What we’re doing is covering all of the history of everything in chronological order, week by week. Remember, the first week was our sun and where it came from. Then atoms and matter and the basic forces that hold it all together. Then this week was the formation of planets and our solar system.

Side note: As we go along we’re also talking about the history of human understanding of each thing, how we know what we know and what people used to think. What made people change their minds? Will they change their minds again in the future?

I’m not a pretentious wanker; I don’t use the words paradigm shift when I talk to little kids. But one of the overarching concepts that I want to ingrain is that our understanding of the world develops over time and could change dramatically by the time they are grown.

One of the reasons that science feels walled off to a lot of people is because it is presented to the public as infallible and inflexible, an overwhelming list of facts. Science isn’t a list at all. Science is a conversation that spans over thousands of years of human history, and anyone can jump into the discussion. You can argue with people who have technically been dead for a hundred years. You can raise questions and share ideas for people who won’t be born until long after you die. It’s pretty neat.

Which is not to say that I want my kids to grow up to be professional scientists; they can be artists or teachers or whatever. I understand a fellow can make a nice living cleaning fish tanks. A solid understanding of how scientific thinking works as well as a good working model of the universe and our place in it will help them think through whatever problems they meet in whatever sort of life/career they choose. Plus this way they won’t be devastated if Jupiter turns out not to be a planet.

Haha! suckers! I am tricking you into reading my tedious philosophy of education!

SO. What did we actually DO this week? It was a busy week considering that Graham and I both had a terrible cough+cold. Our second cold in three weeks of school. How does that happen? My understanding was that homeschooling meant sheltering my kids from the germs/social skills provided by the outside world! That’s what I keep hearing. So where are the damned colds coming from? Ugh. Much of what we did this week was related to phlegm and snot production.

But what ELSE did we do?

A big hit of the week is always the Mystery Box. It’s a literal version of science’s black box which is defined as a system or something that you can’t know what’s in it. Last week it was a package of batteries from IKEA. I didn’t put it in a box – it was in a bright yellow package labeled BATTERIES and yet the boys found it incredibly frustrating. Honestly it was my jerk way of hinting around that if Nicolaus would give up on his reading strike the world would be full of exciting information. Though he did read the words “Mango Pie” at a restaurant the other day. I was afraid to show too much excitement but what choice did I have? I bought him a piece of pie.

This week’s mystery box didn’t last long for two reasons:
1. Graham peeked an hour into the week.
2. I filled it with ice. I was really looking forward to them noticing physical changes to the box (temperature, changes in the sound, eventual dripping all over the rug) but Graham swiped the box when I wasn’t looking, took it to his bed, and pried open one side. He was very proud of himself. Dang him to heck.

But it was still neat. The answer surprised them a lot, because it turns out that ice cubes in a cardboard box sound freakishly similar to legos. Try it in your spare time this weekend and tell me that doesn’t sound like Legos.

Anyway.

Monday! We talked about the basics: What is a planet? What do they all have in common? How do astronomers decide which objects are planets and which are, say, asteroids or moons? The Pluto debate was pretty short. I explained both sides, and they both said that Pluto IS a planet. I told them that the problem is that if Pluto is a planet, then there are hundreds of other objects that we have to include as planets too. Nicolaus said, “Oh WELL. Then we just have to have a solar system with a whole bunch of planets.”

Graham agreed, we took a vote, Pluto won, and that was that.

We read about how planets form, then we did an experiment: Filled a big mixing bowl with water. Then I had Nicolaus stir it in a circle until the water was spinning really fast — then he pulled the spoon out and Graham sprinkled flour on top of the swirling solar system.

We watched for it to clump up into little orbiting blobs. Thank goodness they did, I really had no idea whether this was going to work at all.

They LOVED this activity, and started experimenting with different materials. We’d read that planets were basically asteroids that slammed into each other and stuck until they formed a big enough blob to be a planet. So they sprinkled bigger objects like confetti to see what would happen. Mostly they scattered randomly, some sank and collected in the middle, but every time we ended up with a couple of clumps that we declared planets.

Then Nicolaus spun off to go jump on the couch while Graham played with the flour for twenty minutes.

On Tuesday, Graham was pathetic.
Nicolaus and I read a great kids’ book about planets. How common are they? How common are moons?
Graham played a planet game on my phone and drank orange juice and didn’t do much else.

He did perk up when it was time for writing. Graham is working hard to master all of the letters and writes his name all over everything. At one point I left my phone unsupervised. I came in the room and said “Whatcha doing?” – and he jumped and really quick closed the screen. Later I went to text Kevin something and discovered that I had apparently sent something like: GRAHAM
GRAHAM
GAHAM
GRAAAA
M

The reply from Kevin, now several hours old, was Hi, Graham.

