Amazing questions
House on Red Corner · 2010-08-10 · Daughter, Father, bakfiets, homeschool
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On a day like today; hot but not too hot, sunny and clear despite pronouncements by weather advisors that there will be rain; jumping in the bakfiets with our school supplies and a bag of food is exactly the way to do things. I did not create a map before hand because I wanted to leave some room in the day for spontaneous exploration, plus I was not certain exactly how far I wanted to go.
We ended up going a long ways.
As we were enjoying a transverse jaunt through Central Park, TheBubster posed a question that was especially relevant; the question in question also demonstrated a curious and insightful mind. She asked me, “Why is it harder to ride the bakfiets uphill than downhill?”
BOOM!
It was as if we were at home and Hell’s Bells rang out “Time for school robes and studying”, there we were, me huffing and puffing up the hills of Central Park and explaining, as best I could, Sir Isaac Newton’s work to a five year old. We discussed our planet, the sun, Jupiter, the moon, various bodies of various sizes (mass) and things of various distances from one another like space stations and ships on the oceans or even bakfiets. The amazing thing was the fact that she seemed to understand what I was talking about, certainly she will not be able to recite the description from memory in verbatium, however she does now know the reason a fully loaded bakfiets is harder to pedal uphill than it is to coast downhill.
She also understands that The Bronx is one of five boroughs in New York City. She already knows Brooklyn and Manhattan and now she understands that The Bronx is up and the Battery is down…
After we found a park with a children’s festival where she tried to jump Double Dutch, we went to Randall’s Island and did some writing and mathematics. She is having sentences from a workbook about Ancient Greece for writing and her work with the number line and the functions of addition and subtraction has progressed to the point where she does not really need to be reminded to check the sign before making the jumps with her spaceship. See the spaceship is a triangular piece of cardboard that serves as a pointer for our little game of jumping up and down the number line. The ‘+’ or ‘-’ only serves to tell her which direction the jumps are being made. I love that she is getting these concepts quite easily and the hardest part of the work right now is to get her started. Once she is doing the work, it gets done well.
So it was a long and exhausting day in the Eckenrode House Bakfiets School but we are all satisfied with the results.