Field trip to Harris Lake County Park!

Do you recognize the name?  Yes, its the same park that we visited for Isaiah's birthday and we went again for a field trip with our FIAR group.  I really do like this park.  Its about 30 minutes from our house, so we don't go too often, but enjoy it whenever we do.

For this outing, our group was split into two groups.  The younger group (prek-5) learned about Reptiles.

What a reptile is and what makes them special.  (Eastern Box Turtle)

And how they are different from amphibians.

Great visuals and hands-on learning too.

Just loved this shot of my two youngest!  Aren't they cute?!

So much to see and learn about in this beautiful world that God has made.

Can you just see the fascination?

And delight.

And not sure what she is thinking here, but it made me smile.

While the younger kids were learning about reptiles, the older ones were learning about Orienteering.  They were split into several groups and we occasionally saw them walking by our shelter.

 Park staff had set up an orienteering course including basic compass instruction, map orientation and course layout and safety instruction.  

Some of the hands on items were easier to touch than others.

No fear of the Corn snake here.  This reminds me of a sweet memory.  I remember when Christopher was much younger and he saw a corn snake.  He liked it and asked me what my favorite snake was.  I told him that I didn't really have one, but asked which one he liked.  He told me that he liked the corn snake ... and all of the other vegetable snakes too.  :-)

The older ones had to work together to try to figure out where each marker was located.

And then set out to find them all.

It was fun to be able to see some of what they were doing too.

We all had a great day.  The weather was gorgeous too!

Rebecca and I left shortly after the programs ended to make a college visit.  I'll post more on that in my next blog post.

Blessings
Leslie

Isaiah's Birthday ... 12 years old!

My two middle boys have birthdays just 6 days apart.  2 years and 6 days.  For many years they have had joint parties and that worked well.  This year though, we just let them choose what they wanted to do for their birthday and this was fun too!

We have done this in the past for Isaiah - and he really enjoyed it.  It wasn't a surprise then though (I wanted a photo).  This year was!  What fun to wake up and find something you didn't expect - and really enjoy!

I loved being able to start off his day in this fun way!  And green is his favorite color.  :-)

Food is always the choice of the birthday person.  Isaiah wanted pancakes with blueberry syrup and sausage cheese balls.  Oh, and chocolate milk.  Yum!

One of the first activities was a treasure hunt.  I have a great book from Klutz with already designed hunts that I use often.  It is a great resource with some hunts good for pre-readers and other more challenging ones for older children.  I love that it tells you where to hide each clue on the back of the clue!  Super easy and I highly recommend The Treasure Hunt Book.

One of his gifts was a fishing box filled with all sorts of things and a new pole.  He had asked to go fishing on his birthday and this seemed an appropriate gift for him.

It was a gorgeous day and we headed out to Harris Lake County Park to go fishing.

Ready to fish!

They first tried fishing on the pier.

Eliana became quickly tired of it all and we took a walk.

There is a great playground here and we headed over there.

Love seeing the sweet smiles!

After no luck on the pier, they headed out to fish near the woods.  Only one person caught a fish ... the birthday boy!  I was so glad it was him.  :-)

Christopher met us for lunch.  Isaiah picked take-out Chinese.

More gifts.  Slim jims are a huge hit.

And a fun movie too!

For dinner, Isaiah wanted to have a cooking contest.  We gathered ingredients for nachos and then split into 3 teams.  Each team had time to make their food and prepare something to say about the food.

Some of the presentations were very creative.

Both the words.

The gestures.

And the food.  (Can you tell that this one is an I?  For the one judge - Isaiah!)

The foods were judged on appearance, presentation and taste.  A few had secret ingredients (such as bacon and ranch dressing).

After sampling all of them and learning who the winning team was (the all girl team), everyone took time to make their own plate of nachos to their liking.  It was a lot of fun and yummy too!

Happy 12th birthday Isaiah!  You are a delight to our whole family!  We love your creativity, wit and humor.  I'm thankful for your willingness to serve and help others.  I love that you are a hugger and am so very thankful you are my son!  I love you so very much!

Blessings
Leslie

FIAR: Roxaboxen fun

Have you read this book?  Its such a fun story based on true events of childhood imaginations and delights with friends that span years.  Its part of our Five in a Row fun and I'm enjoying it as much now as I did the first time we read it.

It was my turn to teach co-op this time and having taught it before, it was easy to use my notes to tweak it a bit and plan some fun.  We started with a devotion.  Then on to a lesson about colors of the Southwest.  I used some paint chips for this lesson.  

They took the colors and tried to match the paint chips to the colors in the book in order to identify the ones that were prominent in the story.

They enjoyed this and then moved to matching other colors too.

Next, we did some experiments! These are the items that I had gathered to use in the experiments.

We started by learning about simple machines and what they are.  

I had gathered a box full of a variety of items.  They took turns pulling out an item and then trying to identify what type of simple machine it was.

I used this poster to keep the definitions in front of them.  I also used this to help explain the machines.

This is our final assortment of items grouped by type of machine.

A worksheet about simple machines.

Now it was time to test what they had learned.  I found several great books at the library which I used for ideas on experiments.  (See photo above).  I primarily used Simple Machines by Anita Yasuda.

The first experiment was on levers and looking at the distribution of books on one end to see how it affected the lever.          

We also did a chopstick challenge as this is a lever too.  I counted out the sizes and numbers of pompons and then just had them see who could pick them all up (one at a time) and put them in their cup.

Inclined Plane.  Does using this really help with the work load?  We measured and tested to find out.  First they measured the pull on a rubber band holding a sock of marbles when lifting straight up.

Next we lifted the marbles to the same height by pulling it along the inclined plane.  Again, the pull on the rubber band was measured to see which used a greater amount of force.

Wheel and axle.  We tested moving something using rollers.  The early Egyptians used something like this while building the pyramids.

We also tested out the roller on playdoh and compared it to the force of just pushing on the dough.

Screw.  This contraption was made for my older children to measure the movement of water.  The water in the bowl was dyed red.  There is a tube wrapped around the can.  The kids took turns twisting the tube into the water like a screw.  This caused the water to rise in the tube.  Can you see the red water at the bottom side of the tube?

Wedge.  We tested out pushing a wedge of carrot into an apple versus just pushing a carrot that was not cut into it.  I think my apple was too firm as both were difficult.

We also looked at the difference in using a sharp metal needle (wedge) and blunt piece of metal.  It was definitely easier to sew with the wedge!

Pulley.  For the last experiment, they made their own pulley.

They had to improvise to get it to work.

After all of that work, it was time to head outside.  We had siblings and a neighbor join us for this part.

Time to make our own Roxaboxen.  We headed to the back yard and they began to clear spaces.

We had random materials around that could be used for adding to their sites.

One of the items in the story told about 2 children that sold ice cream.  All that you could eat.  We had to add that in.

And the currency of our Roxaboxen was rocks.

They all liked this part.

Some (or most) took advantage of the ability to have more than one!

Happy faces.  :-)

We also enjoyed cooking our meal to end our time with Roxaboxen.  Daniel is really enjoying helping in the kitchen and I LOVE having the help as that soon means that they will be able to do more and more!

Daniel also wanted to decorate our table and make it special.  We all had desert placemats - with rocks, cactus and desert creatures.  Doesn't it look great?

Our table - beautifully decorated and set with delicious food.

The two types of muffins were a big hit!

This is another fun series of books that I found in our library on simple machines.  Highly recommend!

After decorating our table, Daniel decided that the whole thing needed to be a desert.  Fun, isn't it?

We loved our time with this book and the opportunity for fun memories to be made.

Happy learning!
Leslie