Mostly Wordless Wednesday: Dinosaurs!

 First Adventurers trip: the new dinosaur exhibit at Natural History!

We had at least 7 other families come along with us, including these cuties.

 It's a stegosaur that's just knocked a theropod flat on it's back.

Not So Wordless Wednesday: Because Sometimes the Day Doesn't Follow the Plan

 So.  The plan was to do a leaf walk at the Arboretum with Adventurers, and then head north to pick up baking supplies.

But. This seasonal clothing change.

I'm fighting the good fight, but it's winning. And laughing at me.

I asked a friend with 8 kids for sage advice and she laughed at me too.  Immoderately. Apparently more kids doesn't make it easier, something I probably should have known.

So I decided to take the entire morning, dump my plans, and just get it done!

 Well, I certainly worked hard all morning.

Can you see a difference?  Kinda? Squint.

The main problem seems to be that I am missing the three bins  containing all of Choclo and most of Oob's winter clothes.


Yes, I have rechecked all the clothing bins in the basement, all the way to the bottom of each bin.  I predict it will take me 6 months to recover.






 In the mean time, I was running low on flour and sugar, so we used the afternoon to  make  a trip to the warehouse.


Final tally: 800 pounds!

300 lbs of sugar, and 500 lbs (total) of pastry and bread flour.

Judging from the most recent receipt, that will last me nearly a year.

And that, at least, was easily found and is now neatly stored away!

Wordless Wednesday: Adventurers, Air and Space Part 2

Wordless Wednesday: Adventurers, Air and Space Part 1

Gospel Dessert: Palm Sunday

I was away visiting my folks for the weekend, but, when I got back,  Klenda had made a tiramisu cake with a palm theme.

We're excited to be entering Holy Week!

It's also spring break week for Klenda and Mxyl, so we'll be doing some special things with them.

We'll be helping out with decorating the church for the Triduum.

We won't be doing any of our usual classes, although we will visit the Basilica for Adventurers.

Hope you are having a great Holy Week, too- let's keep each other in prayer!

Just In Case You Think I am Excessively Organized

Not My Bookshelf Ever

On Monday I was looking ahead to a long empty week.  No more Chemistry, what would I do with myself?

Just then I got a text from a friend asking if she could come along to the museum on Wednesday. 

Ha! I started to text back, We aren't starting up Adventurers until... I had to look it up. 

Wednesday!

So we went, and it was super fun and great and we had 4 families there.

And look at that!  We are starting Awesome American History on Friday!

Well, at least I know what to do with myself. 😊

Natural History

 Last week's Adventurers was again Natural History.  We did the mammal hall, human origins, and the ocean hall.

What's not to like about glowing jars of weird stuff in a dimly lit corner?




And here is Choclo doing his best penguin impression!




And here is everyone's second favorite giant squid (the really big one is in a very long horizontal case).

But the real surprise was the birds!  I've been to this museum probably a dozen times in the last 5 years, but I hadn't seen the birds.

Oob loves birds, and was disappointed in the lack of feathers in Mammal Hall, so I told him we would find the birds. I had a vague idea they were on the bottom floor.

We discovered two things.

 One, the birds are tucked away in two dead end hallways in the basement.

Two, they are not "birds of the world" the way Mammal Hall is "mammals of the world."

They were something much better!  They were samples of every single bird found in this area in the last 150 years!

As a novice bird watcher, it was fantastic!  I have a fancy searchable bird app with pictures and songs, but there is truly nothing like seeing all the sparrows in the area next to each other, holding still.  Seeing them together, it's quite obvious that the song sparrow is the one with the gray cap and the house sparrow has just a gray stripe.

There were glass cases for song birds, another for owls, another for ducks, for eagles and vultures, for heron like birds... all with tags explaining where and when they might be seen.  It was a beginning birders paradise!

Chemistry (and Pirates)

Yes, I know it be Talk Like a Pirate Day, but I be trying to catch up on all the stuff we been too busy to blog about! Shiver me timbers!

Annnd, I'll take a break from that to tell you that we started high school Chemistry last week.

Evidently, this is the class that many fantastically overcompetent home school moms do not want to teach. Maybe because we work with strong acids, horrible toxins, set things on fire, and occasionally blow things up?


I thought those were why we wanted to do chemistry!

At any rate, I wanted a class of 6 kids.  Six is perfect: enough for a good discussion, but not too many to oversee when we set things on fire, and an even number so they can have lab partners.


