How my five year old beat me in Monopoly

Actually, that can't be what this post is about because I'm not really sure how it happened. No I wasn't playing seriously cut throat or anything, but it's not like I let him win, either. I think the real key is that at five you don't have a strong sense of risk/benefit analysis so caution tends not to get in the way when luck is there to help you out. In any case, I ended up with a total of $63 to my name, all properties mortgaged, and I owed him $1,150 for the rent on Illinois Ave with hotel. If nothing else I'm finding that Monopoly is a great way to use math, especially creative math and math in your head, and it's also a great way to stretch patience, memory, and attention—we'd been playing this game on and off for two days.

It's been great to have a couple of days just at home. Math, monopoly, making dinner. A little piano, a lot of coloring and art. Calvin made a model T-Rex (which he affectionately dubbed "Model T"), and he's got a dinosaur diorama in the making (he's still on the background painting phase). He wrote a book on matters, as in the states of matter. We're making our way into the Cenozoic era finally so we re-watched Walking with Prehistoric Beasts and we'll do the same with Walking with Cave Men. No video is perfect, but we've been happy with this series in general and of course Calvin loves them.

Evolution—we are here

An update on our progress towards U.S. History by way of the evolution detour. Or actually backtrack, since it's not really out of the way, I suppose. This is turning out to be a really fun exploration. Discussing ages of evolution with Calvin—exploring, researching, sometimes explaining—I've had to look more closely at my notions of life and death. I spent the better part of my college years studying exactly this topic, and still I feel like I am only now really seeing it for its most basic lessons. But that's a post all its own. For now, an update:

The timeline has been keeping us busy. So far we have populated each period of the Paleozoic era. Calvin chooses the critters and designs the scenes, then I get to work with cutting and gluing. Mostly we've been using Evolution, The Story of Life, by Douglas Palmer and Peter Barrett, for sketches. We're really enjoying the process, and even my sore neck, from bending over the pieces, is worth it when we play with them either on the timeline or on his felt board.

Designing the Permian period

The timeline is hanging in our upstairs hallway where the light isn't good for photos, but here is our progress up to yesterday, populated through the Devonian Period.

We've just discovered Back in Time, an app for the iPad that has given us no end of pleasure, starting with the big bang and passing through all the events between then and now with pictures and info and lots of buttons to tap. Less hands on, but equally fun, we've been reading and re-reading The Story of Life, by Steve Jenkins, and Life Story, by Virginia Lee Burton (reviews here), and watching and re-watching the BBC Walking With videos. They've definitely taken some liberties with those, but we are enjoying them nonetheless.

And thanks to said new app and the book Bang! The Universe Verse, plus a push from the recent arrival of BFSU (Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding), we've taken on the idea of matter. All those life forms that are evolving had to come from somewhere, right? This is only cursorily related to the evolution exploration right now and has more to do with the arrival of the BFSU book, in which the states of matter is amongst the first topics to look at (along with classification of stuff, and that we really have down), but when I think about it, clearly they're related. Well, actually all of life, and thus all study, is related, and isn't that the point? So tomorrow we'll be freezing, melting, and steaming water, and other fun experimenting.

And because we're not unit study or subject immersion learners, there are lots of other things going, too, like a little piano, a little math, a lot of reading, a little playing with food in the kitchen, a lot of board gaming, and a little outside play. The workboxes are going well (I'll write about that sometime soon), and we're happy and busy much of the time. Still, sometimes the old fear of not knowing what we're doing will creep in grab me around the neck...until I look around, and then, in one great big "oh, yeah" moment, I'm fine again. Evolution it is.

Watching ice melt

We watched ice melt today, our own versions of icebergs and glaciers. The first was an iceberg, one we'd made by almost freezing a cup of red dyed water, that we plopped into a bowl of luke warm tap water. We watched it spin and turn, rather than just calmly float; we watched bubbles escaping from the ice and listened to the sounds they made; we watched the red dyed water seep out into the clear tap water in waves, ultimately blending and leaving all the water red. I think the latter was my favorite observation of that experiment.

The second ice we watched melt today was one of our hand made glacier-like things, only having done the experiment I now think its only redeeming value was the hilarity of wathcing it fall apart. Either the directions in the book of experiments was wrong, or else they weren't well described, because the resulting "glacier simulation" was really nothing of the sort. Yesterday we filled plastic cups with an inch of pebbles and sand, then added water up to two inches and froze the whole concoction. Today we fastened the "glacier" to an inclined plane to watch the melt runoff. Only everything we've read is about how glaciers move down towards the sea, rocks and all, not about how glaciers melt and allow their drippy, rock and sand laden water rivulets run into the ocean. And not that the latter doesn't happen, but I think some of the basic glaciery things that make glaciers glaciers were lost here. Still, watching ice melt sure beats watching paint dry.

