Making Connections

Yesterday my daughter and I were acting out a Grimms story called "The Devil with the Three Golden Hairs."  (I must say there are few things that help me feel more like a legitimate, not-so-slacking homeschooler than acting out a fairy tale with the kids.  The old teacher in me gets all fluttery when one of the kids suggests it--oh thank God!  We're actually going to do something that could be classified as educational!)  Near the beginning of the story, a king puts a peasant baby boy in a wooden chest and throws the chest in a river so the boy can't grow up to fulfill a prophecy that he's going to marry the king's daughter.  

My son was playing nearby and half-listening as we acted out putting the baby in the chest.

"Sort of like Perseus," he chimed in.  

"Oh?" I said.  "Did Perseus get put in a chest?"  I couldn't remember.

"Yeah," my son said.  "Don't you remember?  He was the one who killed Medusa."

My curiosity was piqued.  I grabbed a book of Greek myths that was conveniently nearby and looked up Perseus.  It all started to come back to me as I read.  Yep, there it was.  Perseus's mother Danae being impregnated by Zeus in the form of a shower of gold.  Perseus and his mother Danae getting locked in a trunk and thrown in the ocean by Perseus's grandfather, who feared a prophecy that his grandson would someday kill him. 

"Dang," I said, looking up at my son in wonder.  "You've got a really good memory!  What a cool connection!"  It must be lovely, I thought, to have such a nice, absorbent brain that still retains information.  

Today we went to the Minnesota History Center, which has become our habitual Friday afternoon outing lately.  It's been nice going there so frequently because things are really starting to come together and make some sense.  Today, for instance, Charles Lindbergh kept coming up.  First, there's a model of the type of airplane Charles Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic hanging prominently in the atrium.  Charles Lindbergh is also featured in a short film about aviation and space exploration that we've watched several times now.  There's a bust of him and a photo of "The Spirit of St. Louis" airplane in the MN 150 exhibit of 150 Minnesota people, places, and things that have changed the world.  And then, while we were playing the MN 150 electronic quiz game, Lindbergh came up again in a question:  "What body of water did Charles Lindbergh cross in his famous solo flight?"  We were able to use what we'd just seen in the museum to answer that it was the Atlantic.

Another time, we used something we'd learned earlier to answer a different quiz question.  We'd looked at a map that showed patterns of glaciation in Minnesota over the last 10,000 years.  A question in the quiz asked what had created the rich black soil that covers much of Minnesota, or something along those lines.  Glaciers was one of the possible answers--in fact, the only one that made sense of the four.  So once again, we got to put a few different pieces of information together to come up with the right answer.  I could just feel the new neurons percolating away in our brains.

I have to say--moments like these make me feel positively effervescent.