Play Is Serious

As I typed up the latest journal entry,  I was struck by how serious the kids were when they were playing. Looking back on memories of my kids playing, I picture them all-smiles, laughing and chatting. Of course, they did all of those things at times. But at other times, their faces were solemn, their attention was focused, their movements were deliberate.

Why should I be surprised? Look at adult gamers racking up points at Tetris or leveling up in World of Warcraft. They have that same intent, focused, serious look. Look at adults playing tennis or poker or bridge—of course they laugh and smile at times, but their faces are usually serious as they concentrate, develop strategy, and try to win.

Yeah, OF COURSE playing is serious stuff.

Not a smile in evidence on these guitar heroes!

Mindy, Lindsey and Camille were serious as they danced in the living room, and they were serious as they played school. They “knew” a book about modern animals that they'd snagged off our bookshelves wasn't “really” a school book about dinosaurs, but they were serious as they played/pretended that it was. Often their play on the computer was solemn stuff, a time for focus and attention and even (once in a while) competition.

One great thing about homeschooling is that I could take play as seriously as my kids did—as seriously as play should be taken!

A book that had a lot of impact on my when I was a young adult was TheThree Boxes of Life, by Richard N. Bolles, the What Color Is Your Parachute? guy. Bolles points out that a lot of people seem to find it reasonable to devote the first couple of decades of life to learning—kept strictly separate from “working,” and hopefully not too distracted by “playing.” The next four or so decades of life, these people seem to maintain, are of course dedicated to working. After a long, productive life, if we've made it that far, we are allowed to retire and devote whatever years or decades remaining to us to leisure. In other words, to playing.

But, Bolles argues, in reality we should be learning, working, and playing at all stages of our lives. We shouldn't even try to keep these things separate! Watch a toddler do all three things at once, as he or she plays with all sorts of objects, toys and non-toys alike, and learns through the play. This toddler is apt to have a serious, intent expression during a lot of this play/learning, and we can easily see that, for the toddler, playing around with stuff and learning from it is serious “work.” I can say the same thing about the play/learning/work as Camille danced at age five, and as Lindsey made mountains of drawings at age ten, and as Mindy created computer programs at age fourteen.

What a gift it is to get paid to learn/play/work, as many people who love their jobs or professions are! We could say that one major goal of homeschooling is the maintenance of learning, playing and working as one integrated whole. 

Journal Entry 7

Thursday, September 24, 1987

We haven't gotten dressed yet. We haven't eaten breakfast, even. But Camille is here, and the three girls are already playing.

This is what play looks like this morning: Leotards. Ballet shoes. The Nut-cracker Suite on the record player. Girls dancing with lovely curving arms, graceful-awkward leaps and turns, gently solemn faces.

They dance like this, with quiet, serious intensity, for a good long while, but eventually the girls submit to hair brushing and gobble up their breakfasts. Lindsey changes her clothes, because Delia and Kiki are coming to take her to Mommy and Me again.

Since Delia is running late, I read a book called The Get-Along Gang to the three girls. Then we get out some felt-tipped markers and paper and start to draw. When Delia arrives, Lindsey happily says good-bye and runs out the door, eager to see Kiki again.

Mindy and Camille say, “We're ready for school!” They inform me that the day's letter is “L,” and they busy themselves with their cubbies and pencils and paper. “Use the chalkboard,” Mindy directs me.

I write a large “L” on the board, and the girls copy it. So easy! They look as solemn as they play school as they did dancing ballet, so I decide to try for some smiles as I begin a guessing game. “Can you figure out what L-word I am drawing?” I begin to draw a lion – and before I even get to the mane (the most lion-y thing about a lion), Camille has guessed it. I write “lion” on the board as I congratulate her.

The girls are smiling now—but they put their serious scholastic faces on as they copy the word “lion” from the board. I'm thinking I'm going to do Round 2 of the guessing game, but they are now drawing on their papers. Mindy copies my lion face and then, she tells me, writes “lion” in “handwriting.” She means cursive writing, but she doesn't know how to do it, so she just makes some enormous loopy squiggles that she says means “lion.”

Camille draws a human figure and then does “cursive” in small, rounded script. She reads her message to me (which is lucky since it, too, is made up of squiggles). It's a pretty long sentence, and I don't catch it entirely—something about a woman from Mars doing strange things. (No connection to a lion, as far as I can tell.) I offer to print her sentence below her handwriting, but she says, “No. I'll read it to people.”

