Sparking To Learn

It’s been super cold this week. The snow just keeps getting a little deeper each day, and the kids get more and more cabin fever symptoms hanging out in the house. I’ve been forcing them out for fresh air on any day in which they’re remotely perky.

Anna is not super excited at the prospect of getting “outside in the cold air”. She spends a lot of time tucked up under the eaves of the house in the only snow-free space.

The big kids love the snow. They have been trying to roll a record breaking snowball. Thus far, they’re making some decent sized attempts, but no real MASSIVE record breakers have been managed to date.

It’s very early in the winter season, and I’m already beyond tired of the cold. I’m not a lover of the long, cruel winter. I’d love suggestions from folks who have beaten their seasonal depression and developed a love of the cold.

((*apologies in advance for the rough photography taken via Em’s p-n-s with one hand, while the other hand juggled bags and babes))

Taking five children under age 10 on a historic trolley tour and a gallery walk on a busy Friday night means that you’re either brave or crazy…or just homeschoolers who love to try something different on a regular basis.

Tonight’s adventure with the folks over at Mind Games involved taking advantage of our city’s First Friday activities, many of which were themed for the holidays this month.

Our first activity was a guided history and architecture tour of the city aboard a lovely old-fashioned trolley.

The tour guide, a member of the local Preservation Society, was gracious and full of information. Some of us learned how many bridges are in our city (8 major ones), what the almost-triangular architecture on the doors and windows of a church was called (gothic), and the names of the different kinds of Greek columns used in building design (the ones we enjoyed most were Ionic or, if you’re Nate…IRONIC).

Others of us were…less involved.

After the trolley tour, we decided to grab dinner at a local cafe that was featuring a live jazz band. Dining out with gluten-free Anna requires some care and planning, but the Lost Dog Cafe has a great gluten-free menu, not to mention some excellent cafe atmosphere.

We had a bit of a wait for our table, so we grabbed seats next to the band to enjoy their set.

After our buzzer did it’s thing, we moved off to our table to enjoy dinner. Waiting for a restaurant meal with 5 kids involves a bit of creative thinking if you don’t want a hungry riot on your hands. In our case, there were thumb wars, a game of trivia for Smarties candies (one handed out to each child, in turn, for answering a question correctly), and some passing around of the camera at the table for creative photo taking.

Handing the camera to the kids gives you some of this:

And a little of this:

And maybe a little of this:

Then the food came, and there was a little bit of this:

When we had finished eating, we decided to explore a couple of galleries. First stop was at Orazio Salati Gallery, where Anna signed the guestbook (half a page high, in all caps) to “let the artists know I came to see their work”.

Then KarateKids made his Mama sniffle by using all of his saved up money to buy her a fancy pottery piece from Fern Lynn. He was so very grown-up throughout the transaction. Finding the right person to approach about the piece, conversing with the adults along the way as we slipped off (he wasn’t carrying his money around tonight, so I “helped” a bit on the financial end so his Mama wouldn’t have to be involved in the buying) to make the purchase, and then presenting the gift to his mom with such innocent grace that we all wanted to squeeze him senseless.

We made a quick, end of the night stop at Cooperative Gallery and Anna decided to make her first independent gallery purchase.

Em bought a small pottery vase for herself, but she’s made art purchases before so she requested that I not photograph her transaction. She’s hitting the “no photographs please” stage of development.

We trekked back to our car, stopping briefly here and there along the way to talk about various buildings or store windows or interesting things we passed. One of the most fun windows of the night was filled with trains.

The business was closing, the sign had just been turned off, but the proprietor saw me taking a picture and pulled me inside because she thought I should take a picture of the kids looking INTO the store.

She stopped me as I was leaving the building to tell me how absolutely precious our children were…how beautiful they were standing there together in the night.

As we walked away, I got a giggle from hearing an older artsy man comment that “they look like a little, walking Benetton ad”. That’s us…a wee little United Nations.

