Best. Play. Ever!

That was Asa's comment after seeing Macbeth tonight at Free Shakespeare in the Park. This was uttered just after the soldiers carrying branches (from Great Birnam Wood) came rushing past our picnic blankets to the battle at Dunsinane. I also heard (though this did not happen to us) that the witches came and switched stuff from  people's picnic baskets and coolers, taking and leaving food as they went. What fun!

Mackenzie of course loves the Bard. In fact, just to torture him, I showed him this book from the (I'm not making this up) "Shakespeare Can Be Fun!" series) My kids, being homeschoolers, find any of the "Learning Can Be Fun!" type stuff intensely amusing. Like our society has made learning into such a horrifying thing that we now need to dress it up in exciting ways so that kids might actually like it again. Hey, I've got an idea, how about making it Not Boring in the first place? Even fidgety Asa was more than happy to sit through Shakespeare's weighty verses because damn it, the man could write a fine play. Love, death, murder, friendship, swordfights, what's not to like?? No need to "make it fun".

Meanwhile, the day before going to see the play, I did check this excellent book out from the library: William Shakespeare's Macbeth. It was the best re-telling of the story in the kids' section, including lots of good actual quotes from the script, and had beautiful illustrations. There are a couple of nice-looking graphic novel editions as well, but they were all checked out.We discussed the story and I think the kids were really ready to see it in its full version. Although Free Shakespeare in the Park does lack some in sets (I first saw Macbeth at the awe-inspiring Ashland Shakespeare Festival and the staging of the witches on the moors was incredible!) and costumes, one thing I like is that with being able to sit 10 feet away on a picnic blanket, for some reason it makes it seem so much more accessible. Even the language is easier to understand when you can see the actors' expressions up close and personal. They do quite a nice job with their plays, and used real swords with some nice sword-fighting choreography thrown in. The weather was warm and pleasant but not too hot, and we got to enjoy some chicken, grapes, and chocolate-dipped coconut macaroons (which has become our annual "Shakespeare treat"). Yes, Shakespeare can be fun!

Eid-e Shoma Mobarak (Happy New Year)

All over the world today, Persian people are celebrating Norooz (also spelled NowRuz & NoRuz in English characters). Timed to coincide with the first moment of spring (literally, it took place here at 4:44 am Pacific Time, but is different all over the world), this is the Persian New Year. Celebrations go for two weeks and include many activities, starting on the last Wednesday of the outgoing year, called Chahar Shanbeh Suri. On the evening of the last Wednesday, Persians light small bonfires and jump over them shouting:

Give me your beautiful red color
And take back my sickly pallor!

They also set up a Haft Seen, or table with seven items that begin with the letter “S” (Haft means seven, and Seen means “S” in the Persian alphabet).

The festivities end on the thirteenth day of the new year, called Sizdah Bedar, (Sizdah means thirteen and Bedar means outdoors). To escape the bad luck associated with the number thirteen, families leave their homes to head outside for a picnic, literally entire cities like Tehran empty out into parks and any scrap of land (including traffic medians) to picnic on this day.

This year, just before NoRooz, my sister Marisa and my brother-in-law Nickrooz (who is from Iran) journeyed down from Seattle to our house. In addition to celebrating Marisa's 40th (OMG!) birthday (can my lil' sis really be 40???) they put on a wonderful presentation for our homeschool group and neighbors on Nick's home country of Iran and on Norooz.

We started off with a Persian potluck, with every family cooking and bringing a dish from recipes my sister mailed me. I tackled "Shollehzard" or a rice pudding made with saffron, rose water, and decorated with pistachios and cinnamon (here, my sis and brother-in-law show the gorgeously decorated pudding, almost too pretty to eat!). The food was awesome, such a great idea to get us in the mood of an entirely different culture. Persian cooking is very distinctive, and my kids have gotten used to sampling some of uncle Nickrooz's dishes (his "green rice" has been a perpetual favorite).