I'm figuring we are done with the letter “L,” but the kids ask for another guessing game L-word. I draw a lemon, and Mindy guesses. Again, both girls copy the word “lemon.” Actually, Mindy draws the lemon first, and then starts in on the word. She soon runs out of room and complains to me. I tell her about hyphens, and she ends up with:

Le-

mo-

n

Drawings and labels done, the girls ask me for “one more.” I draw lips, thinking maybe the kids will say “mouth,” but they chime in with “lips” right away. This time they don't bother to write and print and draw. I can see that they're done as they start fussing with their cubbies again, putting away their pencils and erasers.

I'm thinking the girls are going to run off and play, but Mindy remembers the wooden dinosaur skeleton model I'd said we could put together today. We open the package. All the “bones” are made of flat pieces of wood. The girls are excited and start sorting the bones. They make a pile of rib bones—I tell them the label “rib bones,” and they eagerly use the term—and then they figure out which bones belong in the neck and which in the tail.

Mindy sniffs one of the bones. “It doesn't smell like other dinosaur bones,” she tells me, “because they smell bloody.”

“These are just wooden pretend bones,” I say. “And they're a lot smaller than the real bones.”

Mindy nods.

The model bones are hard to put together, and I can see that I am going to have to sand some of the “bones” for the thing to work. I go off to the garage for some sandpaper, and I am soon busy sanding rough connections.

Mindy and Camille troop off and come back with two rather large books from our bookshelves. They are regular adult books, but the girls tell me that they are their “school books,” and they pretend that they are getting them out of their cubbies (even though the cubbies are a lot smaller than the books). They settle down in their chairs again, and each starts to turn the pages of her book.

“These school books are about dinosaurs,” Camille says. As she turns the pages, she starts to talk a little about dinosaurs, as if she were reading interesting bits to me. But soon she is distracted by the pictures of foxes, crows, and other modern animals, and she loses the dinosaur stuff in favor of narrating the mammals and birds in front of her.

When Camille is done “reading” to me, I ask Mindy about her book. “Is it about dinosaurs?” I ask.

Mindy has the book Cosmos, by Carl Sagan, so she answers, “This is my space book.” Then, as she turns the pages, she says, “Here is Jupiter...The moon...This is the sun...Wow! Space is beautiful!”

Camille agrees. We chat a bit about space, and Mindy says something she'd already mentioned—that she thinks our next subject, after dinosaurs, should be space. I ask Camille what she thinks of the idea, and she agrees again.

The kids are being awfully agreeable today!

The girls ask for time on the computer. They decide to play “Reader Rabbit” with the sorter game, choosing the letter “L.” (Yep, they are still holding onto their chosen letter-of-the-day!) Their game play is really improving, and after each girl has done three games, they seem ready to move on. Before I can suggest a change, Mindy says that she wants to play one more game and then switch to another computer game. She plays, does well, and turns the mouse over to Camille. Camille plays her last game—and has a perfect round! Reader Rabbit appears on the screen and dances in reward.

“I want to make it dance, too,” Mindy decides. So she plays “one more” and ALSO gets a perfect score, and a dance. Big, happy smiles!

The next game they choose is a picture match-up. I assume they will play separately, as they had the sorter game, but although they take turns with the keyboard and mouse, they work together the entire game, and they robustly cheer for themselves, too.

Halfway through the last game, Mindy mentions that she is hungry for snack. I ask if they want to take a break from the game, but she says she will wait for “snack time.”

Snack time, she had previously informed me, is 10:30.

At 10:30, the girls abandon the computer and move back to the wooden-bone-strewn table for their snack. I help them get out bagels, cream cheese, “Quacker Crackers,” and apple juice. They need a little help with the bagels, but they do the spreading and the pouring, and the eating and then the cleaning.

I sand wooden dinosaur bones!

Next, the girls inform me, it's time for recess. They start in with some dance moves again, with a few gymnastics stunts thrown in for good measure. After practicing more leaps, they ask for music. I put Grieg's “Peer Gynt: Morning” on the turntable and begin to dance with them.

“Let's line up,” Camille says, arranging us in the hallway. Then she leads us out of the hallway in a line. I continue to happily dance with them until Mindy says, “Mom, when can you leave? We need private time.”

Oh, well!

