A Sad End and a Living History Lesson

When we bought our house, one of the things we loved about it was the old dogwood tree right out the back door that bloomed big and beautiful every year.

Sadly, the last couple of years it has been slowly dying, with fewer and fewer limbs showing those beautiful blooms. And this year, it didn't bloom at all. It was finally dead.

However, out of the sadness came an opportunity. We have been studying Ancient Egypt all year and one of the things we learned about was the various tools they used to make life easier along the Nile. One of these is the shadoof, a tool used to raise water out of the flooded canals and into the fields to irrigate them.

Since the Dogwood had a nice split on it, we took the longest limb and made one for the kids to try out. Now, a real shadoof is much loonger and has a significanly bigger weight at the end, but this worked well enough for them to get the idea.

No question, we're going to miss our beloved Dogwood, but the kids got to experience a valuable history lesson we might not have otherwise had the opportunity to.

Washington DC - July 2018 - Part 1 - Art and History

In the middle of July, Aunt DD organized a family gathering in the heart of our nation's capital, Washington DC. We managed to get everyone together for almost a full week of fun, exploration, and education. One of the first things the kids wanted to do was take the train down to the Mall. Honestly, they didn't care much about where we were going, just that we were going on a train!

They were getting impatient for the train to arrive...

Once we were on it, they had a blast seeing the city pass by and then loved when it went underground! Little did they know what awaited them once we got off the train...

 Being DC in July, it was brutally hot and the sun was intense, hence all the squinting. Irene was not happy about having to walk everywhere once we got off the train.

 Of course, one of our stops had to be the Air and Space Museum. The kids went crazy for all the planes, rockets, and spacecraft on display. I really should have gotten more pictures, but it was enough just to keep up with this crazy crew!

They found one of the tracks from the crawler that carried the space shuttles to the launch pad and thought it would be a fun bench to rest on. 

 One of our stops the next day was the National Museum of American History

 There were some very interesting (at least to the adults...) exhibits that showed how our country has changed and grown since its inception. The kids particularly liked the exhibits on construction, transportation, and food. 

They even got a little hands-on and helped grind some wheat into flour. (It was harder than they thought.)

Afterwards, we went off on our own to the American Art Museum. The kids weren't particularly excited about it going in, but they soon got into the swing of things and began to enjoy comparing the different art styles and picking out pieces they liked.  

They also got to make a little modern art of their own with this exhibit that you would press a button and then wait for it to take your picture. On a big screen, it would update every few seconds with the latest picture at the bottom. The hard part was knowing when it would take the picture. If you look closely, you can see some of our kiddos in various poses. 

 This cat was a favorite of everyone. 

 We thought that this was an ingenious piece. If you read the plates, it spells out the preamble to the Constitution. All 50 states are represented.

 In another section of the museum was the National Portrait Gallery. Despite the kids being a bit tired of all the walking, they perked up as we went through because they discovered that each portrait has a number next to it designating which president it was. The portraits were arranged in such a way that they weren't exactly in order, so they made it a game to find each number. Not only did it make it more fun for them, but they would stop and look at each one, reading the information about the various presidents, so they were finding ways to make learning fun on their own!

They also thought it was really neat to see things like the original of the portrait featured on the dollar bill. Notice how it's actually the mirror image! Some other highlights were the modern presidents, particularly Barack Obama and Donald Trump, because they recognized them from the news or other recent sources.

Arts and Sciences Night - EMMA Classes - Spring 2018

It's that time of year again! The kids have had an amazing term at EMMA classes, continuing their courses from last fall. once again, one of the boys' favorite classes was Art. Their teacher, Ms. Patti, had them using various styles and media to create some very cool pieces.

 

 

 

Emma also loved her art class! She got to do so many awesome things with her class!

 

 

 

Other than their art class, the boys had a geography project where they had to make salt dough maps of a country that they had studied. Ezra chose Italy and Gabriel picked Israel.While I did help them some with the dough portion of the maps, they handled all the painting and labeling.

 

Olivia didn't have an art class this year, but she did have a couple of science classes that had projects for her to put together. She's gotten to be very independent in her work, so these were done with almost no input from us.

Her first one was a presentation on the Appendix. She had to research its function and purpose, plus talk about how it can get infected and interesting stuff like that.

Her other science project was to create a salt water acid battery.

She had to sand one side of a bunch of pennies down to remove the copper coating and expose the zinc.

 While she was doing that, she had to soak cardboard in a solution of salt water and vinegar.

 once all that was done, she stacked the pennies, copper side down with the cardboard between them.

Then when you attach a small LED light to opposite ends of the stack, it lights up! Something about the different metals interacting with the salt, vinegar and water causes an electrical current. So long as the cardboard stayed damp, the light would stay lit.

We really do love EMMA classes and so do the kids! It gives them a chance to learn and do things with kids their age that we might not be able to do at home.