Live.Play.Learn.

Maya found & bought a little robotic panda bear at a local second hand store recently and, as she's been playing with it, she's been wanting to know more about pandas -- what they do, what they eat, what kind of shelter/nest they make, etc., which she then incorporates into her play. She was (still is) really wanting to see real, live giant pandas that look like her toy, but our local zoo only has red pandas. I started to look for a nearby zoo with some but haven't found one so far. Thanks to internet and webcams, though, we did get to read about and watch the giant pandas at the San Diego Zoo.

Whales & things

The morning started with several books and magazines at the breakfast table. Ri was reading a book about Gila monsters, and we were talking about travelling and how cool it would be to see one in the wild one day. There was something -- can't remember exactly what now -- that connected to something in the National Geographic we had on the table, so he started looking through that. He came across some blue whale photographs that were really beautiful and got interested in the article that went with them. A picture of one researcher shooting a satellite tag and another shooting a biopsy dart brought up a lot of ethical pondering and questioning and considering. We also spent a lot of time looking at the chart on the page that you can see here in this photo. It shows the feeding pattern of whales diving & lunging for krill, which we were talking about having seen happen to Marvin and Dory in Finding Nemo.


We decided to make a little Krill & Whale experiment. We came up with oats to use as Krill and a big jar for a whale.


Seth was kind enough to let us intrude on his bath.

Some of the observers hanging out on the side of the tub:

Squidward



Penguins from the movie Happy Feet, which also happens to touch a bit on tagging/researching/human impact on wildlife. I just love it -- connections, connections everywhere, even on the side of our bathtub.

Some of our oatmeal krill sank to the bottom but other pieces floated. Here is the "whale" going after his food.

Before moving on to other things, Ri decided he wanted to work a sea life floor puzzle we've had for a long time. We talked about things from Finding Nemo, from our own trips to the ocean, from things we've read, and from visits to the Aquarium.

Pablo wondered why we were so interested in stinkin' sea creature puzzles when we have a perfectly cute puppy to shower with our undivided attention.

The joy of finally finding where that darn piece was supposed to go.

After the puzzle, Riley moved on to other things.

For future reference (or not), or for anyone else interested, I found some more cool stuff related to the National Geographic article on their website, here.

Connections

Riley and I have been reading Dr. Seuss: Young Author and Artist in the Childhood of Famous Americans series. One of the themes from the story that we've talked about quite a bit is the treatment of German Americans during the WWI era. The book tells how names of various German things were changed: frankfurters became hotdogs and sauerkraut was called "liberty cabbage" (which spurred a whole other conversation about "freedom fries" in our more recent history!).

This morning, when Riley and I were at Findlay Market in Cincinnati to pick up our eggs from Thistlehair Farm, we stumbled upon this historic marker detailing some of the consequences of the "Anti-German Hysteria" in Cincinnati during that time period.

Riley took these pictures.

Right next to the sign is Krause's German food market, so we decided to browse through there. We bought some bratwurst and some "German wieners" -- despite the fact that Ri can't say "wieners" without giggling.

Here are a few pictures from home lately. There are a few more on our new Project 365 photo blog. I added a link to it along the side of this blog site in the "Other Interests and Activities" section. Here is a site that explains Project 365.

We bought some used games (Scrabble/Scrabble Jr, My Little Pony Memory game, Math Bingo) and Lego's earlier this week and have been having a blast with them all. Since April is National Poetry Month as well as Shakespeare's likely birth month, we're celebrating with a variety of poetry books from the library and animated Shakespeare videos from Netflix. The overwhelming favorite poet so far has been Ogden Nash. Maya and I, inspired by one of the poems in Ogden Nash's Zoo, looked at pictures on the internet and read about the lamprey as well as the legends about the death of King Henry I of England, rumored to have died from eating a "surfeit of lampreys." Nash's poem says it was King John of England who was killed by the surfeit of lampreys, though the closest similar rumor, among other rumors, we found about him said he died from eating a "surfeit of peaches." Maybe we're missing something??? Anyway, there have been several lampreys in Maya's pretend playing lately as well as one in her story here. We are not, however, interested in exploring them deeply enough to try Lamprey Pie!!! Interesting connection with words here, though -- one of the other books we happened to bring home from the library in the same trip is called "As: A Surfeit of Similes."