I go back to the mess of bones and sand paper and wood dust and begin to clean up. (Obviously, we aren't going to complete the model today!) I can see that the girls are now doing partner dances, each with a large stuffed animal as her partner. Eventually, I spot some wonderful action: as they dance, they throw their partners into the air and then catch them again!

The girls invite me back to recess to read a book to them. (Hmmm...read-aloud time during recess? It's pretty obvious these girls have never been to “real” school.) They choose a book called Messy, by Barbara Bottner, and the story includes a ballet class and dance recital. Camille assigns herself to be various characters in the book, as I read, and Mindy wants to be the main character, the star dancer who is (you guessed it!) messy.

Lindsey usually leaps and cavorts and capers and dances as I read aloud, but with her gone, I'm thinking we are going to have a more relaxing reading session, because Camille and Mindy are usually curl-up-with-the-adult cuddlers. But not today—during this special recess read-aloud, they are in constant motion.

When the book is finished, Mindy gets out the bell and rings it. “Recess is over,” she announces.

I offer to read a dinosaur book in Spanish to them. With the pictures as context, the kids do a great job of translating a lot of the Spanish. But they can't seem to hear what I can see: the similarities of scientific words such as “herbivore” and “herbivoro.”

While we are still enjoying studying the pictures and translating the Spanish words, Delia, Kiki, and Lindsey arrive back home. Camille and Mindy are ready to share some of their dancing with the younger kids. They beg me to put on the dance recital videotape, so I do. Delia and I watch as all the kids dance along. Soon the kids segue into another, related activity: they remove all the sofa cushions and pillows and arrange them on the floor. It's a lumpy, piecemeal gymnastics “mat,” and they do somersaults and gymnastics poses. “Remember to point your toes,” Camille reminds her cousin.

Delia eventually breaks up the dance/gymnastics party, saying that she and Kiki have to leave. And I say, “Let's make lunch.”

We'd already decided to make some special “pretty” food for lunch today, and Mindy had chosen a cucumber/carrot snack she'd seen in a magazine. Which is very surprising, since she hates cucumbers! But the veggies look like flowers, which Mindy loves, and she'd figured out a substitute.... I cut the carrots into “stems” and curling “leaves,” and each girl arranges one on her plate. Round slices of cucumber make Camille's and Lindsey's flower heads, and Camille removes the seeds from her flower center. Mindy gets a round of apple instead of cucumber—and of course I cut the core and seeds out. Although Camille likes her hole-flower-center, with the plate showing through, Mindy doesn't. I suggest a dollop of peanut butter as the center, and she enthusiastically endorses the idea.

To go with the food flowers, there's yogurt, cream cheese on bagels (again), tuna, apple juice, and a pear to share.

After lunch, energized by the addition of Lindsey to the group, the girls want to do more dancing, more gymnastics, more dance recital video, and (Mindy only) more Reader Rabbit on the computer. After seeing her big sister take a break from dancing to play on the computer, Lindsey decides she wants to play on the computer, too, so she does a quickie color-in activity. (I have to help her control the mouse.)

Soon all three girls are on the dance “stage” again. When I check in on their activity, I realize that this time, it's not just dancing. The girls are doing full-on pretend play, with characters and story lines.

I get a lot done in the afternoon!

Finally the girls are tired of playing. Camille asks me to read Messy, again, and the others choose two more books. After a very pleasant reading session, I ask the girls to help me clean up before Roz and Ginnie come for piano play. All the cushions and pillows, the stuffed animals and books, some other assorted toys and markers are restored to their rightful places. I glance at the clock. Hmm, we have some time to kill—but that means time to make another mess. “Let's do chalk on the driveway!” I suggest.

Today the girls draw pictures (rather than write words). Camille draws several vehicles and some stick figures. Mindy draws houses and people. Lindsey draws faces—lots and lots of smiling and grinning faces.

After that, it's Roz-and-Ginnie time, and piano time, and Maria-picking-up-Camille time. Over and out.

Mixing It Up

One of the big benefits of homeschooling is that the kids are in mixed-age groups. Within our household, everyone was a different age. Even adding a few kids of the same age (Camille being a mere day younger than Mindy, for example) didn't dilute the fact that the kids learned a bit more about patience and kindness from being in a mix of ages. And when it comes to kids “showing” what they can do, or trying new stuff, or learning-through-watching—having multiple ages as well as multiple interests and strengths is a big benefit.

