A Few of The Things We're Learning These Days

Well, the above moment surely warmed my heart and assuaged some of my Waldorf guilt, a malady beautifully described by fellow blogger Patricia Zaballos. Bridger wanted to make an ornament for our Christmas tree, and even though we were running late for an errand and I knew it was going to take us a good half-hour to get on the winter gear, how could I resist his sudden desire to be crafty, a desire he almost never evidences? I showed him how to make one of these nifty felted wool wreaths, and he went to town, his first-ever sewing experience. You could have knocked me over.

His creative pursuits usually skew more towards the Lego end of things. He took a Lego Dragsters and Monster Trucks class at the Science Museum with his dad last weekend and built some very cool vehicles and learned some physics along the way. And then when he came home, he immediately sat down and built. . . more things with Legos.



He's also teaching himself to read, slowly but surely. He started with a series of "Now I'm Reading" books that were very basic, but lately he's been picking out whole sentences in his Lego Club magazine and in picture books I'm reading to the kids. It's so fun to see his excitement and pride when the puzzle pieces come together to form a coherent, meaningful whole. He also finally whipped my butt good at Stratego, a board game we found at a thrift store that I'd beaten him at over and over again, to his great annoyance and frustration. Today he had me cornered so beautifully my heart was literally racing--and I don't think I could possibly have enjoyed a victory of my own more than I enjoyed his.

The other fun development is his increasing mathematical confidence. The other night after he'd gone to bed, I was taking a nice candle-lit bath. He knocked on the door, came in, and asked, "Does 150 X 20 equal 3000?" I had to think about it for a minute--it's hard for me to do equations like that without a pencil and paper--but I realized that, yes, 150 X 20 did equal 3000.

"How did you figure that out?" I asked him.

"Well, I know that 100 X 20=2000, and 50 X 20=1000, so I just put them together," he said.

I love that he is lying awake at night, doing math equations in his head, learning to juggle numbers in his own unique but effective way.

Cassidy learned to finger-knit this week (another strike against my own Waldorf guilt!) and sewed a felted ornament, too. Inspired by Ed Emberley's great drawing books, she and I have been working on a giant picture of a made-up faraway land, complete with a skeleton who wants to marry a serving maid, a circus wagon, a swirling storm, and a purple castle.

She is also showing a serious bent toward women's studies ("Are there any girls in this book?" and "Why aren't there more women?" are her constant questions), and is becoming an avid letter writer, with a lot of help from me as she learns to form the letters and numbers. Her interest in writing letters started after she wrote a lot of thank-you notes after her birthday and got back truly enthusiastic responses from her grandma and her aunt. Then, a few weeks ago, her interest in correspondence and feminism came together when she noticed that the author of the Magic Treehouse books almost always has the main characters, Jack and Annie, go back in time to help male historical figures, not women. So she decided to write a letter to Mary Pope Osborne, the author, asking her to please include more female historical figures. Wouldn't it be cool if she actually got a reply? If the writer actually wrote about some kick-ass historical women?

She's currently gotten interested in First Ladies, who not only had great wardrobes but also have some pretty compelling stories. Right now her favorite is Dolley Madison, who was so beloved for her kindness and generous personality that she actually got away with dipping snuff and wearing outlandish turbans bedecked with ostrich feathers. During the War of 1812, Dolley saved a famous portrait of George Washington and important government papers right before the British burned the President's Mansion--and right after the 100 soldiers assigned to guard the presidential residence had fled in terror.

After a steady diet of Barbie as Mariposa, I am happy to be reading about this kind of heroine, let me tell you.

So that's just a little of what we're learning right now. We putter through our days seemingly doing very little, yet when I write all this down, I'm reassured to see how much the kids and I are learning together.