I got two classes of six: a girls' class on Tuesdays and a  boys' class on Thursdays! In practice this has been fantastic, and I, at any rate, am really enjoying both classes.

The only change to the plan is that I will now be finishing before Lent, instead of finishing before Thanksgiving (it had been two classes a week).

Unfortunately, neither class landed on Talk Like a Pirate Day.

Adventurers, however, started up with it's very first trip today- let the anchor fall on me liver, that was fun!

We went to the Natural History Museum and saw the skeletons (crossed bones!), dinosaurs, gems and
minerals.

I'll post more pictures on Wednesday, but I'll leave you with this one of the Hope Diamond being eyed by my crew of scallywags.

To wrap things up, we sang many many verses of "My Name was Captain Kidd," and watched a BBC documentary on Captain Cook.  Not technically a pirate in the conventional sense, but very interesting to watch.

Home School Scheming

Or planning, we could call it planning! Last week I attended a delightful tea with about a dozen other homeschoolers.

It was part meet and greet, part curriculum swap, and, for me, part advertising for the things I want to do next year!

Have you heard about Awesome History? (Spoiler: it's AWESOME!)

Do you have a high schooler that wants to learn Chemistry? It's a thing! Do you have a younger kid who likes Chemistry?  It's another thing (but in the spring)!

Do you crave adventure?  Adventurers is for you!

Long story short, I filled my high school Chemistry and got about 5 or 6 more families interested in Adventurers, and another 5 or so interested in Awesome History.  I figure that's as many as we can comfortably fit, so that's pretty perfect!

My plan for Awesome History is to continue and finish A Child's History of the World in the fall (Awesome Modern History), and then find a new book to do Awesome American History in the spring.

Plus the scones were fabulous!!

Spring Into Adventure!

It's the spring schedule for Adventurers!

As always, spring schedules are entirely weather dependent: not only do some events get canceled by bad weather, others get shuffled when the magnolias/cherry blossoms/azaleas bloom off schedule.  It's all part of the Adventure!

Also, please note that unlike last semester, these trips are all on Tuesdays. 


2/23 Bureau of Printing and Engraving (this is where they print money - last time we went they were printing $100 bills, so we saw over a million dollars cash!)

3/1  Franciscan Monastery  Always a great trip, especially during Lent.

3/8  Fort McHenry Exploring the fort from the Star Spangled Banner is more fun if you beat the crowds by going in March.  Not only do you get to hunker down in the "bombproofs", they have cannons from at least four different wars!

3/15 National Zoo Weather dependent, of course, but early March is often a great time to visit the Zoo.  You get early spring, lots of animals and no crowds.  Also you don't overheat while tromping back up the hill to your car!

3/22 Skip week:  Holy Week
 
3/29 National Arboretum  The magnolias should be in bloom!

4/5   Cherry Blossoms  If I get the bloom time right... otherwise the C + O Canal

4/12 The Walters This will dovetail with the Awesome History Middle Ages class

4/19 The Baltimore Museum of Art or the C + O Canal/Great Falls

4/27 National Arboetum: The Azalea Walk should be at peak bloom.

5/3  Monuments on the Mall (Washington Monument, WWII Memorial, Lincoln Memorial, maybe more)  This will be a hike!  It's one mile from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial, so we'll see how far we get (and if I can figure out how to park in the middle!)

 5/10  Fossil Hunt  (Shark's teeth) down by the Bay.  This should come right after the last Masters of Disasters class on fossils! I may also do one more shark tooth trip in May when Mxyl and Klenda are done with their college classes.

Plans and Resolutions

Rather than jump back into our regular schedule, we've been spending most of the week on personal projects.  For the kids that has meant reading, playing games, doing art and video editing, and working on their movie, Abydos.  For me that has meant planning like a maniac.

The pictures are from a fun game called Say Anything.  The question was, "What would be the coolest skill to have without needing to practice?"

Oobs answer was, "Leg sweeping!"

 He might be the youngest of four boys.

Leena, on the other hand, said, "Singing!" 

I don't think you have to illustrate your answers, but the Zoomlians do.

I've  finished plans for 3 interlocking co-ops: Adventurers (field trips), Awesome History (Middle Ages!), and Masters of Disaster (weather and earth science: hurricanes, volcanoes, earthquakes, etc.).

They interlock in the sense that some of the field trips relate to the other classes at critical times.

I'm very pleased!   I just need to plan out my religious education stuff...

And, of course, plan out a schedule that accounts for Mxyl and Klenda being off at college on certain days, as well as the co-ops, and ice skating, and swimming, and library trips,  and possibly other time for education.  I'm mostly there!

