Libraries as refuges for children

Cevan Castle is a recent graduate of Columbia's School of Architecture, and he participated in the Architecture League's collaboration with Little Free Library's efforts to make beautiful, free libraries for communities. His design was good, and his statement resonated with me:

Libraries are shelters for people, as well as books. Children, especially, rely on libraries as a safe destination outside of home or school. Books are not the only attraction. The activities that congregate in and around the library collection—such as storytelling, tutoring, clubs—allow children to connect with each other and share in a safe place. New York City is not particularly friendly to children. The presence of a neighborhood library gives our smaller residents a destination and means of connection. I propose that Little Free Libraries could help children find an anchor in an otherwise adult-sized landscape.

I grew up in libraries, and our recent experiences at SF Skate Club have shown me how important these places are to children. Places that are not school, and not home, where they can have unstructured social time with other children, but feel safe in the presence of adults. Libraries fulfilled that purpose during my childhood.

Paragliding physics

We've been learning about the physics of flight (lift, thrust, drag... those things). So far we've looked at balloons and planes. Today, a paraglider friend gave us a demonstration on the beach.

The 30-foot wing fits in a backpack and looks like a massive plastic shopping bag:

The holes in the front fill up with air, inflating the wing:

When the wing has acquired its shape, it starts to generate lift...

And we're up and running!

Talking about how air pressure creates lift has been an opportunity to introduce Newton's laws of motion (particularly law 3, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction). Here's a short presentation about these forces in the context of paragliding.

Skateboarding with SF Skate Club

On Friday mornings E has been learning to skateboard with another homeschooled boy. Their teacher is Shawn Connolly, bona fide skater and founder of the San Francisco Skate Club.

I too skateboard and the children's uncle used to skate professionally, so there are lots of skateboards around the house. There are also plenty of skate parks in the Bay Area, and they're empty in the mornings (skaters aren't early risers). Perfect for kids to learn.

Sometimes the girls and I tag along to hang out with them and see what new tricks E has learned:

Shawn and his wife Thuy have been running the SF Skate Club for seven years now. They integrate skateboarding lessons with other creative and educational projects. They run an arts program, painting skateboards, making stickers, teaching film & photography and doing crafts such as sewing.

They recently opened a clubhouse two blocks from us, and our children hang out there almost daily. There are few such places for children to spend social time in an unstructured way with other children outside of home and school – what sociologist Ray Oldenburg would call The Third Place.

It's great to have them in the neighborhood! Also, the skate lesson is on Meetup, and there are still slots left for a couple more kids at this time.

Molecules

Today we talked about the units that make up the things around us – cells (in living beings), molecules, and atoms.

We reviewed the atom video (not everyone had seen it) and created a model of a water molecule out of poster board, construction paper, and string.

The water molecule is great because it's so simple: one oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms.

Here's my script for the lesson:

• Try chopping an apple into smaller and smaller bits. If you break a piece of matter in half, and then break it in half again, how many breaks will you have to make before you can break it no further? In ancient Greece, Democritus asked this question. He reasoned that it had to end at some point in the smallest possible bit of matter. He named this basic matter particle an atom. It means "indivisible" in Greek.
• What does an atom look like? Nobody can see them directly, they are so small. We have to imagine them. Physicists are people (mostly grown-ups but some teenagers ands kids too) who think about this stuff a lot. In 1897 (around the time our house was built) an English physicist named Joseph John Thomson, who lived in Cambridge and taught physics to students there, was experimenting with electricity. He discovered something unexpected: that atoms have a nucleus made of even smaller particles called protons and neutrons, and one or more electrons orbiting it much like planets orbit around the sun. The orbits of electrons are called shells. Now, over a hundred years later, almost everyone imagines atoms this way.
• J. J. Thomson also suggested another thing: that not all atoms are the same. Different atoms have different numbers of protons, neutrons and electrons. Atoms always want to have a certain number of electrons on their outer shell: two on the first shell, eight on the second.
• When you put atoms together, some of their electrons get shared between the atoms. This binds the atoms together, forming a molecule.
• A water molecule is formed when one oxygen atom binds with two hydrogen atoms. They do this because the oxygen atom has six electrons on its outer shell. How many is it missing to be happy? Two. The hydrogen atom has only one electron. How many does it need? One. So, when two hydrogens and one oxygen find each other and bind, they form a molecule of water: H
  2O

The children like chopping things up and putting water into smaller and smaller droplets. Also, pointing to things and asking each other "is this made of cells?" and "what is this made of?" (they know the right answer is always atoms but sometimes they know some of the molecules too).