Mindy was almost always one of the oldest kids in the group, even in our large homeschool group, because we started the group with our five-year-olds and their younger siblings. But even Mindy was often exposed to older learners, because we adults tend to learn a lot while homeschooling (especially unschooling). Whether we were touring a newspaper publishing plant, doing combustion experiments, or reading a historical novel set in Ancient Egypt, we parents learned along with the kids!

Being Left Out

Three can be a tricky number, when it comes to play groups, because two kids can “leave out” the third. In our teeny unschool group of Mindy, Lindsey, and Camille, the most likely kid to be left out was Lindsey, because she was younger.

I tried to keep an eye out for any mean behavior, including exile from the group, and of course I talked to the girls if I thought they were being mean. However, there are good reasons for kids to sometimes want to be by themselves or to play or talk with just one friend. There are times when kids want to be away from their siblings, as well.

Looking back, I'm glad that the teeny group wasn't just these three kids, all the time. I'm glad that Lindsey got a chance to go off with Delia and Kiki, in the most recent journal post, and that friends would come over and play sometimes. There can be all sorts of groupings in the ebb and flow of people coming and going.

Another thing I notice as I look back at the journal entry is that Camille felt hurt by being excluded but didn't especially notice that she was being excluded on ridiculous grounds (“no five year olds” when Mindy herself was five!). Also, she apparently wasn't that hurt—she just dove into doing her favorite activity with me. Later, Lindsey and Kiki were being left out in the most pointed way, with a sign specifying that people of their particular age weren't allowed, but they didn't even notice or, at least, mind. After all, they had each other. Finally, I noticed that the mean-seeming exclusionary sign was really (though we didn't know it) in preparation of a fun surprise; Mindy and Camille were excluding the younger kids so that they could set up a pretend store that the kids could play with them.

Unschoolers “Playing School”

I have already shown that our family's homeschool didn't try to replicate what happens at school. I didn't set out to have a curriculum with learning divided into discrete steps—lesson-sized chunks that would be introduced, practiced, tested, and periodically reviewed. I didn't intend to carve up the world into separate subjects like Science and History and Art, and I didn't want to spend much time on evaluating (testing) or labeling (grading) my kids.

Instead, I hoped to concentrate on true learning.

I hoped to promote education by listening to my kids' expressed interests, helping them learn about those things, and exposing them to other cool stuff.

So it was pretty funny to have the kids ask for formal lessons—exactly what I didn't  want to institute.

However, there is a very, very different feel in playing at school, on the one hand, and really “doing” school (whether at public or private school or in a school-like homeschool), on the other hand. Playing at school when the kids want to do that is child-led learning, is tapping into their interests, and (by the way) is lots of fun. If I would have chosen a Letter of the Day, myself, and if I were serious about introducing and practicing and testing for mastery of that letter...it would soon have become drudgery for them and for me.

Fun for all—and all for fun?

Naturally, not all learning has to emphasize fun. My kids often chose to do things that involved a lot of work and even drudgery. Learning gymnastics and ice skating and dance, for example, involves sit-ups and sprints as well as glittery costumes and performances. But self-imposed drudgery to reach a goal that the child has freely chosen is, again, very different from days and weeks and months and years of slogging through boring or mystifyingly irrelevant lessons “just cuz.”

Typically, adults say that knowing all that school stuff will be important someday. But that is not a very convincing reason to study hard—because no matter how smart or not-so-smart kids seem to be in school, they're all smart enough to realize that parents and other non-teacher adults, by and large, don't remember all that supposedly crucial stuff. All the kids have to do to find this out is to ask for help with their homework!

What every fourth grader should know...

I know that we can have a panicked response when our children or, say, people on the street don't know something that we consider absolutely minimal for being considered “educated.” But we probably all have different lists of what that baseline-supposedly-necessary knowledge is. I would say that everyone should know the planets of the solar system and the definitions of the words proton, neutron, and electron. Someone else might say that it's crucial for an educated person to be familiar with the names of Shakespeare's major works and to have read at least one. Most of us would agree that familiarity with the structures of the government and the particulars of our nation's written constitution are important for being good citizens, but some people would stress learning about past presidents, and some would stress learning about Congressional and lobbying procedures.

However, maybe the concept of having a list of facts that EVERYONE needs to know is, at heart, erroneous. As education scientist Sugata Mitra says, when you can look stuff up on the internet in just a few seconds, why should you try to stuff that stuff into your head?

