a Lego/sick day

We had plans for today. There was an exhibit of real Egyptian mummies at the local library, appointments to keep, friends to see, books to be read aloud and math to be done. I have been forced by some severe pain to spend most of the day in a very hot tub, rocking in pain. Anything requiring me was canceled and a doctor has been called. I have zero patience for this sort of senseless interruption. I'm willing to halt planned lessons for weeks to garden, protest, focus on one project, but pain? That's just stupid.

I may rig up a documentary for them, probably Food Inc or the rest of Guns Germs and Steel. I'll have them work through some Khan Academy badges; they love that and don't need to be pestered to do it. There's been the usual amount of reading of books, the Storyteller Leven Thumps and the Whispered Secret, and the Scientist The American Story. Both of those books were finished this morning. Mainly today, though, the boys have been working on Lego.

Their Lego world has an economy. They use a particular size and shape of piece as currency, coding the value further by color. The more translucent a piece is, the more valuable it is. I overhear them bargaining and negotiating costs as I type.

At a recent used-kids-stuff sale I acquired a bag of moving parts, Lego Technic I believe but sans instructions. Vehicles and weaponry, and vehicular weaponry, has been in production with those parts all day, with the boys negotiating prices of pieces from the new bag of stuff. One of them made a gun that really shoots when you press a button. He's been trying to modify the design to make it go further faster. One of them made a truck with poles that come out of it at the press of a button, like a porcupine's defense system.

While they build, they are mining pieces out of our giant Lego bins and sorting these out on their home baseplates. They each have warehouses, garages, parks, and homes on their boards. As they dig through the piles of Lego looking for pieces for their moving-parts project, they are also sorting, piling heads up in the "heads room" in their home and attaching all the trees they happen across to their parks.

It seems like a valuable use of their time. I remain antsy, though. This type of work is hard to quantify and the learning and growth that comes out of it is tricky to describe.