Then, because the heat was coming back at the end of the day along with the storms, we met Jon at Hudson Mills metropark for some play time (the two of them playing along the river, me getting a chance to run the trails) before a picnic lunch.

The mushrooms are almost as plentiful as the mosquitos, and a quite a bit more enjoyable.

The workboxes are continuing to serve us well. They feel like a compromise to me, and I guess I can live with that. The rest of our day was a blur of biking, trains, piano, David Attenborough, some math, some art (an Antarctica felt set has been requested), quiet reading time, and ice cream after dinner with Oma and Opa, and it ended with beautiful storms lighting up the night and bringing the cooler air back. That's a good day.

A bicycle built for two

In the wake of my sudden fear induced paralysis of the planning mind (too much guidance? Too little?) I've decided to try a modified workbox system. To be fair, I'm fully aware that some person has produced a how-to book on workboxing and that she is the definitive voice on the subject, so when I say "we're trying the workbox system" I can't really mean it because I've never read said book. The idea is simple enough, though—one box or drawer each for a variety of subjects or projects so that the child has a choice of what to work on at any given moment, and also has a space to keep work that was begun but is not yet finished. We already do this to some extent by keeping our current thematic study materials in a Wonder File so that we can easily tote them to the library when we go, but the workbox system will allow us to have multiple projects going at once, and will allow me to give suggestions of things to do or to plan certain activities in advance.

For this week I filled the boxes with a multitude of choices in each subject, many of them being variations on something to do with Antarctica, his most recent love, others being completely off that topic. Some of the choices are worksheets, others are books to read, still others are notecards suggesting that we play a game or go outside. This morning Calvin pulled out the science box, selected a book of experiments with the page of glacier experiments already marked, and beat me to the kitchen even before I had finished my crossword and coffee. So today we melted ice, we refroze the water, did some all around discussing of the states of matter, and there are two miniature glaciers hanging out in the freezer right now that will be a lot of fun if it doesn't rain tomorrow.

As projects are completed they are taken out of the drawers and placed in a folder on top of the unit. So far I think the system is working, but this being only day two I'll reserve judgement just yet. We didn't do science or Antarctica for all of the day, though. He did some math sheets at one point, and practiced the piano, and he read his book out loud to me while we were in the car running an errand.

And that special errand was another big part of our day. Calvin loves to ride his bike. He rides it to the mailbox, to the park, around the cul de sac. It's such a healthy activity, and lately I'd been wondering about getting back into our habit of biking into town for the library or other events (like ice cream!) instead of driving, or of hitting the paved paths in nearby parks, only he's too big for the trailer and too little to ride his own bike the whole way. I did a little research and found some great options for turning a standard adult bike into a tandem with child, only they were expensive, so I put a request out on Freecycle just on the off-chance...

I know I've mentioned how much I love our local Freecycle chapter, but this really takes the cake. Within a couple of days of submitting a "wanted" post asking if a family happened to have one of these bike attachments that maybe their children had outgrown and they had no use for anymore, I was driving the half hour to a nearby city to pick one up. And tonight we tried it out with a child who was nervous and apprehensive until the second time around the block, and by the third was impossible to pry off it.

Dinosaurs, discovery, and make-believe

PaleoJoe was at the library today. If you're not familiar with PaleoJoe, which we weren't and likely neither are you, he's exactly what he sounds like: an energetic, entertaining, real, live paleontologist, complete with stereotypical hat. The beard suited him quite nicely, too.

PaleoJoe is a local author, and between book tours (or probably the other way) he's at a site in Utah, digging for dinosaurs. PaleoJoe had just the right amount of scientific information to share, mixed with just the right flavor of humor to make it lively and absorbable. We learned a lot. I, for one, had heard that new thought on the T-Rex paints him as a scavenger or opportunistic hunter, but PaleoJoe gave us all the great arguments for why that would be true. Just ask Calvin and he will likely tell you about that carnivore's poor eyesight, good sense of smell, and brain shape matching that of the scavenging vulture, the opposite of the super hunting eagle. There's a bit about the tiny arms, too, and the danger of running or lunging after the prey you are stalking if you have no arms with which to catch yourself if you fall. We also explored the theory of the great die off and the effects of the volcanic ash from a super eruption.

PaleoJoe brought with him replicas of fossils he'd found, and also so fun dinosaur puppets. A velociraptor with hair? Well, no, but very fine feathers that resemble hair, yes.

PaleoJoe also brought some of his books with him, because this was a book tour, and we are suckers for books.

After PaleoJoe Calvin has an enlivened interest in dinosaurs and digging. Later in the afternoon we visited the park by my parents' house and discovered great dig sites.

And femurs and teeth.

And then, because it's make-believe and can take us anywhere we want, he climbed into his futuristic lab and used the computer to create images of the dinosaurs whose bones he'd found, and shipped them off to schools world-wide for other kids to discover.