Fun!

PS. A good source on the history of atoms here.

Physics

While visiting friends in Los Angeles this week, we have been learning about physics. It started with an inevitable question on the plane from San Francisco: How can something so heavy fly?

It's tempting to geek out on the answer, but the below clip summarizes the gist of my explanation attempt. (No doubt we'll be returning to this one!)

As soon as we arrived the children discovered a bunch of balloons left over from an easter egg hunt, and proceeded to experiment by tying a basket to them and adding and subtracting balloons to see how many were needed to get the weight to rise up.

Having succeeded in this, they then encountered the problem of getting the balloons back down from the ceiling:

A number of recovery attempts were made, including an audacious one by our friend Ben involving use of the remaining balloons to lift a string connected to a clothes pin held open by a melting ice cube. (Ultimately the children had success with a simple ladder).

By now we had made some comments about air and gases, and why helium made the balloons rise up, in contrast to the plane.

On the second morning at the pool one of the girls asked, "What is water made of?"

This launched a discussion about the elements, molecules and atoms. The children enjoyed asking each other what various things were made of (wool? smoke? another child's ear? the sun? pee?)

Until E asked "If everything is made of atoms, then what about the atoms?"

At this point we watched this animated video about atoms. (There's an explanation of how hydrogen atoms bind to oxygen to form a water molecule at the end).

We then spent the afternoon at Griffith Observatory on the Hollywood Hills, which is filled with models of celestial bodies – strikingly resembling the atoms from the morning.

Tomorrow we'll pick up from where we left off,  and start by watching The Powers of Ten, one of my favorite science film classics. We also use The Physics Book: From the Big Bang to Quantum Resurrection and other resources in the classroom.

Writing letters

Today we talked about writing letters, sending and receiving them, and also what it's like to be illiterate.

We passed around, opened and read some old letters C had saved from years ago:

We then recited this poem about an illiterate man, who received a letter, but didn't know who it was from or what was in it:

The Illiterate

BY WILLIAM MEREDITH

Touching your goodness, I am like a man

Who turns a letter over in his hand

And you might think this was because the hand

Was unfamiliar but, truth is, the man

Has never had a letter from anyone;

And now he is both afraid of what it means

And ashamed because he has no other means

To find out what it says than to ask someone.

His uncle could have left the farm to him,

Or his parents died before he sent them word,

Or the dark girl changed and want him for beloved.

Afraid and letter-proud, he keeps it with him.

What would you call his feeling for the words

That keep him rich and orphaned and beloved?

The man was ashamed he couldn't read. We talked about what it means to be ashamed of something, and some of us shared personal stories. It was a great conversation!

We had also brought out different kinds of stationary, and talked about how a writer can express feelings and ideas without using words.

Everyone chose somebody they wanted to write a letter to, and we spent a good chunk of the morning composing our letters. Some children wrote more than one. Grandparents, friends, even a friend's dog got one.

We then wrote addresses on the envelopes, attached stamps for domestic and international destinations, and walked the letters to the mailbox down the street.

I think everybody felt like they had touched someone far away.

Update: we just learned that April is National Card and Letter-Writing Month – who knew!

Archery on the beach

The children's interest in archery, which has been going on for a while, has led us to set up a regular archery practice on Thursdays in a safe area between the sand dunes at Ocean Beach. We announced it on Meetup, and this attracted a bunch of other homeschoolers and friends.