After eating, they showed slides from their two trips back to Iran, showing the kids everything from markets and roads to ski slopes and playgrounds. They had put together a terrific presentation that really gave a picture of life in Iran, which is a bit different from the kinds of things you see in the media about Iran on a daily basis. The kids asked lots of questions. I think they were most impressed with the fact that the bazaar in Tehran is 12 miles long!


All in all it was a wonderful way to get a peek into a different culture, something you might not be exposed to every day. I've been grateful to have my brother-in-law Nick in our lives, because I have learned many things myself about Iran that I would've never known. It was nice to be able to share that with our friends and have a great evening together as well.

Curiosity Required

Asa just bought a stone at the market the other day with these words inscribed on it:

The life you live is the lesson you teach.

She picked that one out after looking through a whole basket of stones with new-agey inspirational sayings. It strikes me as an interesting choice for a nine-year-old, since kids this age are usually looking more inward than outward. But it also strikes me as an excellent phrase to take to heart as an unschooling parent. In fact, it could be the credo of the unschooling parent.

I was out on a run the other day when I passed a mother and two kids. They were by the side of the canal looking at a nutria (a large rodent that looks like a cross between a beaver and a rat, an introduced and invasive species I might add). The kids were asking the mom what kind of animal it was, and she replied that she didn't know. "But that's what you said last time!" one of the kids wailed. "Why don't you know now?" It's an excellent question, and one that cuts right to the heart of the biggest requirement for an unschooling parent: curiousity.

The life you live is the lesson you teach. If you are not living a life of intellectual curiosity, it may be hard for your kids to find the impetus to be interested in more than just their own small little universe - whatever that might be. Or worse, by not being open and actively engaged with their own curiosity, you may inadvertantly shut it down. I imagine the young kids of the mother by the canal may eventually stop asking such pesky questions.

In school, many of us remember that asking too many questions was penalized, either by exasparated teachers or more typically by the other students. A kid with their hand perpetually up is, more or less, frowned upon or outright reviled. You pick up unsavory knicknames if you don't learn to stifle that curiosity, and most kids learn to do just that. By 5th grade or so, they're way too "cool" to care.

In many ways, unschooling is easier than the sit-at-the-kitchen-table variety of homeschooling. Heaven knows, I know I'm not personally cut out to be the parent who enforces 10 pages in the workbook each day. But in many ways, it is tougher. Without a curriculum to follow and standards to be checked against, the unschooling parent can find themselves feeling like they are just drifting along and that their kids aren't "interested in anything". But if we take the time to engage in whatever our kids are doing, we discover that their interests can take us all kinds of places. My son's now four-year love of hippopotami came from a video game he used to like to play called "Impossible Creatures". We've since watched hippo specials on the Discovery channel, read hippo books, adopted hippos through the Nature Conservancy, he has a hippo shrine in his room, and a career as a wildlife biologist protecting hippos and their habitat is on his list of life's possible paths.

By having our own interests, our kids are often drawn into worlds that they might not venture into otherwise. I check out books and videos from the library that answer my own curiousity. Recently for me, that's been world religions and religious art, which meant National Geographic videos Inside Mecca and Inside the Vatican, books about Caravaggio, the Catholic Saints, Giotto, etc. Sometimes the kids ask what I'm reading and I summarize or read them excerpts. Sometimes over breakfast I read them a poem or show them a painting from whichever book I have at my place at the table. They almost always watch whatever video I'm watching. We discuss, we think about how what we've seen or read fits with our own experiences, and often these discussions bring us to more questions that we want answered.

For any one thing that kids or parents are engaged in, a thousand possible things spiral off. Every question that asked is an open door to walk through into unknown worlds. The internet and the library are our best friends in making sure that we follow up on things that they want to know about, and that their curiosity and interest are rewarded with finding answers and more information. Often, the answers lead to even more questions and we're off on another path of learning.

