   Tales of Interest! Things the kids make up, funny conversations, unschooling stories, or whatever strikes our collective fancies. Ok, maybe you had to be here to fully enjoy them, but we are easily amused ...  Mom: Are you sure? Maybe you are imaginary. Aaron: No, I exist. If you touch something imaginary with your hand, it will go right through them. (touches Mom) See? I touched you. So I exist! (Aaron was examining the available stitches on the sewing machine. It has multiple zig-zag functions and stretch-stitch settings, and the numbers are for making buttonholes.  )"Look, you can do lots of kinds of sewing. You can sew straight, or in a scribble, or in another scribble, or in a different scribble, or in a scribbly thing, or a completely different scribble, or three lines in a row or five lines in a row or a 1, 2, 3, or 4. You can do a lot with this machine!" Aaron was playing a computer game, and the task was to match small letters with their capital letter equivalents. The one on the screen was a 'V'. Katherine was teasing him and said "Look, that's a 'Q'". Aaron said, "No, it's not." Katherine said "Yes, it is." Aaron said "If you think that, you are really screwed up." Katherine was telling us about a manga story she was reading. A character got married, then wasn't mentioned for a year, then showed up with a child. Katherine was explaining how this fit into the story, and said "I am really not sure how she got pregnant" because it wasn't part of a plot line. Aaron looked really confused for a minute, then said "Mom - I think she needs to read the Where Did I Come From? book." Aaron got these boards that show math facts, they're hard to describe but basically they're set up as a grid, with the numbers from 1 to 9 along the top, and the left side, and the point where the numbers meet, there is a button you can push and it shows the answer. He got one for each of the four basic math operations. Here is a picture of them. He made up a game where one person asks a math fact and the other has to "guess" the answer. We played last night, and I asked him "what is 9 divided by 3?". He wanted me to "make up a story" to explain the problem in words to him, so I said "if you have nine pieces of candy, and you, Katherine and Christopher each want the same amount, how many do you each get?" and he said "three", without even stopping to think. Then he said "Do you know how I know that? Nine is a perfect square. Three across the top and three on the side. So we each get three." We think he was visualizing a tic-tac-toe board, but it was fun to see a (just turned) 6 year old understanding "a perfect square". Baby Santa Baby Santa Baby Santa is made of FRESH HAM! (don't ask, we don't get it either )(December 2004) 
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