The blog is slacking, but the school isn't!

Now that it's Fall Break for city schools and we have a week off of our organized activities, maybe I can get some blogging in. And can I just stop for a moment and tell you how much I love Unschooling??? It never ceases to amaze me, although it darn well probably should by now, how much these kids learn whether we're "teaching" at them or not. There's big stuff going on in those little noggins.

Tex and Noodle have discovered a new online game at PBSkidsGO.org, part of the show Design Squad, whereby they have to use various shaped widgits to get a certain number of Tribble-like Fidgits to fall out of their tube and into a little box. So they have to use geometry to figure how to bounce the Fidgits in such a way that they head towards the box, they have to consider the physics of the materials used and how much energy each absorbs (each widgit can be made of rubber, wood, or concrete), and there is definitely a certain amount of creativity and trial & error involved in getting it to work. I especially appreciate this aspect as Tex is a perfectionist, my typical first child who only looks up to adults and thinks he should be as skilled as us with much less practice. It's nice to have a game where, first thing, you HAVE to fail. You HAVE to let those Fidgits drop out of the tube and just let them land wherever they may, and not get into the box at all. Then you have to try out a solution, but it's probably going to fail, too, and that's good because it gives you more information. And so on and so on until finally you tweak your design just right, and those little squeaky, beepy Fidgits finally get in the dang box and shut the heck up. I love this game.

And Noodle, oh Noodle, my little electro-nut. Last week Noodle and I put together Tex's Electronics Lab because he just could NOT wait any more! It had wires! It had springs! It has transformers (NOT actually robots in disguise, though you would have thought so by how excited he was) and capacitors and did I mention WIRES?!?!?! Oh, the joy on his face when he completed a circuit and that little red LED lit up, it was priceless. I must admit I was pretty tickled, too, having never really known before how any of this stuff went together; it was a flashback to the old HeathKit television my dad built when I was about 7 years old. And two days later Noodle and I went right to the library to try to find some books on robots again (they said they'd order more for us) and left with a grade-school book titled Artificial Intelligence and three books about Star Wars (because Star Wars has... you guessed it... robots!). Strike what I said a few posts back about Tex building the spaceship and Noodle being the unwitting test pilot; I'm now quite convinced that they will be full partners in their plot to launch themselves out of the garage. For my part, I just don't know what I'm going to do when they get to more complex physics issues; that is not a class I took and I was quite happy about it. Perhaps they have a kindly grandfather or uncle who will help them experiment safely... or just enable their craziness, you never can tell in this family.

We've started reading the Chronicles of Narnia aloud, and so far Tex is thoroughly enjoying it. Only the second night, but when I finished Chapter Two tonight he very sweetly said "please don't stop", and who am I to deny this kid a good story?? Frankly, at this point anything that isn't a dinosaur book is a-okay with me! Truly, though, he still insists that he dislikes reading as an activity AND a school subject (even though he's getting better at it all the time), so anything that gets him excited about reading is something I want to encourage. He even wanted me to follow along with my finger so that he could tell where I was on the page, which is something he usually finds distracting. I do so hope that at some point he's going to find the book or topic that makes him want to read things on his own, so that he can get in some more frequent practice and start to reap the rewards. Of course, I should also remind myself that just because being "a reader" is important to ME does not mean that it will or should be so for him. DaddyO is not ravenous about books the way I am by any means. In fact I can only think of a few in which he was so engrossed that he didn't want to put them down to eat, work, or sleep, while I could probably say that about a few dozen books at least. There's almost nothing I like more. On the down side, we're running out of shelf space.

So there you have it, in a week filled with paper-making, computer and board games, The Magician's Nephew, and lots of outdoor and gym play, we have all grown leaps and bounds. I can't wait to see what happens next!