still very wary about strange, off-leash dogs of any size. The kids liked seeing all the people, too, and I think they interacted pretty well with them, with reasonable manners and grace, from great-grandmother all the way through young cousins.
• After the holidays, we visited the Da Vinci Machines exhibit in Denver. This consisted chiefly of machines built based on Leonardo's drawings, from materials that would have been available to him. Many of these were okay to touch and play with, though T was sorely disappointed that Leonardo's idea for a tank was not one of them. He really wanted to try out moving the four independently driven wheels in different directions to see what movements the tank might have been capable of. He loved the bicycle chain, though, as well as the cam hammer, the compound pulleys (he spent a lot of time with these, with and without me, trying out ideas about how they worked), and pretty much everything else he could touch. P enjoyed these too, and also spent a while watching the 40-minute video running on a loop. She particularly liked the water pump based on the spiral of Archimedes (if memory serves, Leonardo figured out that if you made it from pipe wrapped around a cylinder and put the cylinder at a 45-degree angle, it could move water uphill). She asked me why it worked, and it was fun figuring out enough to answer her question accurately. We bought a kit to build a working model of Da Vinci's aerial screw, a failed but inspiring attempt at a helicopter.

Thinking, asking questions, planning...

• P is torn about her room. Sometimes she says she likes it messy. We usually try to clean it up some (usually with my help) when someone is coming over to play. I've been trying not to put a lot of pressure on her about it, which is different from what I did before unschooling. Recently she said to me, "I don't often have the time and the will for this at the same time, but I really want my room to be neat, with a place for everything." I was privately very pleased that she could say that to me, and that instead of launching into possible solutions, I was able simply to ask whether there was anything I could do to support her in that goal. Thus we have measured for shelves in the closet, and I'm helping her with cleaning, organizing, and helping her think about what she's willing to give away, for short periods more frequently, rather than helping mainly with crisis cleaning.
• Recently, P saw a woman with dwarfism in a store where we were shopping. I think she was the first such person P has seen outside The Wizard of Oz (and I don't know whether we talked about it then, so P might have thought that was done with special effects). P looked very curious and made sure I saw the woman, too. I asked P not to point or stare, and as we moved on, I told her the basics about the most common form of dwarfism. P moved on to other things comfortably. Perhaps there will be more questions in time, or I can share the Wikipedia article with her, but for that moment, her curiosity was satisfied.
• T asked me one evening whether you would die if your arm got cut off. I said you might if no one helped you, because you could bleed too much to survive, but that if someone could keep you from bleeding too much, you might survive and have a stump left where your arm was. T wanted to see pictures, so we found a photo of a man who had lost limbs in a train accident, showing his healed stumps. T wanted to know if he could walk, and I said maybe not (he'd lost both legs above the knee as well as an arm), but maybe so if he could get good prosthetic limbs. There followed a long time of looking at pictures, reading descriptions, and then watching videos about various kinds of prostheses, including the C-leg and various prosthetic arms, hands, and fingers. We stopped a lot to talk about what wasn't being made explicit in the videos, such as how the people wearing the prosthetics controlled them. When T had had enough of prosthetics, he asked what else we could watch. He's been asking lots of questions about volcanoes, so we watched a video about the 1980 eruptions of Mount St. Helens, noting that several images from that video corresponded very closely to the volcano sequence in Fantasia 2000, in which a sleeping volcano awakes and erupts. (I've read that St. Helens was the model for the volcano in that sequence, set to Stravinsky's Firebird.) Then T saw links to videos about the space program, so we watched videos about Moon and Mars missions (including Spirit/Opportunity and Curiosity). It was a fruitful evening, and T asked lots of good questions, like, "Are the Mars rovers kind of like robot servants to help those people?" I asked which people he meant, and he said, "The people who want to know more about what it's like on Mars." I told him he was right on. We had already discussed how the rovers had to be able to do some things on their own, because it took so long for messages to travel between Earth and Mars, but that big decisions about what to do came as messages from the scientists on Earth.

Learning and Moving in Election Season

Once again we've been focused on our activities more than on writing about them. I think I detect a pattern! I'm very glad, this Election Night, to be done with the election and also past the hardest parts of moving to a new house in a new town (near enough our old one to keep our old friends). Now perhaps we can settle down into a new rhythm and explore a wider variety of interests. Here's a sampling of recent learning:

Reading

• We read Little House in the Big Woods recently, as bedtime reading, and started on Little House on the Prairie. T listened carefully to  the details of Pa making bullets, scrutinized the pictures, and asked me about it again a couple of nights later. P was excited to hear about square dancing and wanted to know if people still knew how to do it (yes) and if I knew how to do it (yes, a little). Perhaps we'll seek out some square dancing or contra dancing locally so she can try it. T asked what "pebbles" meant when we read about pebbles on the share of Lake Pepin. He knew about gravel from playgrounds, but didn't remember hearing small rocks called pebbles before. We read about cheese making, maple sugaring, and much more. As we started running into parts that are derogatory toward Indians, I noticed several local homeschooling moms chatting online about what other books they've used to give a more accurate or balanced view of Native Americans in that time period. We have one well-liked book from that discussion on hold at the library now; more on that when/if we read it!
• P checked out several graphic novels at the great library that is a short walk from our new house. She's especially enjoying Akiko (the children's librarian said a lot of girls especially like this series), and it's wonderful to hear her read aloud from it. She's very fluent and gets a lot of appropriate expression into her reading voice.
• T continues his frequent readings with UnschoolerDad of The Sneetches and Other Stories.  He likes to read some of the words on each page (mostly from memory, but there is some actual decoding starting to happen), and with almost every reading he wants to read more of the words. He's asking just the right kinds of questions for starting to decode; for example, he asked UD why there were little sixes everywhere -- that was how he saw lowercase a, as he's still learning some of the lowercase letters.

Doing

• We parked a twenty-minute walk from P's choir rehearsal and walked there along a local bike path that followed a creek. P and T both really enjoyed the walk. I commented as we passed a Jewish temple, and P wanted to know how I could tell that was what it was (Star of David, Hebrew lettering on sign, transliterated Hebrew in name of congregation), and talked just a bit about Jewish theology.
• P went with me to our Democratic headquarters to volunteer on the get-out-the-vote effort one day. They wouldn't put an 8-year-old on the phone (and she wouldn't have wanted to phone, though she would have been happy to stuff envelopes), but she did a bunch of voter-list shredding (for voter privacy) to save time for another volunteer to make calls.
• Both kids did some leaf-raking in our extremely leafy yard, for fun and for pay at different times. 
• Both kids enjoyed trick-or-treating. I totally dropped the ball on costumes, between our recent move and election work; but they cheerfully decided on and pulled together costumes  (a purple dog, again, and a cowgirl) from what we had on hand and could find. This was T's first year of feeling confident about trick-or-treating, and he had fun, remembered his thank-yous more than he forgot them, and got into some fun conversations with people at their doors.

Making

• P made some very fetching little cards for Thanksgiving, using materials she's found so far as we unpack in our new house. Some of them tell loved ones that she is thankful for them. Others provide space to list things the recipient is thankful for. 
• Both kids are building a lot with Lego and wooden building blocks. P was very happy when she finally located her big box of Lego bricks that had been in storage during our move. She builds creatures, vehicles, and often creations that are cyborg-like combinations of the two.
• P continues making her elaborate creations in Minecraft. She's learned to open and search the Minecraft wiki when she wants to know how to make an item.

Writing

• P wrote on her Thanksgiving cards, and she's been playing Scribblenauts a lot and asking about spellings of harder words. She comes up with really cool ideas in Scribblenauts, like having her character fly very high on a griffin's back and then parachute down, or getting out of a too-deep-for-a-ladder hole by bouncing on a big trampoline (because just a trampoline didn't quite do the job).

Watching

• I brought in a tiny snail I found in the backyard, so the kids could get their first up-close look at a live snail. We put it on a plastic mat in the kitchen and tried bringing different things (grass, some dandelion leaves from where I found it, a slice of turnip, etc.) to see if it would be interested in eating them. P also experimented with moisture on the board to see how the snail would react. We were considering keeping it around inside for a while (I thought it might freeze to death soon otherwise), but we looked up a bit about snails and found that they hibernate, so after we'd watched it a good long while, we put it back outside where I found it, so it could go about the business of finding a good hibernation spot. Another day, after I killed a yellowjacket that had gotten into the house, P and I took a good look at its body structure and texture. She remarked on how smooth it was, "almost like plastic," and on how much its wings resembled smaller dragonfly wings.
• On Election Day, I had an electoral map updating on my computer starting when the polls closed on the East Coast. P saw it and wanted to know how it all worked. She was very anxious about the possibility of Romney winning the presidency, and glad to see the electoral votes piling up for Obama, but I don't think she really believed me that Obama was winning at first -- after all, there were those huge red swaths across middle America! She felt better after I showed her the electoral map and equivalent cartogram for the 2008 presidential election on Wikipedia (look down a bit, on the right side of the page, for these images), so she could see in the cartogram how all those red states didn't account for many people/electors compared to the blue states. UnschoolerDad and P had a short talk about the House still having a Republican majority, and why highly polarized partisan politics could still make it hard to get things done. I find, as I try to explain why we believe as we do on certain issues, that I need to make sure UD and I don't demonize the other side inordinately. A blogger I love put it well, quoting her son as asking, during the election eight years ago, "So, if George Bush were driving in his car, and he saw me, would he try to run me over?"