It's one of my favorite activities during the week – we have the beach mostly to ourselves, and the children find all kinds of interesting things to do when they get tired of honing their skills with the bow and arrow.

Green School in Bali

Our friend sent us this video of a school in Bali, called the Green School. It was started by John Hardy, a Canadian who ran a jewelry company with his wife before they embarked on building this environmentally-minded school. It's quite amazing!

Homeschooler gymnastics

San Francisco Homeschoolers organize a gymnastics class on Mondays, which our children love. It is nearby at AcroSports, an edgy gym in a landmark building converted by volunteers from an abandoned pigeon roost.

To see friends, run around, and learn to do flips (if you're E) - what could be better!

Doctors without Borders doctor visit

The children have been interested doctors and their work recently.

This morning we had a visit from our friend Dr. Chris Brasher, a pediatrician who worked for several years in the Congo and starred in the documentary Living in Emergency.

I brought out our globe, and Dr. Chris showed us places he had lived and treated children around the world. He told a story about a five-year-old boy he had treated in Ireland. The boy had challenged him to a bet, wagering one British pound he could tell a joke and make Dr. Chris laugh even as he did a spinal tap on the boy.

Here's how the boy's joke went:

Two cats challenge each other to swim across the English Channel from England to France. One of them is British, and is named One-Two-Three. The other, a French one, is named Un-Deux-Trois.

Which one do you think won the race?

One Two Three cat because Un-Deux-Trois cat sank (un deux trois quatre cinq!)

The Irish boy had won the bet. "He was a tough kid," said Chris.

The solar system

It took me a few weeks to prepare a unit on the solar system.

We started by looking at the sun using specially designed kids' welder goggles (do not use regular sunglasses - you can find inexpensive kids' solar eclipse observation glasses on Amazon) and clocked how long it takes for light to travel from the sun to the earth (8 minutes and 20 seconds). This in itself was an exciting exercise. For bigger kids, Khan Academy has a good video on the scale of the earth and the sun.

The most amazing thing about space is how astonishingly vast it is. Yet, despite its immense scale, we can design spaceships and travel in it because we can measure its geometry really accurately. Astronomy is all about the math of distances. I wanted the children to get a feel for that.

There is a whole industry of educational solar system kits out there. But I couldn't find one that was proportionally accurate. So I cobbled up my own model using the following scale, adapted from this Finnish document (it's in meters and centimeters; we've used the metric system for science from the start, and our children are used to it).

Planet	Size (cm)	Distance (m)	Note
Sun	100.0	0	If the diameter of the sun was 1 meter...
Mercury	0.4	43	Mercury would be 40 meters from the sun
Venus	0.9	78	Venus would be about 80 meters from it
Earth	0.9	107	The earth would be about 100 meters from it and just under 1 cm in diameter
Mars	0.5	164	It would be 160 meters to Mars
Jupiter	10.3	559	It would be 560 meters to Jupiter, which would be 10 cm in diameter
Saturn	8.6	1,025	1 kilometer to Saturn, which would be 9 cm in diameter
Uranus	3.7	2,061	2 kilometers to Uranus
Neptune	3.5	3,229	3 kilometers to Neptune
(Pluto)	0.2	4,237	The distance to Pluto would be 4 km and it would be the size of a pinhead

I found a sun roughly the right diameter from this inflatable kit. The smaller, rocky planets were about the right size in a kit similar to this Smithsonian one that I picked up on the sale rack at Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley. Since these planets are so small I wanted the surface to look detailed. The bigger gaseous planets were roughly the right size in this unpainted styrofoam kit.

I hung the sun in the school tower room. Cool!

We then painted the larger gaseous planets (the smaller ones from the other kit were already painted). While painting, we talked about what they are made of, and why each one is a different color. And peculiarities like Jupiter's Great Red Spot, and of course Saturn's rings.

We played with them to get a better feel for their relative sizes. Compared to Earth the sun is SO HUGE! The children didn't seem to ever get tired of marching in ellipses to show how they orbit round and round.

Also, by now we had memorized their order.