Proof positive that it's not THAT important that your kid know what every fourth grader should know:

Before I had kids, I was managing editor in a company that, among other things, produced textbooks. I headed up the project of writing the fourth grade state history book, and for a while, I not only knew tons and tons of California history, I even knew exactly what page and paragraph particular facts of that history could be found in our textbook. The book was adopted by the state of California, and for a number of years I often saw fourth graders with my book under their arms!

(If you know anything about textbook writing, you know it's a huge committee effort, but as MANAGING editor, all changes and additions and deletions—and all photos, diagrams, illustrations, and charts—went through me. So it really seemed like my baby...until I had a real baby, at least.)

One task that fell to me as managing editor was choosing the VERY MOST IMPORTANT stuff that we really wanted kids to remember, and writing review and test items about those particular concepts, terms, and facts. I thought I chose really well. I stayed away from dates, because few of us remember them. Instead, I went for the really meaty concepts and facts that I thought every Californian really ought to know.

Flash forward four years. I was over at Camille's house, and her cousin, who went to school, was trying to rush through his homework so he could join us in celebrating Las Posadas. He had history homework that involved my book, and he was having problems with one of the review questions I myself had written.

Camille's mom grinned and said, “You have the book editor right here—go ask Auntie Cathy for help!”

As I confidently reached for the book, I asked which question he was stuck on.

“Number 3.”

I read the question...and realized that I had NO IDEA of what the answer was. Of course, it didn't take me all that long to scan through the chapter and find the answer—and then to help the student find it as well—but I was shocked! Shocked, I tell you! If that test question really dealt with something that EVERY Californian should know, right off the top of their heads, as I had been confident when I wrote the question, then how could I—the book's editor—have no idea what the answer was a mere four years later?

The actual crucial thing in education isn't knowing the right answers. It is the confidence that we can find the answers.

Journal Entry 6

Tuesday, September 22, 1985

Today Lindsey is going to “Mommy and me” class with Camille's cousin Enrique (“Kiki”) and Aunt Delia. So for a while, it will just be Camille, Mindy, and me.

The girls begin the day by “playing school.” While I'm urging them to eat breakfast, get dressed, and succumb to hairbrushing, they're busy getting out books, arranging their “cubbies” (boxes of “school supplies”), and talking about lessons. Probably inspired by Sesame Street, they announce that the day's letter is C.

I play along. I write capital and lower case Cs on a miniature blackboard and urge them to do the same on theirs. They eagerly comply and identify the sound that C makes (the hard-K sound, that is). It's easy for them to think of names and words that start with C, since Camille and Cathy are perfect examples!

Then I challenge them to say the C word that I draw on my board. Again, no problem! They immediately identify pictures of a coat, caterpillar, and cap. I write the first two words on the board, and we discuss the facts that OA together say O and that the word cat can be found inside the word caterpillar. I challenge them to write cap on their boards by sounding the word out, and they are able to do that without breaking a sweat, too.

I ask if the kids want to draw a C word for me. Camille promptly agrees and draws an oval. I say, “Cabbage?” while I search my mind for more likely oval objects that start with C.

She shakes her head no and informs me, “It's an O word.”

Oh, yikes—apparently not cake or candy or cookie.

I suggest, “Oval? Olive? Orange?”

Camille kindly gives me a few hints (it's a food, it's green), and I finally hit the mark with avocado. She is pleased that I “got” it and isn't a bit fazed when I show her that that word starts with A and ends with O.

Next, it's Mindy's turn. She draws what clearly looks like money, and I ask if it's an M word.

“No, a C word, like you said,” Mindy answers.

“Cash?” I ask, and Mindy nods with satisfaction.

The girls use the Sesame Street coloring computer program. On the C page, Camille discovers C words cookie and cupcake as she electronically colors. Mindy chooses the H page and colors house, hat, horn, and Herry Monster.

Then the girls run out to excavate dinosaur bones, as they did last week.

As they play, I do some housework and lay out some nice watercolor supplies. Of course, the minute the girls come inside, they want to use the paints—they're especially cool because they come in tubes!

We all mix colors. Then the girls use a stencil to trace a dinosaur outline while I sketch a dinosaur freehand. Next, the best part: lavishing on the paint.

Camille stops painting first and goes back to the Sesame Street program, choosing the letters A (apple, airplane) and B (Bert, Big Bird, ball). Then she moves on to another computer program, the Sorter game of “Reader Rabbit.” She has to sort words that start with W or C into two piles, and she informs me that she “can't do it—it's too fast.” I'm interested to note that, after such a dire pronouncement, she does the task perfectly!

