Field Trip: Cole M. Rivers Fish Hatchery

So we took our field trip to the fish hatchery today. As excited as the boys were to be there, I think Mike was even MORE excited! He acted like a six year old boy (not in a bad way, though). Running from pool to pool to view everything he possibly could. lol I think we'll have to go earlier in the season, though, so we can see more in the fish ladder and watch them incubating the eggs and all their activities they do.












Feeding frenzy! They gave the boys a few large handfuls of fish food and the boys got to feed the fish.




Fish would come barrelling out of the pipe here, but since my brain and my trigger finger don't communicate with each other that quickly, I never got the shot of the fish coming out.



The boys loved this tank because all you could see was a bunch of fins above the surface and it looked like a tank full of tiny sharks. lol




In the upper left of the monitor you can sort of see a fish. This was a monitor that connected to a camera in the fish ladder so visitors could see some of the fish struggling to get up the ladder.


The image on the left of the monitor is a fish face.




If you look from the middle of the top of the picture, you will see a white steak going towards the middle. That's a fish. I couldn't ever get the entire fish in my viewer in time. But he was HUGE.



Look for the white streaks. Those are more fish.










More feeding frenzies!





In the lobby of the Visitor Center.

Creation Day 4, Science Project: Build a Solar Oven

So for this week I thought it might be fun to build a solar oven. Since we are limited on funds, I did a search for one that involved things we already had in the house. I found our particular instructions at this page.

We had everything we needed already, except for the construction paper and the plastic wrap, both which we bought at the Dollar Tree for $1 a piece. Except the construction paper. We had to improvise with a black party tablecloth, lol.

We don't get direct sun in our yard until the afternoon, so we won't know how well this thing works until later today, at which point I'll update. But here are some pictures we took while we made it.

Top Buy of the Week

I bought three binoculars, cheap ones, on Walmart.com the other day to use for our hikes during our Creation Week. While we were at Walmart picking them up, we walked around the store avoiding going home because the power was out and they didn't know when it would be restored. While wasting time, I came across some educational placemats. I bought one of each for each child. They have spent the last 1 1/2 hours playing games with the USA one and the World one. AND.....they are LEARNING!!!

Our field trip today

Went on a field trip today. Took the boys up to one of the local hiking hills and did some hiking looking at plants and flowers. Christopher's best friend and his mom and brother came with us.

While walking we took a few pictures of some local plant life and tomorrow we're going to look in our books and figure out what they are.

We also found some wildlife. We got two pictures of teeny lizards, one missing his tail; and a picture of a wild female turkey that you can't see very well because she blends in quite well with the grass.

All in all it was a good day. OH! We also went to their house and met their neighbor's calf.



This is the deer hoof print we found at the beginning of our hike.










Can you see the wild turkey?

New Hampshire Court Orders Christian Homeschooled Girl to Attend Public School

From OneNewsNow

By Pete Chagnon

A Christian homeschool girl in New Hampshire has been ordered into government-run public school for having "sincerely held" religious beliefs.

An attorney working with the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) has filed motions with a New Hampshire court, asking it to reconsider its order to send the 10-year-old homeschooled girl into public school.

According to ADF allied attorney John Anthony Simmons, the court acknowledges that the girl in question is doing well socially and academically, but he adds that the court went too far when they determined that the girl's Christian faith was a "bit to0 sincerely held and must be sifted, tested by, and mixed among other worldviews."

Simmons contends that parents have a "fundamental right to make educational choices for their children." However the girl's parents divorced in 1999, and she is now living with her mother who has been homeschooling the child since first grade. As part of the schooling, the young girl has been attending supplemental public school classes.

As part of parental custody hearings, a court-appointed guardian stated that the child reflected her mother's "rigidity" on questions of faith and added that girl's best interest would be served by exposure to a public school setting.

According to the New Hampshire Supreme Court, Home Education is an enduring American tradition and right. ADF concludes, based on that statement, that there is no legitimate legal basis for this latest court ruling.

Back in the swing of things?

We begin week three of our homeschool year tomorrow. Forget about the first DAY being stressful. Forget about the second WEEK marking the beginning of the year getting better and more organized. Here we are about to start week three and I'm STILL finding myself completely disorganized.

The funny thing is, it's mostly additional stuff that's got me going crazy. Not getting the stuff for the kids READY, because printing out the Math and Grammar stuff from CIMT (Math) and Scott Foresman (Grammar) takes all of 10 minutes.

Oh no. It's the going through the unit study and creating the list of books I need to get for the NEXT week of homeschool. Finding all of the books we've used for the PREVIOUS weeks of homeschool that need to be returned....two days ago. It's the going through the experiments books to determine which experiments to use and compile a list of the things we'll need, only to find out we don't have enough of the items to make the experiment work AND we don't have the money to purchase said items.

I need to get more organized, though. Like NOW. Especially since week seven of Creation will be coming up VERY quickly (if the last two weeks is any indicator) and I have something VERY special planned for that entire week because of the significance of the seventh day of Creation. Basically what THAT boils down to is we're no longer going to be Sabbath KEEPING Christians....we are going to be Sabbath CELEBRATING Christians.

My friend Kimberly recently bought a calendar from FlyLady. I'm thinking about purchasing it myself. It'll probably have to wait a few paychecks, especially since I have my eye on a laminator I really want to get. I'm debating it, though. I tend to do better with planner/organizer type calendars rather than wall calendars. I'm going to have to do some shopping around. I need one with LOTS of writing space.

I also need to invest in a LARGE calendar for the boys to use. Hang it on the refrigerator or something and mark each day with what needs to be done. That way I don't have to type it out every day. That gets rather tedious.

Update: August 18, 2009

I am in the process of moving my unit study website. I found out that Tripod is now going "paid only", and I won't pay. And the website they are in partnership with to provide the free services really isn't very good (at least to me), far too complicated for this simpleton. ;-) So I've moved it here. I just got done transferring four weeks worth of unit study over. That was some serious work!

The boys are enjoying their new school year. This week we will have our first field trip. Well, second I suppose, since we did go "try" to watch the meteor shower the night of the 12th. We'll be heading up one of the local parks this week to look at the clouds. We'll be taking the art pads and utensils, and the camera, and having ourselves some fun doing some cloud watching. And since I have Thursday AND Friday off (as well as Saturday), we can even go two days if they want to. We'll probably go Thursday MORNING, as I want to go to the local free book exchange that day while it's open.