The scary, geographically correct electoral map for 2008

The reassuring (to Obama supporters), electorally correct cartogram for 2008

Listening

• I heard P humming the tune to "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" in the car, so I sang the first verse. P asked where it was from, and I said it was a wartime song (couldn't remember which war, but thought it was the Civil War) about waiting for the young men to come safely back from the war. She asked about their ages, and I said there was probably a minimum age, but some boys lied about their age and went when they were younger. An interesting discussion ensued about why someone might WANT to go off to war (fighting for their ideals, a chance at excitement or a new life, desire for glory). Later, I looked it up, and we found out that "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" was a pro-war song from the Civil War era, set to an older Irish tune, "Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye," which was an anti-war song!

Talking

• I don't remember how the conversation about adrenaline started, but P and I talked about "a rush of adrenaline" as what happens when you are angry, scared, or very excited. We talked about how adrenaline temporarily suppresses immune responses, so for example, if you have a cold and are singing in a concert, your stage fright will probably keep you from coughing or sniffling during the concert. We also talked about how, in a crisis situation, adrenaline might give you greater strength and/or endurance than you would have without the adrenaline surge.
• P said, as she's said several times recently, that she wishes she could go back into the past -- the horse-drawn-wagon, washing-clothes-by-hand past of the Little House books, which we've been reading out loud recently. We've talked about the incessant nature of chores in that time compared to now, but also about some things that might be pleasantly different. She speculated about being able to introduce some labor-saving devices early, and wondered whether time travel might actually become possible in her lifetime. I told her about one of my favorite books, Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus, and how in that story, time travel to the past results in the present ceasing to exist. I told her a little about the interventions decided upon in that book (giving smallpox immunity, better weapons, and some potentially protective religious ideas to some native American groups to place them in a more powerful position upon Columbus's arrival), to make changes around 1492, in hopes of correcting the disastrous route history had taken by our future/the book's present. I said I didn't know whether she'd enjoy the book yet, but she said, "Oh, I'm all about time travel," so I guess we'll give it a try when we find it. We just moved, so most of our books are still in boxes.
• Listening to the radio one day, P asked what the electoral college was. Complicated discussion ensued as we talked about the E.C. vote versus the popular vote. We also got into apportionment of Congress members and Senators, since electors for a state are mostly equal to the sum of those two.

Visiting

• Both kids are ecstatic to be living just two blocks from our new local library, since we moved last month. They love the kids-only computers in the children's section, and they love walking or riding their bikes to the library. Wait till they find out the local rec center's nearly as close in another direction!

Thinking, asking questions, planning...

• P decided to spend some allowance on deeply discounted gymnastics clothing. T was considering also getting a fancy, shiny gymnastics shirt -- he tried it on and told me he wanted to buy it -- but as I almost always do for him, I reminded him that he'd been telling me he was saving up for a particular Lego set, and asked him to decide whether getting the shirt was more important than that goal. He thought for a few minutes and decided to save for the Legos. He doesn't always decide this way -- eraser pets recently won out over the savings goal -- but sometimes savings win out.
• T asked how you send papers -- he wanted to know how mail works, so I explained about addresses, stamps, mail carriers, sorting at the post office, and planes and trucks to get the mail to the right delivery area. I wrote a letter to my parents from him, using his words/ideas (he signed his name), so he could send some mail. And shortly afterward, he got some back!
• We drive pretty often by a Catholic church that, at the moment, has 3000+ crosses planted in its front yard, with signs about abortion. P asked what the crosses were all about, so I gave her the basics of what abortion is and the opposing viewpoints about it. Hard topic! We also talked some about contraception, which to my mind should be the best thing for both sides, since it minimizes the demand for abortions -- but I can't claim to speak for Catholics. Then, the next day, P asked me to read aloud to her from a book I bought a long time ago at a library sale, thinking P might be ready for it one of these years: Catherine, Called Birdy. It's a humorous teen novel set in 1290, voiced as the diary of a 13-year-old young woman. She's the daughter of a country knight with modest holdings for a noble, and she hates her life and writing about it, but her mother has made a deal that if she writes a daily account for her brother (an aspiring monk who is trying to make sure she gets at least a little education), she need not spin. Spinning is worse than writing, so the game's afoot. Just about every paragraph requires some kind of explanation of a vocabulary word (e.g., betrothal), a social structure (e.g., dowries, or feudalism and the tenant farmer system, including payment of rents in goods rather than currency), a historical phenomenon (e.g., the Crusades), if not several of these. Very rich, thick going. But P gets most of the humor, and she asks good questions about the explanations. How did the Church get to be in charge of so much? That one took a while, but fortunately we'd watched some videos about the Roman Empire, so she had some background for it.
• T and I watched several episodes of Little House on the Prairie on DVD while he was sick one day. He asked me several times whether this was real life. I think he was trying to get the hang of live action vs. animated video (he's seen lots of animation in a variety of styles), and also whether this was filmed close to the present day or in the older times it portrays. I think we got that worked out: I told him these were real people and animals doing things in real places, but that they were people filmed pretty recently, when I was a little girl (I realize that juxtaposition may be confusing for him!), pretending to be people who lived much longer ago.