Spring 2012

I suppose I have quite a bit of catching up to do...we haven't had a ton of outings this spring, but we've had fun anyway. Here is a taste of our spring 2012:

Lighthouse Park
At the tail end of March, we had a week of beautiful weather. On the warmest day, a friend and I decided to hit the beach. It was a sunny 74 degrees when we left the Hartford area to head south. I thought about tossing jackets into the car - after all, it was still March in the Arctic. But I figured it was forecasted to be in the 80s, why bother with a jacket? As we were driving, I noticed the temperature reading in the car started dropping the farther south we went: 70, then 65, then 59. By the time we got to the beach, it was 57, and we were greeted wtih this:

We decided to make the best of the foggy situation. We ate our picnic lunches in the car. And then, as the temperature continued to climb, we went to Sugar Bakery. The owner of Sugar Bakery is a Cupcake Wars champion, and this was NOT my first visit to the Cupcakery.

Although it never got real warm, it did warm up enough for us to enjoy a lovely day at the beach. Michael had fun being buried in the sand.

And we discovered a private cove surrounded by rocks which afforded a bit of protection from the wind.

Peabody Museum
Not too long after our beach excursion - and after the weather had turned decidedly back to Arctic cold, we paid a visit to the Peabody Museum. Think Museum of Natural History in miniature.

What was awesome is that the museum's temporary exhibit was all about food.

Unless you follow me on Facebook or Pinterest, perhaps you don't know this, but I've been a little obsessed lately with eating healthily. (And, yeah, the display above shows how many teaspoons of sugar are in each item!) My kids aren't as enthusiastic about this healthy eating as I am, but since I'm the teacher...well, anyway, we had a good time.

Ice Skating
Almost every week for the last few months, we have joined a homeschool group at a local ice skating rink. The kids all started learning by holding on to these little walker things.

They have all improved greatly, though Audrey still holds on to her walker. Jacob and Michael took off, and even Alex heads into the middle of the rink occasionally. It's been a lot of fun learning to skate and hanging out with homeschool friends at the same time!

Sweet!

Due to the prohibitively high cost of maple syrup, I have kept my children on a strict Mrs. Buttersworth syrup diet since their first bite of pancake. Since then, of course, I have discovered that sometimes cheapest isn't always best. Not that any type of syrup is healthy, but when choosing the lesser of the two evils, maple syrup certainly beats high fructose syrup on pancakes and waffles.

Unfortunately, once conditioned always conditioned...the last time I purchased the liquid gold, the children declared they did not like the taste at all. So imagine my surprise when they all but drank some maple syrup during our last field trip to see the process.

We began our tour in the barn so we could have a chance to visit with the animals.












After the barn, we kind of headed in a backwards fashion through the tour. Since there were three other groups doing the tour with other leaders, our next station was the pancake station to sample maple syrup. And that is where the kids decided they do indeed enjoy real maple syrup. Unfortunately, this was not syrup from the farm as this is a 4H teaching farm and therefore does not produce enough syrup to sell. They loved it nonetheless and may have even licked their plates.




After sampling the syrup, we learned about how to identify a maple tree in the dead of winter and then how to tap it. We followed our indoor instruction with an outdoor trek to check out the sap that was draining into the buckets of some tapped maple trees.

Following that, we went to the sugar house to see how the sap is boiled in the evaporator until it becomes thicker and develops that beautiful amber color. We learned that it takes 40 gallons of sap just to make 1 gallon of syrup! No wonder it's so expensive!


I probably don't have to tell you that I stopped by a farm on my way home to purchase some real maple syrup!

The USS Intrepid (also Good to Wow: Green Edition, SOOC)

Note: If you're here from Jill's blog and don't want to see a million pictures, scroll down to photo #5.

We spent this past weekend in New York City, and one of the fun things we did was visit The Sea, Air, and Space Museum, which houses the Growler Submarine, the USS Intrepid, and a British Airways Concorde.

Our tour into the belly of the Growler Submarine was very interesting.


The control panels were fascinating to see, especially considering what these types of panels might look like on a modern submarine.




Here is the submarine mess hall:


And what good is a submarine without weapons? The missile was pretty impressive.
(Good to Wow photo):

Our next stop was the USS Intrepid.


It has an impressive history. Commissioned in 1943, it saw 2 wars as an aircraft carrier, held up under the attack of two suicidal kamikaze airplanes,








served as a recovery vessel for a space mission,


and filled in as the temporary FBI headquarters following 9/11.


It is as impressive in stature as in history.

We ate in the main Mess Hall


and also got to see the Officers' Mess Hall.




We also saw some of the living quarters.






Following our time visiting the Intrepid, we boarded a British Airways Concorde.


Nothing particularly impressive except possibly the bragging rights I now have to say I've been on one. The one interesting fact that stayed with me is the fact that a flight on the Concorde was very quiet because it flew faster than the sound of its engines.

Definitely more impressive was the short movie we saw about the Intrepid. It presented a history of the ship and included interviews with a couple of POWs like John McCain. I was struck by this quote from Commander Paul Galanti: "There's no such thing as a bad day when you have a doorknob on the inside of the door." Now there's perspective.

Homeschool Highlights, Week 22

Science
Using R.E.A.L. Science Chemistry, we have learned about atoms and that a group of the same atoms form molecules to make an element. This week we learned that molecules can bond together. If like molecules bond together, we get a compound. If different molecules bond together, you get a mixture.

I illustrated this by making some gumdrop molecules.


Of course the kids wanted in on the action too. They went a little more elaborate, however.






Socialization
That little bug that hit Alex last week hit Jacob this week, so we did not make it to church. We did, however, make it to our homeschool group field trip to the Sugar Shack where we learned all about making maple syrup.

We learned all about tree selection and tapping the tree.








We tasted some sweet tree sap.


We visited the room where they evaporate some of the 98% water content from the sugar.


We learned about the interesting history of tapping maple trees


and had a little practice drilling just the right size hole in the tree.


We had a good time, and there was even a little lull in the snowstorm that hit us yesterday so that we were able to get to and from The Sugar Shack safely.