A Miscellany of Days

It's winter as usual around our place (drawing towards the end of winter with today's little taste of sunshine), and that means we've been filling our homeschooling days with lots of indoor activities, and getting outside whenever we can to get our gardens ready.

A sampling of what we've been up to:

Asa has been learning how to milk goats from the folks that we buy our goats milk from. Of course, it doesn't hurt that they also have seven new puppies on their farm, so every Saturday has been a combined goat milk/puppy petting extravaganza. Who can resist brand new puppies!


Mackenzie loves to hang out by the library bookshelf in our living room. But the problem around here is that with four cats, whenever you lie down with a good book, you become a convenient pillow for a feline.

We took a tour of the library with our homeschooling group and got to watch the robotic book sorter in action. We found out that on average, our main library receives about 6,500 books turned in each day. For a town of 130,000 people, that's impressive! I think we probably are single-handedly responsible for about 1,000 of those books. As homeschoolers, I can't think of any resource more valuable to us than our wonderful public library.

Whenever the weather breaks for a little bit, we head out to the enormous leaf pile for more raking. We're trying to get a good thick layer of leaves covering the area that we're going to use next year to expand our vegetable garden.

Mackenzie has asked me to teach him algebra. I think that's a blog post in and of itself - me, sitting at the kitchen table, teaching the kids stuff out of a textbook, just like real homeschoolers do!

We have our karate test coming up this Friday. The kids are testing for their next rank of orange belt. I'm testing for my (ulp!) brown belt!

And most excitingly, my brother-in-law Nickrooz and sister Marisa (known to all of us in the family as Meese, my name for her when I was three) are coming down from Seattle this weekend. Nickrooz is going to do a presentation for some of the families from our homeschool group about his native country Iran. We're going to do a potluck with Persian dishes, and he and Marisa have some slides from their last two trips to Iran. With Iran being constantly in the news, I think many people don't know much about the Iranian people and the country itself, beyond a few sound bites about nuclear weapons or Islamic extremism. Iran is a country with a culture that goes back millenia and I am so glad to have Nick as my brother-in-law, I have learned so much about his homeland! I'm excited to share that with other homeschoolers and also of course to have Nick and Marisa here and to celebrate her birthday.

Learn (Many) Something(s) New Every Day

Every now and then I jot down all the things that the kids and I have talked about and learned about in that one particular day, just for fun. I always come away from the experience amazed and awed at the things we talk and think about, the learning that happens without us even noticing it. On any given day, if I thought about it briefly, it would seem like we "didn't do much". The kids and I like to hang out together, or they're at their friends, we might read a book or go for a walk, we might have an activity (of course, activities like a violin lesson look a lot more like the "learning" that people are used to - formalized, taught, timed, structured), or we might bounce on the trampoline or play Yahtzee.

Unschooled learning doesn't look like a parent sitting down and teaching their kids, or the kids working their way through some set of materials aimed at learning some certain thing. It's a lot more fragmented than that, a lot more integrated into daily life, and a lot more interactive on the part of the parent. I have to stay on my toes, as I never know when I'll be called on to pull an answer to some esoteric question out of my hat. "Mom, what's the crush depth of the average submarine?" Hmmmmmm, I'll have to think about that one for a minute.... The other thing that amazes me is how good kids are at putting together the puzzle pieces of learning in their head. They make connections between disparate pieces of information, or things we have talked or read about days, months, or years apart. This is as true of numerical facts and figures as it is of history or literature, or scientific ideas. You don't need "Well Trained Mind" timelines glued to your walls or fancy curriculae for the kids to get how it all hangs together.

So all of this was illustrated in the day's little snapshot of unschooled, interactive learning, which looked like this:

The kids made Eggmen with leftover Easter eggs, glue, tape, boxes, crepe paper, twistie ties, crayons, and anything else they could find in the craft drawer. This is Commander Eggman next to his spaceship. They came up with some funny, punny names too: a baseball-playing "Eggo Martinez", the ever-artistic "Egginardo DaVinci" and the thespian "Eggo Mortensen".