Wednesday – we started talking about the planets in our own solar system. We watched the Magic School Bus Lost in Space which confirmed for them that Pluto IS a planet and also that Janet is a boy because she has short hair and is rude. Graham declared that maybe some people are part girl and part boy, and Janet is probly one of those people because “they DO exist”.

We did an art project for the pure fun of it. I adapted a project from the wonderful Deep Space Sparkle blog.

They worked really hard on this, but Nicolaus wasn’t thrilled with his results. Shoot, I need to grab a picture to post. Graham took his very seriously. I love that he put the rings going all the way around Saturn even though most pictures show them from the side. It showed me that he gets the spatial whatevers of a planetary rings.

On Thursday we had a special guest! An alien from Io, one of Jupiter’s moons. She was sent here to find out how Earthlings manage to control volcanic activity, and there were many delightful hours of cultural exchange. She was their babysitter for the evening, and even though she looked remarkably like me they talked to her as though she were absolutely real and were happy to see me when I came home.

Kids are weird. You can pick up any object and start talking in a different voice and they will hold a conversation with it without question. I wonder when that stops, at what age? I’m guessing the age of self-consciousness, the same age that a lot of kids declare themselves bad at art or writing or math or science and stop doing any of those things for fun. Fourth or fifth grade? In the meantime, we will have many visits from the Iotian babysitter.

On Friday, we listened. Nicolaus is very much an audio learner. This is something I have to make a special effort to cater to because I am extremely visual. I have a very hard time learning anything by listening. A lot of times when he wants to know something I have to draw a picture in order to explain it. He gets impatient; I’ve had to tell him that the picture is for ME. It helps me formulate the words I need to explain how something works verbally so that he can hear the answer.

Anyway, on Friday we listened. We listened to Holst’s The Planets and drew pictures inspired by each piece while the music played. Some of their pictures were pretty literal, others were just spaceley doodles to go with the music. Nicolaus got annoyed towards the end, he didn’t want to draw any more. He just wanted to sit and listen to the music. I started pressuring him, realized I was being a jerk and let it go.

We also found several places online where you can hear space events translated into sound. I couldn’t believe that my jumping, spinning monkey children wanted to sit quietly and listen to pulsars and satellite noises and Apollo astronaut chatter that wasn’t made exciting by Tom Hanks. They want me to add these recordings to their spaceship closet somehow. Hmmm.

After that we listened to the first few chapters of A Wrinkle in Time. I somehow missed this one when I was a kid which is crazy and wrong, I would have loved it. It’s a reach for Nicolaus — he’s young yet for stories with a lot of character development. But he stuck with it and was rewarded when like three chapters in, all of a sudden the characters are thrown into a black hole and zipped away to another dimension where there are magical beasts and fantastic freaky-butt things happening. We may wait till they’re older to finish it, but it was fun to watch his face when that happened.

So that was it, that was our week. In between all of this we played “Guess what planet I am” games with each other, talked about other objects that orbit the sun, and generally sprinkled our week with planetty goodness. The cool thing is what they do on their own. I found tin foil comets in the bathtub, metallic-pen drawings of asteroids, and little models of the solar system all over the place.

My life is way too much fun.

Tonight I cut my own hair with scissors. It… well really? it doesn’t look that great but hey neither did my greasy/boring nothing hairstyle. Nicolaus was fascinated by it and told me that I didn’t look like Tiffany anymore. He said that now I look more like Athena, who he pictures to have short hair but not as thick and fluffy as that. My hair is too fluffy. Dang it that’s why people go to hair stylists! They have those special scissors that take the weight out of insane thick puffy hair.

My annoying cold has become an annoying cough that’s worst at night which would be okay if that weren’t when I do all my sleeping. Graham has become a pathetic, snot-filled creature this week. Meanwhile, Nicolaus is over his cold to the point that he is jumping on the furniture and making hastily-drawn get well cards and jumping and jumping and jumping and talking to us because he! Feels! All better now!

The only thing that makes the jumping stop is a story. We’ve been working our way through a book I picked up for fifty cents at a used book store: The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams.

Holy heck, it should be called The Life and Times of Everything You Like, Nicolaus Ard. It has cool guns and running from the law and natural disasters and falling off of cliffs and murders and poisonous snakes. It also has being nice to animals, stopping to notice the beautiful flowers and birds, the crisp mountain air, making friends with an indian and a wild bear. That plus learning to survive alone in the wilderness. We’re not finished yet, and I’m just hoping that a Greek god shows up on a space ship because then we’ll never have to read any other book ever again.