Mindy asks for a turn at the computer and plays a “concentration”-type game matching words and pictures. She is competent but not perfect in remembering where the matches are.

I glance at the clock and decide the girls will probably ask for food soon. I remember a snack Mindy wants to try and make peanut butter-apple spiders with celery-curl antennae and raisin eyes.

The kids are thrilled with the snack, and Camille knowingly says that they are spiders, because spiders have eight legs.

Camille is being unusually affectionate, kissing me on the neck and whispering secrets in my ear. I can't make out what the secrets are, mind you, but she seems thrilled to be imparting them!

Perhaps because of this secret-telling, Mindy has gone off away from us (which is unusual for her), into her room, even closing the door. (That's really unusual for her!) Eventually Camille wanders down the hall to see what she's doing, and she comes back with a hurt expression. “I can't go in Mindy's room,” she tells me. “There's a sign on the door.”

I go to check it out for myself. I kind of expect to see a badly-spelled sign that says something like “Do not enter.” Instead, I see a sign that has a number 5 on it. I call through the door, “What does the sign say, Mindy?”

“No five-year-olds allowed,” Mindy answers.

Huh! Mindy herself is five!

I turn to Camille and say, “You can have Lindsey's room and make a sign for the door.” 

Camille doesn't want her own exclusionary room, though, so she and I go back to the family room. I am wondering what's up with Mindy but am also pretty sure that she should be allowed to seek privacy if she needs it.

Camille asks me to read the Sesame Street magazine. There are poems, stories, and games, and we even learn some Spanish words.

Soon enough, Mindy rejoins us.

When Lindsey comes home with Kiki and Delia, she seems much closer to Kiki than ever before. All four kids play together while us moms talk and make egg-salad lunch. We all eat together. When Mindy and Camille are done eating, they get some cellophane tape and march off to Mindy's bedroom. When I hear their door close, I suspect that there is more sign action, so I go down the hall to check it out.

Sure enough, there is a new sign on Mindy's door: “No 3 year olds allowed.”

I look in on Lindsey and Kiki, both in Lindsey's room. They are playing side-by-side, Lindsey with the Fisher Price zoo set and Kiki with the airport. They seem quietly happy, so (naturally!) I don't draw their attention to the closed door or sign. But as I leave, Lindsey asks me to close her door, so I guess she noticed.

“Are you guys okay?” I ask. She nods in response, and Lindsey's no stranger to expressing herself, so I figure she's not feeling the least bit hurt by a closed door. Maybe she figures it's just the thing to do today. So I close Lindsey's door, as requested, and go back to chat with Delia.

The next time Mindy's door opens, she wants us all to hear an Important Announcement: “We have a store. And it's now OPEN!” So Delia and Kiki and Lindsey and I all go shopping and “buy” plenty of items from Mindy and Camille's store.

Some friends, Candace and her mom Cindy, stop by. The five kids seem like a mob, somehow, and I'm pretty glad that they want to play outside in the playhouse. Eventually Candace and Cindy leave, but a glance at the clock shows me that it will soon be time for Roz and Ginnie, who live down the street, to come over to join in our piano fun.

I feel a bit tired from all the coming-and-going, and I'm not sure what we should do while waiting for piano class. Luckily, Mindy is ready with a suggestion: sidewalk chalk. We all go out to the driveway, where we write names. I write, “Welcome to De Colores, Roz and Ginnie.” Mindy writes Camille's name, then Mindy, then Camille again. Camille makes a long wiggly drawing (a snake? a really large worm?) and then writes her name. What blows me away is that Lindsey has started writing her name. (At age 3, I didn't think she knew how to spell it yet.) She writes L I N, then asks me what the next letter is. (Oh. She doesn't know how to spell it yet. That's okay, she's only 3.) I tell her D, and use my finger to trace a D shape on the driveway, and Lindsey writes the letter. We follow this procedure for the rest of her name: S E Y. And there on the driveway is Lindsey's almost perfectly written name.

Yeah! I'm very impressed.

Lindsey decides to write her name again. She copies without any help from me, and the result is only slightly incorrect:

Soon we see Roz and Ginnie and their mom Cindy ambling down the street. There are whoops of glee as the girls run to greet their friends, and we are soon arrayed around the piano for keyboard-and-movement fun and games.

So concludes another day.