We hopped into our car, came home to our menfolk, and then divided up to head to our respective resting places. My kids crashed immediately after teeth were brushed and now I’ve blogged. Mission Complete. It was a beautiful, beautiful night!

Today’s Muffin Tin Monday theme was apples. We live in apple country, and the kids are always up for a field trip, so PisecoMom and I loaded up our herd of happy apple pickers and moved our way out to the local You-Pick farm.

We started out picking in the rows of filled-to-overflowing trees. My kids were very anti-tart apples, and Pisecomom and her crew liked them on the sour side. Mostly, though, ALL of the kids liked running around the orchard and trying to avoid the camera. But, hey, I’m sneaky and I caught them all at least once!

Emily:

Nathaniel:

JediBoy:

Anna:

BabyGirl:

I even caught the PisecoMama snacking while we filled our bags.

After we paid for our harvest, we lunched on our Muffin Tins full of apple slices, lots of dipping options, and crushed walnuts for sprinkling. Thank goodness that PisecoMom was in charge of the apple dippers, since I managed to run out of the house with the wrong bad, so I had disposable bowls, forks, napkins, and some coughdrops instead of the gluten-free pretzels, cheesesticks, and juice bags I’d meant to bring along.

Nate was brave enough to try the Ginger Gold apples again…and they were STILL too sour for him.

When they were finished eating, the kids spent some time looking at dragonflies and trying to find more wildlife down by the irrigation pond (squishy, slimy green pond!).

After eating, we hung out with the farm animals for a while. Lex and I mostly just relaxed. She used my camera for some pics while I was making multiple trips to the potty with various combinations of children.

Since I put a picture of her at the top, I’m going to be brave and crazy enough to post one of myself. A completely unflattering one, but I have to say I was having SO much fun that I don’t really mind. I really was as happy as I look in the picture!

We managed to leave the orchard before anyone melted down. BabyGirl crashed in the car, and we hopped out at home to send the PisecoPals back to their house for some rest before Karate and Gymnastics.

It was a great day. The very best kind of sunny, funny, best-friends-and-best-fun type of day.

Forty (thanks, Alexa) years ago today, Neil Armstrong climbed down from the lunar lander and captivated the world in black-and-white on their tiny televisions.

For my kids, the concept of being able to travel into space is more basic than wondrous. They know that there are researchers living in space, and that it’s quite possible that tourists will regularly fly into Earth orbit or beyond within their lifetimes.

I couldn’t convince the kids to be excited about any of the projects I had planned (a frequent occurrence), but we watched a couple of episodes of Bill Nye (Space Exploration and The Moon) and they worked with model magic while they were listening.

Emily decided she would build some Aliens watching over the “teeny-tiny Earthies”. I love her stereotypical green men and their little flying saucer, just hanging out behind our home planet.

Anna Banana wanted nothing to do with “Outside Space”. She decided she was going to build a coral reef and stick her favorite yellow cut-out fish on top. She requested frequent photographs.

Like this one, when she was telling me how she feels about the fact that her coral looks like pre-chewed gum:

And this one, of all of her hard work in progress…

Or this picture of her finished, pink and yellow project:

Oh, and my favorite picture from today. I can’t resist her puppy-dog eyes looking up at me.

But, you say, I thought you had three children. I thought you had a son. Uhh, yeah, I do. He abstained from all activity today. He has, however, agreed that it’s pretty cool men walked on the moon long ago and has requested that we let him know when it’s his turn to go to Mars.

We got a big box of surprises in the mail today from Steve Spangler Science. The kids were eager to jump right in to playing with their new baby soda bottles and test tube racks. We decided to work with two projects today. The first, and the one that kept them occupied for the longest time, was a good old color-mixing experiment.

The kids started off with empty test tubes, a large beaker flask of water, a pipette, and three fizzy color tabs. They turned the fizzy tabs and water into three tubes of liquid- red, yellow, blue. Then they used those colors and their pipettes to experiment with secondary color combinations in the empty tubes.