The next day we went to the beach to measure orbits. While R held the sun up high, the children measured the distance to Uranus, then Venus, then the Earth and Mars using a big outdoor tape measure I had ordered for this purpose.

When we got to the orbit of the Earth (107 meters from the sun) one of the girls exclaimed "it's the same size as the real sun!" Which was true - the real sun, its sphere visible through cloud cover, was the same size as our inflatable one, which R was still holding where we had started. We could easily blot either sun out with our thumb.

After Mars (160 meters) the children had had enough walking. It was humbling to think that we still had another 400 meters to get to Jupiter at the end of the beach. And that sand grain-sized Pluto was whizzing by Point Bonita Lighthouse four kilometers away, on the other side of Golden Gate Bridge.

Later this spring I plan to connect this to our ongoing interest in ancient temples and cultures. Stonehenge, the pyramids, and the Mayan temples all stand testimony to the crucial importance of the celestial bodies to people, their religion and societies throughout history. I'm planning to use the book Celestial Geometry: Understanding the Astronomical Meanings of Ancient Sites as one of the resources for this upcoming unit. 

Filming a documentary on homeschooling

Today we had a film crew over, who were shooting a documentary on homeschooling. The children were having their gardening class, and barely noticed the cameras:

Later in the afternoon Rose the music teacher came over for what we call Band Practice. I had forgotten the film crew was still around until I walked into the room – the shoot had turned into a music video!

Tinkering class

This spring we are participating in the Homeschool Science Programs at the Exploratorium on the San Francisco pier.

In March, the children have been taking a class on tinkering – building simple machines, and learning about electronics, circuits, mechanics, and the basic laws of physics in the process. It was run by Ken, an Exploratorium staff member who had a knack for demonstrating everything from static electricity to robotics.

Here he is explaining how magnetism works:

The children made many projects. One of their favorites were robots that drew strange patterns:

In this video, we're working on building a simple electric motor – watch us get it to work!

Math games

In 2012 at the annual Adventures in Homeschooling conference I attended a talk by math teacher John Bennett titled "No Math? No Problem", where he argued that math, which is fundamentally about inductive and deductive reasoning, would be better taught through logic games than traditional school exercises.

Here's a short TEDx version of it (which unfortunately doesn't include the part about his favorite logic games):

Since I met Bennett we've been playing math games, including the simple two-player game he taught us using teddy bear counters (the bears are useful and we keep a set handy, but any small objects you have in sufficient quantity will work).

Here's how the game works:

Set out on a table

• Five bears of any color (say, blue)
• Three bears of another color (say, green)
• Two bears of a third color (say, yellow)

Now, each player can take away as many bears of one color as they want - but they always have to take at least one bear, and they can't take bears of different colors on the same turn. The objective is to take away as many bears as you can without being the last one to take a turn. The player left with the last bear loses.

Here's an example game flow:

1. Player 1 takes the five blue bears
2. Player 2 takes the three green bears
3. Player 1 takes one of the two yellow bears
4. Player 2 loses, because now there is only one (yellow) bear left for her to take!

It's a really simple game of strategy where the players have to compute moves and outcomes to win.

This week we tried a new game that worked quite well: Think Fun Math Dice Jr. The youngest child played the short version of it while the older children played the full game. All could play at the same time, which was nice!

Drawing from life, and watercolors

In the past weeks we've been learning to draw from real life and paint with watercolors.

We've been using the book Drawing with the Right Side of the Brain, which is an excellent guide to learning to draw from real life.

E started with the exercises.

This is an upside-down copy of Picasso's portrait of Igor Stravinsky: 

A few weeks later, when the weather was nice, I decided to teach the basics of aquarelle technique to the children. We started by watching this video I had made of my grandfather, who was a painter, and taught me when I was a teenager in art school:

During the next few days we went out to the nearby square and painted with watercolors. We learned to tape the paper to the board to prevent curling, to start the composition with the horizon, to paint wet on wet, etc. We started by doing a landscape of the Painted Ladies:

The next day we did a close up of the flower bed - same location, different framing & composition:

Learning how nature copes with the drought in California

We went on a hike in the Mt. Tamalpais national park with ranger Dave. Hikes with him are fascinating - he finds creatures (salamanders, centipedes, frogs...) where you wouldn't expect to look, and can tell a good story.