Surviving alone in the wild has been his favorite subject matter since he saw The Black Stallion, which has been his favorite movie since he was two or three. We recently discovered Librivox, a collection of public domain stories read by volunteers. He loved Robinson Crusoe, written anew for children. It was written anew back in olden days, so it’s still pretty awesome. Kevin and I like to guess what outrageous debauchery must be in the original adult version, seeing as the one for children includes killing, slavery, racism, blatant homosexual overtones and other things that don’t bother Nicolaus one bit but still.

Next we tried Journey to the Center of the Earth, which he didn’t like because you have to get through like thirty chapters before anything cool happens. Up until then it’s what he calls politics, which means it’s a bunch of adults standing around arguing and talking about stuff that they think is interesting but really? It isn’t.

So we abandoned that and switched to a recording of Swiss Family Robinson. He liked it a lot. I found it boring as all heck. It’s just – every chapter is “There was an animal, so we killed it! My sons were proud of killing it. We had a big talk about what the Lord thinks of people who are proud. Then we chopped up the animal. Said our prayers. Pretty soon another animal came along!”

And so on. It’s just a little repetitive. Is all. Moreso now that I’ve noticed the pattern and so I zone out except whenever they say “And then some kittens came along…”

It surprises me that Nicolaus likes it so much what with all the killing and the kids being griped at and put to work all the time, but it falls under people learning to survive in the wild all alone so it’s a winner.

Please excuse all of my coughing while I type this.

Anyway, the Grizzly Adams book is a hit. Last night we read the second to last chapter where it is implied that everything is going to turn out fine and Adams will be able to go back home. I thought Nicolaus would be happy about that, what with caring about the protagonist’s six year old kid being orphaned by the previous twenty chapters and all, but no, no, no. He made it pretty clear that if Adams leaves the mountain wilderness to go back to the settlement, he’s out and this book can go to hell. He went to bed wonderfully indignant. It reminded me of my brother in high school reading anything by Steinbeck. He’d slam out of his room and yell, “WHAT is the matter with this guy?? You can’t just do that to your main characters! How is punishing your reader at the end of a story going to make anyone want to read anything else you write EVER AGAIN?”

Which is why Steinbeck’s books and short stories never gained a major following, and maybe why The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams wasn’t required reading in any of your lit classes.

The theme for week 2 was:
Atoms and the four fundamental forces. So what did the early universe spit out? What the heck is matter made of? Why and how does it act the way it does?

Those are big questions, especially considering that chemistry and subatomic wizzywazzits have always been hard for my brain to process. Nothing can really BE that tiny. Didn’t Dreamworks or somebody do a movie about this featuring some wise-cracking talking animals with their hippity hop dancing? Because it sounds very made up.

That means that this week the kids and I learned a lot together and I had to answer most of their questions with well hang on, let me look that up. It was challenging and frustrating but a heck of a lot of fun. There is really something about explaining something complicated to little kids that makes it click. Try it! Next time you have some legal documents or a bit of tax code you’re trying to decipher, try explaining it to some six year olds until you have exhausted all of their questions. Then get them to explain it back to you, and they’ll do it in a way that you can finally understand.

I knew I wanted to start with talking about atoms and molecules. What are they? Where did they come from? So I sat them down with their Monday lunch and started with a quick mini lecture. Ha! You are trapped by food! I talked for less than four minutes: Everything is made up of tiny tiny teeny bits that we can’t see called atoms. Here’s what they are made of, here’s what holds them together. This is the same all over the universe. Eat your carrots.

The first two days I fumbled around. We watched the Magic School bus about molecules. Twice. We read a kids’ book about electricity and we were like ahh! Get it? Electr-icity Electron-ics.

We learned what atoms are made of. We’re still a little fuzzy on why exactly protons have a positive charge and electrons have a negative charge. I think my problem (maybe in life, in general) is that the idea that things have a charge sounds like magic to me. But that’s okay — the great thing about this way of teaching is that we’ll be able to dig the same grooves deeper every year. For this year we just needed to learn a basic vocabulary to work with and some visuals to help make sense of it all. The boys made models of atoms out of pom poms using tiny googly eyes for the electrons. We started our build your own crystal kit and talked about crystal structures and why they form. Ooooh and! Learned that technically all solids are crystals. This was good to hear because honestly I never understood why solids weren’t considered non-fancy crystals.

On Wednesday we mostly took a break. I wasn’t feeling well and my inlaws stopped by and I was sort of doubting the whole idea of trying to teach a three year old and a six year old about subatomic particles and the fundamental forces. These were things that I didn’t learn about until twelfth grade and even then I only made a B.