Tyrannosaurs Can Be Female, Too

Despite the movements of women's suffrage and feminism, modern society still features gender-based stereotyping, and some stereotypes have at least some basis in biology. Genes aside, our kids learn gender roles as eagerly as they learn everything else in their environment. It's hard to completely eliminate gender bias—I know I tried, but I'm sure I didn't succeed.


It is interesting but not shocking that my young girls tended to talk about their cuddly stuffed animals as female, using “she” and “her” and female names, but that only a few of the plastic dinosaurs were identified as female—and that the Tyrannosaurs always seemed to be male. T-rex is often portrayed as a “vicious” and necessarily “violent” predator—and my kids had somehow picked up on the idea that males tend to be more aggressive than females (which is true of some species but not others, and nothing to do with predation!).

Naturally, when we read books about T-rex, and when we saw dinosaur exhibits at museums, I had the opportunity to point out that around half of the Tyrannosaurs were, in fact, female.


Apparently, however, from what I read in my journal entries, I did not point out every stereotype my kids referenced in play. I remember that there were times in which we discussed sexism head-on, but that was probably when the kids were a bit older. And as they matured, I imagine that the kids may have policed their own sexist assumptions in play.

(They sometimes policed others' sexism, too! I vividly remember some boys telling Lindsey that only boys could climb trees. She informed them that they were being sexist, and the boys were horrified. They ran to me to tell on her—saying, “Lindsey said a bad word!” I had to teach them what sexism means and that, although being sexist is bad, saying the word sexist isn't bad!)

Building Blocks and Toy Guns

Over the years, we had a lot of little boys over to play. Often these boys were about the same age as either Mindy or Lindsey, and usually they played well together. Here are a few of the very general tendencies I noticed (again, these tendencies could be biological or societal in origin—or, more likely, both):

• The younger girls tended to use blocks to build enclosures for dolls and stuffed animals. That meant low walls—usually only one block high—and doorways and gates and pathways. These block creations tended to spread out and out, taking up entire floors of rooms at times. And the block play tended to be just a set-up for the longer pretend play with the dolls and toy animals.

In contrast, the younger boys tended to build towers. Only one block wide, these creations went up and up until they toppled down with a tremendous crash. Sometimes the towers went up and up and then there would be pretend play—about 15 seconds' worth, ending with a gorilla attack, lightning, or bombs—anything that would bring down the towers with a crash.

• When the kids were older, both sexes tended to use and enjoy Legos more than wooden blocks. Both boys and girls tended to create enclosures that had both height and length/width—realistic buildings that could hold Lego people. Some of the boys tended to elaborate on the building part of the play and never really got around to playing with the Lego figures inside their creations, and some of the girls tended to rush through the model building but lavished a lot of time to the conversations and actions of the Lego people. Most boys and girls, however, struck a pretty good balance between model building and pretend play with figures.

• I knew mothers of boys who didn't want to buy toy guns for their sons. They often complained to me that everything became a gun—not just their sons' fingers, sticks, and blocks, but even vegetables, action figures, and dolls. I didn't have that worry. When my daughters asked for weapons—say, when they were very “into” the Laura Ingalls Wilder books and wanted a rifle for protection and hunting, or when they were enraptured by a book about Native Americans and wanted a bow, some arrows, and a knife—I gladly bought toys to fill these “needs.”

In their pretend games, my girls almost always used weapons as protection against wild beasts or as tools to hunt for food. Some boys who came and visited played along with these scenarios, but others seemed to gravitate toward the weapons as fun in and of themselves, and they would usually destroy play scenarios by randomly “shooting” everyone else. Of course, this caused bitter complaints: “You're ruining our game!”

(One little boy actually used our rather heavy wooden “rifle” as a weapon, on several occasions, and conked others in the head. After two such incidents, I decided to put the rifle away before he came over.)

I doubt if the boys who loved*loved*loved guns at age 5 and 8 are now, as young adults, any more violent or any more apt to use an actual weapon than the boys who used the guns only for hunting and protection.

From age 3 to 6, my girls tended to choose frilly dresses over more practical shorts and jeans. For weeks at a time, my girls chose their father and papa over their mother and grandma (at least for fun—boo-boos tended to be another matter altogether). Through all their preschool years, when toy boats and cars were available, my girls preferred dolls (although those dolls sometimes loved a nice boat or car ride). My daughters learned and participated in gender roles all too well—but they also participated as I discussed bending gender lines and expectations, too.

And I think it all turned out pretty well.