Northern California is experiencing a drought, and the lake on which the frogs breed was dry. Some of the frog population was apparently still hanging on, because we could hear them in the trees.

We found tiny holes made in acorns by acorn weevil larvae:

Spring birds

It's spring and we've been noticing a lot of bird activity going on, so we decided to spend some time learning about the birds around us. Our bird feeder recently broke in the storm, so it's been necessary to wander out of our own yard to see more of our winged friends.

We've been carrying Mac's Field Guides (the Northwest Backyard Birds and Northwest Coastal Water Birds ones) and putting stickers on the birds we spot. Among the ones stickered so far: the yellow-billed magpie, the California gull, the cedar waxwing, and the Western bluebird.

An American robin couple has been busy at work collecting grasses, twigs and other nesting materials from our yard, but we haven't been able to locate their nest yet.

We also went to the nearby Randall Museum, which has a great bird exhibit and was perfect for us, because we got to see many of the common (and some much less common) birds of the area close up. The cawing raven was everyone's favorite.

Also, we've played Christine Berrie's Bird Bingo, which is really great. (We recently also got the Bug Bingo as a present, and will probably use that too later on).

Among the books we've used are An Egg is Quiet, and DK Eyewitness Books: Bird. Photographer Sharon Beals also has a beautiful book out about birds' nests.

Baking from a recipe

Almost every week we bake something. This time, before baking oatmeal raisin cookies, R had the children first write down the ingredients and the recipe:

Then they got to work:

The cookies were eaten before I had the chance to take a picture!

Money: earning, saving, spending, donating and investing it – or not having any

This week we've discussed money: earning it, spending it, saving it, donating it and investing it; as well as situations where people find themselves without enough money to live on. Thematically this was was a follow-up to the unit on jobs.

The San Francisco Bay Area has both poverty and extreme wealth, and we live in a neighborhood where the two co-mingle, so wealth and inequality are important themes in our everyday lives.

In anticipation of this we had watched Chaplin's The Kid, about poverty in the tenements. It is probably his best movie, and the children loved it.

In the morning we read Judith Viorst's Alexander Who Used to Be Rich Last Sunday. Before starting we had set out a cup full of 100 pennies. The children counted out the pennies each time Alexander spent some – until he was no longer rich.

One evening in the week we watched the 1971 film version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and discussed it (we prefer it to the Tim Burton one). We also read the book out loud over the course of the month – we recommend the edition with the original illustrations by Joseph Schindelman. Here are my notes:

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - discussion

• Veruca Salt - wanted a golden goose but fell in the garbage chute
• Violet Beauregard - gum-chewer who turned into a blueberry
• Augustus Gloop - obese boy who fell in the chocolate river
• Mike TeaVee - always watching screens, was shrunk by the WonkaVision contraption
• Charlie Bucket - the hero, stole fizzy lifting drinks but gave back the Everlasting Gobstopper at the end.
• Slugworth - the evil competitor of Willy Wonka, who offered $10,000 to Charlie if he could bring him just one Everlasting Gobstopper (but who was really Willy Wonka’s agent)
• Willy Wonka - was he good or bad? He let bad things happen to the mean kids, but they were ok in the end.
• Grandpa Joe - understood what it’s like to be a kid - but foolishly got Charlie to try the fizzy lifting drinks

What happened in the end? What do you think Charlie will do with the chocolate factory? What will Willy Wonka do?

To the children, Veruca Salt was the most intriguing character.

C had ordered a Money Savvy Pig (a piggy bank with slots for Save, Spend, Donate, and Invest) for the school. We talked about what each of the slots means, and decided to save up for a telescope.