But somewhere between Wednesday and Thursday the whole thing snapped together. Over the next three days, here’s what we did:

1. On Thursday I showed them paintings by Seurat and we talked about the idea that everything is made up of tiny other things. They stood across the room and told me what they could see in the painting, then they took steps closer and closer until all they saw was blobs of color.

   Yes I know that the atomic nature of our world wasn’t what Seurat was talking about but he was a hardcore nerd and I am pretty sure he’d be okay with this usage. After reading more about his work and what people thought of it at the time, we made our own little pointalism pictures. The boys learned about pointilism and I learned that pointalism requires more patience than children this age have. Nicolaus abandoned his project saying, “I bet he was really mad that people didn’t like his painting. Because ‘Uhhhh that took me like forty YEARS just to paint that one little part and I cannot believe that I worked this hard on something and you’re just like – No, go away.’ You know, Mama?”

   Impressionists were known to interject the word like into their sentences a lot. Only they were French so – the French word for like.

2. We read and talked more about atoms.
3. Moved around and pretended to be atoms making up a solid, a liquid, and a gas. This is where it would be better to have lots of kids in the room.
4. We talked a lot about the four forces that hold everything together: Strong force, weak force, elctromagnetic force, and gravity. Like most teachers of very young children, I was honest about the weak force: Kids, I don’t really understand the weak force. But really this stuff is not over the heads of young children. They love the idea of four FORCES. And that there’s one called STRONG! And it’s the STONGEST FORCE IN THE UNIVERSE. They said it just like that every time, in all caps.
5. We busted out the legos. We set up rules: black ones are neutrons. They have no color. The colorful blocks were our protons. Then the tiny little pieces were our electrons. Your atom has to have the same number of electrons as protons or it’ll fall apart.

   Legos are amazing for this, you guys! We used legos to assemble our own atoms, then we hooked all of our atoms together to make imaginary elements and compounds.

6. We watched a Magic School Bus about gravity, and talked about how little is really understood about how it works. The boys like gravity a lot because you can see its effect right here. We did watercolor paintings where gravity was in charge of where the paint could go.
7. On Friday we read about electrons, electricity and magnetism. Then went to the school supply store (mmmm… school supply store…) and bought a bunch of magnets. It turns out that my kids will play with magnets every minute of their lives if they are allowed to. They would never eat or bathe again. They’d never sleep. It’s like the World of Warcraft for little kids.
8. Saturday Kevin showed them how to make a tiny motor using a magnet and a battery. Nicolaus LOVES this one. Oh my holy heck. He’ll tell anyone who will hold still for a second how to do it.

Looking at the list it feels like we were all over the place; there were a ton of different topics all under the umbrella of atoms. But this is sort of fundamental stuff here — a lot of what happens in the world wouldn’t be possible if it weren’t for this stuff and I think it’s good to know from the very beginning that these things are all related.

This sounds like big connections for little people but if you were to try and teach this stuff in a regular first grade classroom I really think the problem wouldn’t be the kids. Young children aren’t nearly as fazed by complexity as grownups are. To a kid the world is full of stuff they don’t know, so everything from restaurant menus to How to ride a bus to Where your pee goes when (IF) you flush is complicated. That’s just normal life.

We didn’t talk much about specific elements or the periodic table. I showed them the visual guide that I picked up at SciFoo, and my main point with it was see? Don’t be intimidated by the infinite varieties of stuff in the universe. There’s only so many different kinds of stuff.

The purpose here is not to cram my kids full of precocious information that they can’t really understand. And it’s not to focus only on science. The intent is to never draw lines between science and humanities. We’re all humans just trying to make sense of being human.

If nothing else, this week I got them to finally learn the difference between the words QUARK and quartz, and that the word is not GRABity. Even though it grabs things.

To me the most exciting thing was their questions. Questions that pop up during quiet moments in the car or on a walk, questions that show how much they are absorbing and turning over in their minds.

From Nicolaus:

1. How do they know? How did they find out about atoms if they are too small to see with a microscope?
2. If it’s true that atoms are mostly empty space then why – like how does my hand not just go right through this table?
3. Do electricity – like batteries? Do they make a little field out away like the magnets do? Or is it all inside the wire?

Graham is much younger of course, but I overheard him narrating his idle drawing. “YOU have to stick together in the nucleus. And that is a JAIL. Because of the STRONGEST FORCE INNN DA WORLD.”

