A Moment of Silence

A Moment of Silence
 Yesterday I woke up with a sinking feeling. My 8-year-old daughter, Ali, was sick with a bad cold, and I was faced with the daunting task of caring for her and our newborn daughter, Charlotte, all day without the distractions of a play date, field trip, or park day. Although it was difficult, I made the conscious choice to relax and settle into the day, doing my best to enjoy the calmness of it.
 Ali said she thought it would be fun to do some math. We sat down with the unit blocks of ones, tens, and hundreds to give her a tangible way to visualize numbers while working on written subtraction problems. At the end of one of the problems, Ali sat there staring at a cluster of 4 of the "one" unit blocks that were surrounded by a scattering of other one unit blocks. I was just about to say, "OK, let's move on to the next one,", in my usual rush to get through as much homeschooling as possible, when I said to myself "STOP." Baby Charlotte was asleep in the sling, we were sitting in the warm sun, and there was no need to rush. I let Ali stare at the blocks without saying anything. She stared for a long time. I began to think something was wrong, but I held my tongue. After about 90 seconds, she said:
 "This group of blocks in the middle is like the nucleus of an atom. It is very heavy and dense. Papa (Grandpa) said if you had a teaspoon of them it could weigh millions of pounds. The blocks around it are like the electrons."
 Wow, was I ever blown away. Although I had briefly explained about atoms to Ali, we were "officially" studying chemistry this year, not physics, and I had no idea that she had learned, and remembered, this level of detail from her grandfather. It made me think about how much "information processing" can happen if we allow for moments of silence like these. It made me think about the children in school, who are often herded from one activity to the next, and how little opportunity this gives for reflection. Despite the difficulty of the day, I felt joyful for the opportunity to homeschool my daughter and give her the gift of time to reflect.
 Later that day, we had time to go through the many drawings of Ali's that had accumulated in a pile on the kitchen counter. She usually shows me each piece of artwork as it is finished, but I came across a comic she had written that I had never seen before. (Her newest thing was drawing comics, after her grandfather started sharing the Sunday comics with her.) The comic was entitled "Baby Aliens Study a Timeline Three Million Years from Now". She had drawn a rather strange looking teacher (i.e., an "alien") with the following quote bubble next to the teacher: "Humans were strange creatures. We will be studying them the whole year. They came after cavemen but before goglies" One of the alien students, who had eyes floating above her head, had the following quote bubble next to her: "My sis said they made something called c-ar-s. Is that how you say it? Can we study those?" At the top of the comic was a timeline, with time markers listed for each of the following: "Cells, Dinosaurs, Cave Men, Humans, Goglies, Mogos, Loneles, Tagos, Lonas, Pilas".
 I was completely taken aback. Ali had envisioned so many things that I had thought impossible for a child of her age: the fact that humans may not be done evolving, the perspective of other creatures looking back on the human race, the names of future human-like creatures. This was a comic she had written without any adult telling her she had to do it, without any care for a grade or feedback from an adult. This gloriously imaginative comic was written in a moment of silence. I am so grateful for these moments, and the many opportunities for them that come with homeschooling.
 Christina