Here are some of the kids' Lego creations:

Seth working on a truck


Maya's house with a window box, and her girl and lion riding on a cart


Riley's house


It has been so nice to have warm enough days to enjoy the backyard and the trampoline


Here I am with Maya starting a yoga video


And here is Maya still sticking with it in spite of Pablo


Maya

Kitchen Windows

Our kitchen windows have been well used over the last few weeks. I moved our bird feeders where they could be seen from the kitchen again because that seems to be where I spend the most time and get to see the most birds. Last week the kitchen became bird watching central as we participated in Project Feeder Watch and then the Great Backyard Bird Count. Maya is usually my enthusiastic bird watching partner but wasn't feeling too well last week and didn't watch with me as much. Riley and Seth watched a bit.



Northern Cardinal


A pair of Mourning Doves


I feel a bit torn about bringing birds and squirrels to our yard with feeders rather than natural food sources. Then I look up and down my street at the homes, big lawns, pavement, and non-native landscaping that reside in what used to be woods and reason to myself that maybe I'm giving back a bit in return for what was taken away. Still, watching the birds this week has me revisiting the idea of reworking my own yard into a more natural, native habitat. There are lots of resources and ideas for this on the National Wildlife Federation's website.

By this week, everyone was feeling better. Wednesday evening the clouds cleared *just* in time for us to enjoy the beautiful total lunar eclipse. Some unschooling friends from Ohio were spending a couple of nights with us, and everyone was running back and forth between video/computer games and Maya's Martian maker lab and the changing appearance of the moon. It was bitterly cold, and we were grateful to have a perfect view from the windows for the duration of the eclipse. We did decide to open the windows once the moon began glowing red to get the full effects of the color without the glass. We had conversations about what's happening during an eclipse and about eclipse lore and legends, some that I had read about and several that the kids knew from various cartoons.

Maya drawing herself on the red, eclipsed moon


Riley & one of our visiting friends, Titus, & Maya

Connections

I've been inspired by one of the threads on an unschooling email group I'm on to add a Label to my blog for posts that talk about Connections -- the webs of learning that are woven over time as interests and ideas spread out, twist and turn, overlap, and, well, you get the idea. I may go back through my papers and dig out one about zombie movies & Alice in Wonderland that I wrote before I started blogging. To me, connections -- the learning kind and the relationship kind -- are the essence and the joy of unschooling.

I have to start this post off today by saying how very grateful I am to have "found" unschooling, "radical unschooling" in particular. I really do not like to think about what my relationship with my kids might be like had we not so drastically changed our ideas about how we would live with and relate to our children. So, instead of thinking about it any more today, I'm going to blog about some recent joyful living and learning around here.

Riley and I (and sometimes Maya and Seth) have been reading the first Harry Potter book. I have waited for years to read these books because I wanted to read them for the first time with the kids. We're hoping to read a book, watch the corresponding movie, read the next book, next movie, etc.

Maya and Seth have been really into Harold and the Purple Crayon. We heard about this book a few years ago when Riley was into the Captain Underpants stories by Dav Pilkey. We had read, I think on Dav Pilkey's website, that the character Harold's name was inspired by Harold from Harold and the Purple Crayon. It had been one of Dav Pilkey's favorite books as a child and it has proven to be a favorite of all my kids' too. We've read it several times again lately, and we rented a collection of the cartoons. Maya got really excited late one evening after we had been snuggling in the bed reading. She was suddenly way too excited to get to sleep. She said she had decided she wanted to be a writer and a librarian. She got right up and started illustrating several stories and asked me to write them down for her. She also asked me to write a list of titles for stories she wanted to tell for her library's story times, and she borrowed some of my lists and things I had written that were lying around my room for "the grown-ups' section." For the next several days she did her story times from her list, retelling the stories and acting them out for us and for a little neighbor friend who plays at our house and loves to hear stories.