Last summer C and S set up a lemonade stand on the High Line in New York with some friends, which was a financial success. Now we revisited that experience and role-played the various decision points: deciding what enterprise to embark on (we pretended we were a family-owned pizzeria), investing your starting capital, putting in the work to create a product, and then selling it for a profit.

On another day, we discussed spending the money we have earned, and how our wants are different from our needs (this unit on wants and needs can be found in the Oak Meadow curriculum). The children ran around house labeling things with Post-Its: red for things they thought they really needed, green for things they wanted but didn't really need.

The dog got a red sticker:

We are planning to keep developing the theme by creating our school store, perhaps on Etsy, when we have come up with a good enough product to sell.

Wind and Poetry

The thermometer outside our window broke in the wind! It was quite windy this week.

We also learn poetry, and since it was windy, we learned "Who has seen the wind" by Christina Rossetti:

Who has seen the wind?
Neither I nor you:
But when the leaves hang trembling,
The wind is passing through. 

Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I:
But when the trees bow down their heads
The wind is passing by. 

I learned this when I was a child too.

I am a great lover of literature, and when looking through the curriculum we use as a template for our classes, I was not impressed with the poetry at all. The stuff you learn as a child sticks in your head for the rest of your life, so it's better to have good poetry stuck in there! So, we've had some Blake, and Robert Louis Stevenson, and William Makepeace Thackeray, in addition to Christina Rossetti, who wrote wonderful poems suitable for children.

First the hands, then the heart, then the brain

Today a friend from New York sent us this article by Ian Johnson in The New Yorker about the spread of Waldorf education in China. 

We're Waldorf-inspired (what education isn't!) – even more so when it comes to getting our hands dirty; drawing on myths from around the world; and the somewhat lighter-than-usual emphasis on symbol manipulation and screens.

This quote sums it up nicely:

The movement was founded by the Austrian mystic Rudolf Steiner, who “believed that children should be guided slowly out of what he termed ‘the etheric world,’ where they existed prior to birth, and that education should engage first the hands, then the heart, then the brain,” Johnson explains. “Waldorf-educated children play a lot when they’re young, and often don’t learn to read until second or third grade.” The Waldorf curriculum “reflects Steiner’s belief that an individual’s development mirrors a civilization’s, so the early years include lots of creation myths and fables.”

Ways of responding to injustice

On Friday we discussed ways of responding when someone is unfair to you.

To prime the conversation we read The Goose Girl, a Brothers Grimm tale about a princess who was treated unfairly by her lady-in-waiting after being sent to marry a foreign prince.

The lady-in-waiting switched roles with the princess and married the foreign prince; but in the end the real princess was redeemed and the miscreant maid was condemned to exile (we used this somewhat languid but more defensible punishment in the Oak Meadow version of the story; in the original Grimm version she was thrown naked into a cask, stuck with sharp nails, and dragged from street to street till she was dead!)

It was obvious to the children that the princess was not treated fairly by her maid. But when I asked how they would have acted if they had been in her place, they had to think about it, and didn't agree at first.

Should injustice be tolerated? Of course not. Then why didn't the princess tell anyone? The lady-in-waiting had made her promise not to tell any living being, on pain of death. It was only when the foreign king overheard her lament her troubles to the fire that he caught wind of who she really was.

Should the princess have refused to give her word to the delinquent lady-in-waiting, and fought to defend herself? Or should she have pretended to go along with the scam, but broken her promise to the maid as soon as it was safe to do so?

And did she really keep her word in the end?

I plan to return to these questions later, when we do a unit on Gandhi and nonviolent resistance.

From garden to table

Earlier in the year we hired a professional chef, who used to own a vegetarian restaurant. She prepares breakfast and lunch for the school, and we love her cooking! Here's her menu for this week:

The lettuce, which the children planted earlier, is also now ready to be harvested for use in the school meals. (Last week they also planted strawberries, which you can see to the right of the lettuce in the photo below. The fenced one in the back is a tomato plant.)

There's something wholesome about the simple fact that the children grow the food they eat. And help turn them into delicious meals!