But mostly he spent the week quizzing me. He’d point to something and say: What’s inside this? And what’s that made of? What’s that made of? and on and on until you got down to molecules. Then he’d say and what are molecules made of? Atoms. What are atoms made of? Quarks. And what are Quarts made of? Nobody knows! We did this dozens of times.

Poor Kevin. He wasn’t here for that part, so he was baffled on Saturday when Graham asked him, “Daddy, what’s inside my sweet potato?”

“What’s inside it? Your sweet potato is inside it. Want me to cut it for you?”

“Noooo. What’s INSIDE it?”

“Your sweet potato is what’s inside it.”

“NO!! WHAT IS INSIDE MY SWEET POTATO.”

“I don’t know what you are asking. That is your sweet potato.” Graham responded immediately: he folded himself in half, put his head down on his chair and refused to move.

I’d been talking to Nicolaus and not paying full attention and ooops oh my god Kevin, sorry — just say plant cells and he will guide you from there. But it was too late, Graham was crying because Daddy hurt his feeeeeelings. He cried for a full minute, a long time when you have a sweet potato waiting.

When he finished his food, he brightened, “Hey! Daddy! What’s my plate made of?”

Kevin looked at me, “You want to handle this one? It didn’t go well for me last time.”

So there we have it, I survived a week about atoms and I think they learned a lot. Over the weekend we saw a planetarium show that perfectly bridged everything so far. In the first five minutes they showed our sun, zoomed out to show the galaxy and then the known universe full of galaxies. Then went on to where did it come from? A big bang! Then! Matter went everywhere! And drawn together by four basic forces it started coalescing into atoms, then molecules, then huge clouds then stars and galaxies. Zoom back in to our sun and oh! PLANETS formed. For twenty minutes they covered each planet one by one, comparing it to Earth. Perfect because actually! This week we are on to something a little easier: planets.

1. Thank you to everyone who helped give good homes with plenty of room to run to all of my free Nerdy Baby stuff. I still have two boxes of roughly 50 ABC flash card sets. They are by the door, waiting for an address label. Each would cost no more than $30 to ship in the USA, and if you’re somewhere else in the world just let me know and I’ll find out exact postage for you. If you don’t need that many, I can stuff a flat rate box full for you. Email me with your address if you have a good use for them creative@tiffanyard.com

2. And! Awesome article! I can’t believe I haven’t posted this already, my only excuse is all the focus on drinking plenty of water this week has blurred my ability to do anything besides pee. But oh my goodness! this interview was so much fun. We talked for a long time wandering deep into the weeds of teaching philosophies and what’s wrong with the world today. Most of that isn’t in the blog post because see? I’m not the only one who is pretty sure you’d find it tedious in blog form. Anyway, the boys much enjoyed their trip to Dunkin’ Donuts thanks to the article which I will now shut up and post the link to right… now.

3. There was a third thing but now I can’t remember what it was. Time to find breakfast. Or a nap. Is it embarrassing if you take a nap before breakfast?

I don’t know why Kevin can’t be more supportive of my dream of someday being a floating head in a jar. They have them in lots of movies about the future, and the barriers to bringing this technology to market seem mostly related to FDA hangups and funding. But whenever I say man, I so look forward to the day when I can just be a floating head or a brain in a jar and I start working out the logistics of whether he would have to carry me around — and what would be the best way to do that? A sling of some sort, definitely. Or I can get one of those Segue things like cops in suburbia have and I can ask Brianna, the smart lady who keeps my web sites all running despite my best efforts to mess them up, to rig it so that I can drive the thing by thinking about where I want to go.

Kevin just shakes his head like I’m saying something funny and says, “There is something so wrong with you.”

And I say, “I know there’s something wrong with me. My stomach hurts.”

“Go back to the doctor.”

Then, if the boys are asleep, I say swear words.

So yeah. My stomach is a vile prostitute, and I’m ready to go on the total brown rice diet. I like brown rice a lot but I also like other foods. But you know what else I like? Not being sick.

In addition, this week I am enjoying another rollicking and heartfelt UTI, which stands for “Ur Tinkle Is hurting u”

Bonus! This week is super happy girl time, which I wouldn’t even mention except that it causes cramping and general hating of my midsection.

And I’m getting over a cold.

And so it was that four nonmajor conditions converged within my torso, making me remember why I can’t wait until they can just transfer my thoughts into Kevin’s netbook so that he can carry me around. I won’t have to think about what to eat — as part of his laptop I can just eat whatever crumbs the kids drop into the keyboard. I won’t have to be slowed down by stupid girl problems or stomach problems or pee problems. I’ll have a weird Linux interface and sometimes I will get dropped on the floor but that’s what solid-state hard drives are for, duh.