After the color experiment, we used some Magic Sand to study the concepts of hydrophilia and hydrophobia.

I think we’re going to love our newly restructured screen-porch Science Lab!

We’ve already started making another order at Steve Spangler. We’re a little obsessed with their Test Tube Experiment Kits. They’re incredibly kid-friendly. Simple enough that the kids can go it alone with minimal adult supervision.

I borrowed the idea of keeping a running record of our day from Alexa. This is my first attempt at charting the flow of an entire day and then blogging the result. Our lives are a bit more busy and productive than I usually imagine them to be, and it’s helpful to be able to look back and actually see the shape of our day from the notes I took.

(continue reading…)

We went up to Rochester this weekend to visit the GrandChens and do some museum time with Aunt Judy

Our family loves the Strong Museum of Play, and we always try to make at least one trip during each quarter to see the newest traveling exhibit. This quarter’s travel exhibit was a visit to Birdwell Island to see Clifford, Emily Elizabeth and the gang. We also got to see the butterflies, play in the new Berenstein Bears land and make a trip through our old favorite places.

Nate got to feed his love of all things dental in the Berenstein’s dentist office.

Dave, Judy, and the girls had a wonderful time being butterfly landing pads.

While we were on Birdwell Island, Nate got caught in Clifford’s food bowl. It was a close call, but he didn’t get eaten!

Overall, we had a great trip and can’t wait to get back.

Just a little tidbit from the homeschool trenches:

Me (to Anna): What is the opposite of fast?
Anna: SLOW is the ossopit of fast.
Me (to Anna): Yes, slow is the OOOOPPPPIIIISSSSIIITTTT of fast.
Me (to the big kids): What is another term we use for words that mean the opposite?
Em (proudly): Oh, that’s easy, it’s an ANTONYM.
Me (to Em): Yeah! Great Answer! So, what is the antonym of antonym?
Nate (looking up vaguely from Super Smash Brawl): You’re kidding, right?
Me (curious): Nooo? Do you know the answer?
Nate (bored): DUUUUHHHH! The antonym of antonym is……..

CINNAMON.

I’m still laughing 15 minutes later. P.S. I did tell him that the word is synonym, not cinnamon. He’s still not speaking to me because I laughed.

~L

PisecoBabe can alway be counted on for a fun playdate, and she’s more than willing to share her sticky, gluey gooey fun with us. The kids had a great time making yucky artworks and then squishing them back into blobs.

Princess DibbleDibbleDoo had no interest in the dough after a couple of minutes, and fell back to her favorite passtime…eating!

What was she eating, you ask? Well, pretty much anything she could get her fingers on, but the treat of the day was Rice Crispy squares made from PisecoMom’s recipe and decorated by my three rugrats prior to our playdate.

All-in-all, not a bad way to spend a Monday.

We spent our day today visiting farmers and their animals and wares in the most unusual of situations. Today was the annual Farm Days celebration inside the local shopping mall.

Our friends the Piseco Peeps were supposed to pick us up and explore the festival with us, but they were having bouts of feeling generally unwell, so we made it out on our own….

OR SO WE THOUGHT.

We started in the mall proper, and the kids took a quick ride on petal tractors near the doors.

After a moment, we made some crafty cotton ball sheep. It was just after taking that picture with our fuzzy sheep that Nate began freaking out and bouncing around and screaming, “JediBoy, JediBoy and PisecoMom”* at the top of his lungs. I thought he had seen them somewhere in the mall because they’d decided to join us belatedly, but then realized that he wasn’t quite seeing what I’d expected. Instead, we’d found the following on the board the kids were posing in front of for their photo op.After our excitement wore off, we continued through the mall and enjoyed such varied activities as tasting Stone Soup and watching a sheep get her winter coat sheared.

It was a grand day, and we came home with loot bags full of crafts, snacks, and assorted treasures.

For more pictures, you can check out the album…