Diva Girl and I practiced violins. She's playing in a recital next Saturday, so she was polishing up a Bach Minuet. I was trying to explain how to get more out of her dynamics when I decided just to stop in the middle and pull out some CDs. We listened to Mozart's Requiem (Confutatis Maledictis), Dire Straits' Telegraph Road, and Andrea Bocceli's Con Te Partiro. The latter piece sparked a discussion about the Italian Language. We've been watching Rick Steve's guide to Italy's Countryside on DVD lately and are hoping someday to take a bicycling trip there. We discussed how I could read some of the Italian lyrics in Bocceli's songs and understand some (because I can read French and some Spanish) and how the Romance Languages are tied together at a common root (and since the kids both studied Latin for some time, they could also find the roots to some of the words.)

Returning to dynamics, we listened to the music and the ways that dynamics influence the presentation of many different styles of music. I later did a little bit more research on dynamics and found out some interesting facts to share with the kids that I didn't know previously (like the fact that some composers have used more than three fff's or ppp's: Tchaikovsky marked a bassoon solo pppppp in his Pathétique symphony and ffff in passages of his 1812 Overture, for instance!) When Diva returned to her violin piece over an hour later (a bit of a long diversion), the difference in dynamics and presentation were really incredible. It wasn't any planned "lesson" but a divergence from what we were doing that interested all of us.

We took a walk to the store, talked about what to have for dinner. Since Italy was on the brain (and since Rick Steves shows off a lot of wonderful Italian cooking in his series), we decided on pasta and picked out fresh ingredients at our corner market. On the way home, we talked about how going to market and cooking were similar and different between our lives and the small Italian towns we'd been watching on the video (in the segment on the Cinque Terra, they talk about how a traveling marketplace comes to each of the small hill towns on the coast once a week.)

On the way home, we saw a smashed soda can. That's what got us talking about the crush depth of a submarine. That conversation led to discussing where the deepest spot in the ocean was (I said I was pretty sure it was in the Mariana Trench, but looked it up when we got home just to be sure - there's always finding new places or new measurements.) Along the way to finding that fact online, we found some other cool ocean facts, like where the tallest underwater waterfall is (who knew there was such a thing!) or the 50+ foot differential in the tides at the Bay of Fundy.

A wonderful family pasta dinner later and we were watching another Rick Steve's Italy episode, and then a Nova special on cuttlefish (truly amazing creatures). In between all of that we did plenty of different things. The kids played, we went outdoors, we took care of all of our animals, I gardened, they trampolined, M. told me all about his newest adventures in the DS game RocketSlime, Divagirl picked out some tunes on the piano and sang to the chickens (to help settle them into their new enclosure.) We talked with shopkeepers and friends in the neighborhood, rescued worms stranded by the rains, discussed worms, went home and looked up info about whether or not the giant earthworms still live in Oregon (did you know that some giant earthworms here grow up to three feet in length, but that they may have gone extinct in the last decade or so?), discovered that Charles Darwin played the piano for earthworms to confirm that they were deaf, and that there are over a hundred species in our region alone, and many many other things.

Those are just a few things I jotted down. None of them seemed outstanding or spectacular in their moment, just a few threads here and there. It's only when you step back and look at the whole rich tapestry by writing it out like this that you can see how beautiful it is to live and learn as an unschooler.

How To Sap Your Brain and Reduce Your Computational Abilities

Simply take a subject like math that is ingrained in everyday life, something you can't help but do if you live, something the simplest humans have been doing for millennia: counting their bushels of wheat, subtracting the number of goats they sold to their neighbor, calculating the footing of a gigantic stone pyramid; take that subject and make it so abstract and abstruse that it's barely comprehensible, then test people on their timed, immediate recall of those abstracted facts and figures and voila! You have created a monster. It's name: math anxiety.

