Dance Magic

Asa has been on the dance team at her studio this year and last weekend was their big competition performance in Portland. Of course, there's all of the excitement - costumes, hair, makeup, rehearsals, making everything come together for that one moment of perfection. There's something about watching your child do something that they really really LOVE. Whether that's soccer or robotics or dance or whatever, it just gives you a direct line of vision into their soul and what makes them whole. For Asa, when she's on a stage she just shines with such a light, it comes out of her every pore and her smile is HUGE.

Their dance this year was "Ballerinas Get Funky" which started off with some classical ballet in tutus and ended up in a Hip Hop/Jazz kind of dance. They had a lot of fun with it and truly they did a great job, winning first place in their division!!! Asa was ecstatic, and so here she is with trophy in hand. My God, is my little girl grown up or what? It always shocks me to see her in stage makeup because she ages into something approaching a teenager right before my eyes.

What Does Unschooling Look Like Today?

After breakfast, Asa and I play Scrabble in our pajamas. Mackenzie is at the dining room table making a claymation movie. In a few minutes, Asa and I will head to the Performing Arts Center where she'll be appearing in a teaser of Annie - a selection of songs and scenes - performed for about 200 - 300 people. After that, she'll go to her Mime class.

Mackenzie will head out just before noon to go to an internship he's doing with a man who has his own web design business. This has been a terrific opportunity for him to not only learn skills like HTML programming, but to see what it really takes for someone to run their own business.

After a late lunch, I'll take the kids to the homeschool resource center where they're both taking a 5-week short course. Mackenzie's is in web design from his favorite computer science teacher, Asa's is a craft class where they'll make and embroider a purse. Then Asa will go to her dance class and rehearsal for Annie. She more or less lives at the combination dance studio/theatre these days (lucky for us they are in the same building!).

Mackenzie will go to a gaming night tonight, it's a group of adults who play a wide variety of board and card games, from strategy to storytelling to whatever. He really looks forward to Thursdays because of this! I'll pick up Asa at 8:30 and Mackenzie closer to 10:00.

Not all of our days are this busy, in fact Thursdays are the busiest on our schedule right now. But the theme that runs through our days is interest-driven learning, interaction with a wide variety of people and places, and best of all an amazing array of people who have chosen to share their time, energy, talent, and teaching with these kids. From the director of the play to the computer science teacher to the guy who invited Mackenzie to the gaming night to the man who is mentoring him in web design to Asa's encouraging Mime and Dance teachers, their lives are filled with so many wonderful adults. I feel that we're very blessed. Some people see homeschooling as a mom at a kitchen table with her kids and their workbooks. In our case, it is an interaction with the world at large and all of its exciting possibilities.

Crazy Weekend Part 1: Robotics

Last weekend was the culmination of several months of craziness: robotics team meetings and Nutcracker rehearsals, endless details to manage (where in town can I buy a pink leotard? tri-fold presentation boards? Do I have all of the team permission slips filled out?) Of course, it was all worth it as we headed off to the regional robotics competition with our team Veni Vidi Roboti excited to see their robot on the field and present their research project, and as Asa took the stage in her first dance solo.

Unfortunately, bad weather in the form of horrifying ice and sleet made the roads a skating rink (32 accidents in one stretch of I-5 alone) and this complicated our plans greatly. The night before the robotics tournament, we still weren't sure if it was even going to occur, but finally after 3 hours of delays, the tournament did take place on Saturday for which I was very grateful. These kids have worked way too hard to miss out on competing!

The team had a great time at the tournament. They really impressed me with their morale, their coolness under difficult circumstances, their ability to work as a team, and their overall positive and encouraging attitude. Unfortunately, the robot took on a mind of its own at the tournament, with programs that worked fine on the practice table suddenly going haywire on the actual competition table. It was very frustrating for the kids, but they really were very professional about it all. I was extremely proud, both as a coach and as a parent, of this team. I know that we coaches really did our job well not when the robot scored high (it didn't), but when the kids accepted what had happened, worked to fix what they could, and moved forward with a positive attitude. This is not easy for adult engineers, so to see a team of kids accomplish this was impressive.