My friend, Shelli, tells me I'm a planner, and I think she's probably right.  The key for me is that I only have to do the big planning once, and then I'm happy for the rest of the semester.  I actually have a hard time doing a lot of planning on a regular basis.

While I was planning, I was going back and forth through my archives collecting posts from the last time I did Masters of Disasters.  That was such a fun set of classes!  In fact, two of my all time most popular posts (Earthquake and Tsunami and  Earth Science) are from that series!  It occurred to me that I ought to collect the different series and put them in the sidebar so that they would be easier to find and use. 

Then it occurred to me that was an excellent project for a New Year's resolution!  My dear MIL used to make resolutions that were specific projects (like "this year I will research and buy a new car"), and that always seemed to me more sensible than my usual vague "eat less and exercise more" resolves.

So, there we go: I resolve to organize my science and history series into usable sidebar links!

I'd also like to eat less and exercise more. I just need to make a specific plan....

Making a List, Checking it Twice

I usually try to wrap things up before Thanksgiving, but this year ran late.

No!  I'm not talking about presents!  I'm talking about Adventurers, and Biology, and all that stuff that I try to finish early so we can focus on Advent.

Biology: CHECK!  We finished this week with classes on pre-natal development , genetics, and early Christmas cookies.  I think the kids enjoyed all three.

Adventurers: CHECK! Botanical Gardens was our last trip this semester with the group, although we may manage another trip on our own. 

Gingerbread Contest and Party: Yikes!  We're hosting it next Tuesday, on the feast of the Immaculate Conception, and we are still in the preliminary gingerbread sketching phase.

Presents: this is the problem when the schedule runneth over, we're just starting to get a handle on the Christmas shopping.  With 6 kids, we have been charged with getting gifts from both sets of grandparents, and ourselves, and helping manage the kids' gifts to each other. 

There are a lot of logistics and tracking involved: What's been ordered? What's arrived? Who has what, for whom?  Has it been wrapped?  How will we find it when we need it? 

Oh, the spreadsheets!  Still, it's a good problem to have.

Also, we are feeding Christmas cookies by the handful to our friendly neighborhood delivery people: our mail carrier, the Fed Ex guy, the UPS guy (whom Oob calls "Ups"), the fire fighter who delivered the tree, and whomever else shows up with a box. 

As for cards and a Christmas letter/photo:

More Air and Space

 I love Adventurers! There's nothing like having a dozen free world class museums on your doorstep to spark a sense of wonder about the world!

Yesterday's pictures were from last week, but Air and Space takes about 3 weeks (6 hours) to go through thoroughly, and even then, we never see everything. 

Alas, this year, we can only spend two weeks, but since we have younger kids along, that's about right.

Zoomlians on the bridge!

 Last week we did the "space" side, and this week we did the "air" side.

This included climbing through some planes, examining propeller and jet engines, and visiting my favorite exhibit: the aircraft carrier mock up!

You can climb up into a navigation bridge on one side and "watch" fighter jets taking off, and then cross back to the control tower and watch them land on the other side of the ship.

The design is just brilliant! You really feel you are on the ship (or, in Leena's case, that you are in the Shatterdome of Pacific Rim)!

My other favorite, and conveniently near the carrier,  is the WWII exhibit.

The mural is gorgeous, the layout is fantastic, and they have all sorts of smaller exhibits tucked into odd corners.

Also, you can get very close to the planes on both levels, which makes for a compellingly immersive experience.

Biology: Cells Part 1

Getting under the membrane

Last week was planning, this week was full speed ahead!

Bossy Nucleus

Usually I try to stagger the start of new projects, but within the last 7 days we have started Awesome History, Adventurers, and Biology!

 But they are three projects I love!

Golgi Bodies

Lysosome Dalek

So we are starting up with cells, which means microscopes (and you know how I feel about microscopes), and parts of cells.

We started out describing the parts and what they did with the kids taking notes.

Endoplasmic Reticulum

But we moved on to playing around.  Literally!


We used a sheet as the cell membrane and had each kid play 2 organelles.






Then it was on to building models with jello and candy...

 The guys built a plant cell (the tupperware was the cell wall).

The girls built an animal cell.

They used a peach ring as the nucleus, bubble tape as endoplasmic reticulum, gum as Golgi bodies, nerds as ribosomes, lemon heads as lysosomes,  gum balls as centrioles, Mike n Ike as mitochondria and phytosomes, and sweet tarts as vacuoles.

It was one of those demonstrations that didn't last long...