A new study has shown that "Math anxiety -- feelings of dread and fear and avoiding math -- can sap the brain's limited amount of working capacity, a resource needed to compute difficult math problems." Apparently math anxiety (a completely school-generated construct) actually occupies space in a person's working memory, space that could be put to better uses such as, well, actually thinking and calculating and remembering things.

Fortunately, there's a simple and effective solution out there: don't abstract math out of its very real and immediate usefulness in everyday life. Don't make it a "subject" to be dissected, timed, tested, and ultimately feared at such a young age. Let math be joyous and freewheeling. Let it be measuring cups of flour if you double the recipe and calculating how much time it will take to save up for that treasured toy, figuring how high to make a treehouse and how many boards it will take to build it. Let it be how soon we'll get to grandma's house if it's one hundred miles and we're going sixty miles and hour, or how many more days it is until Christmas, how to divide three pumpkin pies among fifteen guests, or the octaves it takes to sing Oh Holy Night.

There will be plenty of time for abstracted math, for math in its purest forms for those who wish to pursue it (or for those whose chosen paths in life require a greater amount of mathematical knowledge). There will be time for piR2 and 3x+14y=z, for vectors and functions and geometries. When that time comes, it can be met joyously in the knowledge that math is something that intertwines among the fabric of life, in music and art and buildings and food; something elemental and of a precise beauty, not something abstract to be feared and detested.

In the meantime, I'm off to bake some cookies. A double recipe.

How They Learn

One of the concerns people always voice about unschooling is how kids will learn if they don't have someone hovering over them making sure they do so. I thought I'd write about just one (of the many, many, many) things I see my kids doing that illustrates how they learn. My daughter loves music and the violin is her main instrument, but she often sits down at the piano to pick things out or to play around. She's never had formal piano lessons, but the other day a friend taught her how to play part of a song that takes both hands. After her friend left, she sat down and tried to remember it. I noticed that she kept playing one part over and over, pausing each time. When I came into the living room, I saw that she was using her little magnadoodle pad to write down the note names (you can see my handy dandy note stickers on all the keys - anathema to most "real" piano teachers I'm sure, but my kids asked for them and use them frequently.) After that, she played it over and over until she had it down.

This morning, she noticed that the song on her Barbie toy cell phone is one by Beethoven that she has on a LeapPad game. She sat down at the piano to sound it out, and was still engaged in that when it was time to leave for Karate. Now that we're home, she's at it again and I can hear the stanzas of the Ode to Joy emerging from her fingertips.

When a child wants to learn something (or an adult for that matter), the most useful thing we can do is to support and nurture that desire. Provide the materials and encouragement, step back and watch the magic happen.

Child's Play

We've been really into games lately. Sometimes the kids play things on their own, sometimes with each other or with friends, sometimes with us on a family game night.

It occured to me that if you did nothing but just play games all day, you could probably learn just about everything you needed to know. There are games for logic and deductive reasoning (Mastermind, Rush Hour, and Clue are big hits here, and little Miss A. doesn't go anywhere without her Sudoku Addict book of puzzles), games that emphasize math skills (one family game of Monopoly gives you addition through multiplication plus percentages and fractions), most video games require reading and puzzle solving, there are trivia games full of history and Pit for market trading, puzzles and Operation for small-muscle dexterity, and there are physical games like Simon Says, Mother May I, and dodgeball that work reflexes and mind-body connections.

The game I love to hear the most is when the kids, either with each other or with a group of friends, start playing what they call "The Imaginary Game", an ongoing storyline set in some place and time of fantasy. Sometimes they play it in the car or sitting on the couch, sometimes its a big group of kids roaming through the woods or fields or at a playground. It's always changing and ever-fascinating.

The value of play is highly underestimated in our society. The phrase "Child's Play" connotes something easy or trivial, yet it is anything but. Children learn by playing, but more importantly play brings their lives meaning and joy. Now excuse me, I think I hear Sudoku puzzle calling my name...