Here are some pictures from the past week:

Saved by Fix-A-Flat

Playing Cranium Hullabaloo

Digging, measuring, playing, and making scenes in dry oats

Experimenting with homemade "clouds" using steam and a cold, refrigerated pan while brewing some tea

The kitchen Maya designed with blocks for her characters, both named Block, who are inspired by and are the little sisters of Plank (not pictured), who was inspired by Plank on Ed, Edd, and Eddy. Later in the day she had built an entire house for this little wooden family.

This is what happens when you leave your 4 year old watching Harold and the Purple Crayon cartoons while you take a shower. No one was there to put any paper up on the wall when inspiration struck for Seth and his purple crayon!

A couple of evenings ago Maya and Riley were downstairs playing in Ri's room (which used to be our family room/play room). We heard some running on the ramp and lots of laughing, excited talk, and occasional squeals. When Seth and I went down to see what all the excitement was, we found them perched on the deck of the ramp, conducting all kinds of experiments with Riley's electricity and magnets kit and his physics kit. I hung out for a while as the kids went back and forth between running around on the ramp and talking with me about the things they were making (a compass, a set of sirens, a working fan, lights, etc).

Here is the ramp side of Riley's room

And here is the other side

After we had all gone upstairs to settle in for the night and watch a movie, we heard the newspapers being put on our porch for Riley's first job. Our city has a once-a-week newspaper, and he is going to deliver on a couple of streets in our neighborhood. I figured we would roll and bag them in the morning, but he was anxious to get started. We chatted about the money and played around with calculations as it is a fixed amount for delivery and then can vary for collection; and we chatted about the job itself and about some of the things going on in our community as we scanned the headlines while we worked together.

Beowulf followup

Riley lost interest in reading the full version of Beowulf after we got past the battle between Beowulf and Grendl (the part he was familiar with from a short story version). Still interested in the original language, we found a website that had audio of a reading from a passage from Beowulf in Old English (you just click on the capital letters at the beginning of each verse to listen -- you need RealAudio Player v3 ). We read a bit more online about the evolution of the English language; and, as we were reading about the Battle of Hastings and the Norman conquest of England, we found this cartoonized version of the Bayeux Tapestry on You Tube. I'll post the video directly on the blog from YouTube if I can figure out how...

Celebrate, Learn, Love

Last Wednesday there was a lot to celebrate. The weather was warm, sunny, and beautiful. Seth was so, so happy to be digging in the backyard dirt with his construction trucks. The date was 3/14 -- "pi day," so in between playing outside we messed around with the compass, making circles and measuring radii, diameters, and circumferences, and, of course, eating pie. We looked up some stuff on the web about pi and ended up doing a frozen-hotdog-throwing experiment based on Buffon's needle problem. It got quite messy as the hotdogs thawed, making me even more grateful that it was warm enough to do this outside. We discovered that it was also Albert Einstein's birthday, so we read some about him and played a little relativity game that we came across online. We mostly liked reading his quippy quotes and ended up printing and cutting out a bunch of them to tape up on the wall along with a big poster of Einstein that Matt used to have in his office. Riley's favorite quote was an explanation of relativity:

"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, you think it's only a minute. But when you sit on a hot stove for a minute, you think it's two hours. That's relativity."

My favorite:

"There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is."

Here are some other quotes of Einstein's we read that, as an unschooling Mom, I love:

"Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom."

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

"It is nothing short of a miracle that modern methods of education have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry."

"Education is that which remains when one has forgotten everything learned in school."

"Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is to not stop questioning."

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex...It takes a touch of genius -- an a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction."

That last one brings to mind many things that our society makes"bigger and more complex" when it comes to life with children. From the time they are born, we're told to regulate and schedule and control our children's eating, sleeping, and even their play. As they grow, we're encouraged to rush them to master new physical/academic/social skills, to push them through all kinds of exercises to get them reading early and a lot, to separate from their families, and to make damn sure they are not behind. Where I've followed that path, it has clouded the opportunity to witness the miracles of my children's lives unfolding right before my eyes; and parenting has felt like a stressful ordeal. Where I've stepped away from that path and moved toward unconditional love, toward trust, and toward connection, the miracles of learning, growing, discovering, loving are right there to enjoy as they are allowed to unfold simply, naturally, and beautifully.