Adventures In School-Strike Land

Well, the strike apparently lasted one day and the kids are back at school. Personally, it was a great day. And coincidentally, along the way we covered a lot of school-type stuff.

• Tulips: We were walking to the park and I noticed once more just how many tulips I've seen on people's lawns this year. I commented on it, and in the next twenty minutes or so the kids had asked questions that led us to an explanation of the Tulip Festival, World War II, Holland, VE Day, similarities between Holland and Canada, nuclear weapons, genocide, industrialization, World War I, democracy versus dictatorship... I don't even remember the rest.
  
  BTW, here's a blurb from the National Capital Commission site on the festival: The Canadian Tulip Festival has grown into the largest tulip festival in the world from a gift of thanks given five decades ago. In the fall of 1945, Princess Juliana of the Netherlands presented Ottawa with 100,000 tulip bulbs. The gift was given in appreciation of the safe haven which Holland's exiled royal family received during the Second World War and in recognition of the role which Canadian troops played in liberating the Netherlands.
  
  Festival Website.
  
  
• Labour: Why were they home from school, they wanted to know. Which led to many other questions, like What is a union? What are some advantages/disadvantages of unionization? What's the history of the union movement? What are the lyrics to Pete Seeger's "Talkin' Union Blues"?
  
  
• Cosmos: Daniel has been banned from TV and movies for a week, for his last freak-out at school. Yesterday he asked if that went for educational TV too, and if not, whether we could watch Cosmos, as I had said we would when he was being home schooled next year.
  
  So we did :)
  
  
• Monopoly: More learning about being a gracious winner, math, and strategy for Justin.
  
  
• Wading pool: Why do we wash the wading pool? Why can we not leave it full of water overnight? What is the life cycle of the mosquito? Why do we need to make sure that our three-year old neighbour does not fall into the wading pool?
  
  
• GoF, OoP: I had just finished Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and started Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Why were they such large books? How could they be turned into movies? Why have movies about books and books about movies? What were some of the differences between the first three Harry Potter books and the movies? What's the difference between plot and setting?
  
  
• Picnic lunch: No teaching here, just something very neat. We had lunch in our back yard for the first time since last fall. ::happy sigh::
  
  
• Clothes: What are the relative advantages of hanging clothes on the clothesline v. drying them in the dryer?

So, all in all, a great day. I love how curious kids are, how eagerly they soak up information about the world around them, and how quickly they try to use that knowledge and integrate it into what they already know. They were play-acting industrialization and pretending to be Union Rep v. Management and trying to figure out whether Lord Voldemort qualified as a dictator and imagining what books were in the library of Alexandria (from Cosmos) and boy, they've got a lot more mental energy than I do ;)

( Talking Union Blues, Pete Seeger )