Of course, the robot performance is only 25% of the total competition, with the rest coming from the teamwork judging, robot technical judging, and the research project presentation judging. I knew the team would knock the socks off of the judges in those areas and they did. They ended up winning first place in the research project category. I haven't posted anything about their project up until now, because I didn't want to give away their subject publicly. The theme this year was transportation, they were to identify a transportation problem in their community, and propose a solution for that problem. Almost all of the teams at the competition chose things like pedestrian safety, school bus scheduling, walking and biking to school, etc. Well, our team chose the solar system as their community, and the problem of orbital debris (or "space junk") as the problem. Their research involved things like calling up a NASA representative, metal recycling specialists, and arranging a tour for themselves at a local metal recycling facility. They really poured a lot of energy into this project and it showed. I'll have to post the text of it here later this week as it was truly impressive. I could tell the judges were really impressed with what they had accomplished.

Lastly, the icing on the cake for the competition was that they got a Core Values Nomination from the head judge. FLL takes their core values very seriously, and they place a big emphasis on teams exhibiting these values, including the value of "gracious professionalism" which means competing like crazy but respecting and exchanging ideas with your competing teams. Here you can see a moment that occured in a hallway between competition rounds where our team and another got a moment to discuss their robot designs. This is really what FLL is all about, right here, the learning and growth that occurs when these kids share what they've learned with each other.

Before we went to this competition, I had told the team that I didn't care a bit if they won or were the absolute last on the robot table, but if they came away from the competition having done their best and worked well as a team I would be very happy. Well, they accomplished all of that and then some, and as always I'm honored to have been a part of their journey, and very proud of all the work that they put into this competition. Having the head judge acknowledge their teamwork and core values really just confirmed what I knew about these great kids.

Of Prudes and Pliés

It's Dance Recital Season again, otherwise known as out of the (robotics) frying pan and into the (dancing) fire! As you can see from this first photo, Asa gets to perform in a ballet dance this year, which she is very excited about.

Every little girl should get to don at least one sugar plum fairy outfit and dance around a stage while the parents ooh and aah, and this has been her dream for lo these many years - ever since this first dance recital of hers at the Parks-n-Rec ballet class for toddlers (she's curtsying on the right):


We went up to Portland for the "Dance Magic" dance team competition this week as well. Boy did that event make me appreciate the woman who runs her studio even more than I already do! For one thing, I really appreciate her "no tummies showing" rule. All of our studio's dancers wear a leotard under their costumes, and in general their costumes are cute, cool, and not revealing of an undue amount of body parts. I've never really considered myself to be the prudish type, but there's something distinctly unnerving about tiny Jon-Benet Ramsey-lookalikes in leopard-skin bikini-top costumes shaking their booties at the audience. I have to admit I did get a little creeped out by some of the costumes and moves - things that look appropriate on an older teen just look so WRONG on an eight year old.

















But the girls from our studio had a terrific routine and they did simply great! Asa came off the stage beaming from ear to ear and saying that she has never felt so intense on stage, like she poured every little bit of her into her dancing (her words). She truly loved it, and it was great to watch her perform with her wonderful dance team. Now we've only got four more recitals to go before we hit the summer!

Dress Rehearsals, Presentations, and Performances, Oh My!

Well, we've made it through the week of dress rehearsals and practice performances. Miss Diva had rehearsals from 5:00 to 9:00 almost every night this week. That's a lot to ask of a seven year old, but she's held up miraculously well (probably due to her undying enthusiasm for dance and an apparently endless supply of energy). In the Chronicles of Narnia ballet, the mice come on stage after the dramatic scene in which Aslan is killed on the stone table. As young and cute as they are, they provide some comic relief after the tension and sadness of the previous scene. They scurry around and untie the ropes binding Aslan to the table. Miss Diva is the first mouse on the stage, and they are all so cute! She is just in love with being a mouse (although she has confessed that she hopes maybe next year, she'll get to be a flower - pictured above in the pink and green dresses beside her). Myself, I can't even contemplate next year after this week's grueling schedule!

Also on the docket this week was the kids' presentation of their robotics team at our local library. They set up their competition table in a meeting room at the library and showed how they would run the robot through the challenges at the competition. They also presented their research project (which is in the form of a play about medical applications of nanotechnology on cancer), and took questions and answers from the audience, similar to how they will answer questions from the judges in the competition this weekend. Afterwards, they demonstrated the robot for anyone who wanted to take a closer look. I was really impressed with all of the work they've put into this, and how professional they are all able to be. M. especially really took time to show some of the kids from the audience how to work the robot, and let them handle it and run it on the table.