Opening Weekend for Handcrafted Gift Shop

This weekend was opening weekend for the Handcrafted Gift Shop we are running out of our studio. Loren has "supervised" us in construction and preparation for the gift shop opening over the past few weeks and was especially excited when we setup and turned on the Christmas lights on the front door and down our long dark driveway.

All weekend long, she greeted customers, attempted to sell to them, supervised both Dad and me working on various shop projects, and practiced sales and conversations with customers through her imaginary play. We even practiced some math skills using coins to count, match, and make and complete patterns.

Mission: massive train track city... Or not.

Today was homeschool group's Learn Through Play. The goal: building a massive train track city using wooden tracks, blocks, and lincoln logs. The result: a generously sized figure 8, built by one of the moms, which is quickly demolished as the kids get interested in books, cars, play kitchen, plastic animals, etc. Well, at least they listened to the story and played with the trains for a few minutes first...

For some people, this change of direction might have been hard to deal with. I mean, we planned and setup for building a train city and now they don't want to play with it?! For us, we decided a long time ago to just roll with the activity changes our kids make. The main goal of Learn Through Play is to provide an opportunity for our kids to learn something while we all build relationships with other homeschoolers. Mission accomplished.

While our kids played together, us moms shared resources and support. C shared an online shopping resource with us, SmallHands.com, a Montessori-style learning toy store. I will be thoroughly "researching" christmas and birthday gifts on this site in the very near future. We also discussed our struggles in finding other consistent homeschooling families to join our group.

We often get families that will join us for a week or two and then they get flakey, cancelling at the last minute or falling off the face of the earth. In my time as a homeschooling family (a little over a year at this point), I've found this seems to be an ongoing struggle with almost every family I've met. I understand that part of the benefit of homeschooling is the flexibility of your schedule, but Come On! A little consistency and reliability would be nice! Flakey people drive me nuts! (end rant)

Physics of Galloping Gertie

Last week while we were at the Washington State History Museum, we checked out a display on Galloping Gertie, the old Tacoma Narrows Bridge that fell into the Puget Sound.

I didn't think that Loren had understood what it was about until yesterday morning when we were driving over the new Narrows Bridge into Tacoma. Randomly from the back seat I hear, "Mom, why that bridge fall into the water?" We spent the rest of our drive talking about how the guy who designed it had messed up and that when the wind blew it waved up and down until it broke and fell into the water. This didn't appease the questions, so when we got to our destination (a show in Puyallup), we broke out the computer and internet and did a search for information.

First, we watched a YouTube video of the bridge collapse. 4 times. During the video I pointed out how the trees and bushes were blowing and the bridge was waving up and down because of the wind. The video that I found had some of the best footage of the collapse I'd ever seen, and I grew up in the area learning about it every year around the anniversary of the collapse. (View video here)

After exhausting the video (well, actually we exhausted mom's attention to the video, Loren would have watched it all day if I'd let her), we did a Wikipedia search for Galloping Gertie and read about the history of the bridge and the scientific explanation of why it collapsed. We learned the words "aerolastics" and "aerodynamics" during this research as well as what "resonance" is in relation to physics. I don't know how much of the physics she understood, but I plan to do a demonstration of the concepts that broke the bridge at home this week, maybe with dad's help.

On the drive home last night, I discovered that her interest in the bridge collapsing stemmed from her concern that the new bridges would meet the same fate. To alleviate her concerns, we talked about how Galloping Gertie taught the engineers how to build a stronger bridge and that even big mistakes like that can be learning experiences. Vocabulary, history, physics, researching, and life lessons all in one lesson. Gotta love Child-Led Learning!

Washington State History Museum Field Trip

We visited the Washington State History Museum in Tacoma with the intention of seeing the model living railroad as part of this month's homeschool group's Train theme. We started our day with a ride on the Link light rail train from Freighthouse Square to Union Station (where the museum is housed). While we were there we took the opportunity to explore the rest of the museum and even did a scavenger hunt through the exhibits.

Snails!

While at the University of Oregon street fair, we were given an opportunity to learn about snails. This opportunity presented itself in the form of an actual snail that had crawled up one of our tubs in the middle of our booth. The snail stuck around all three days that we were there, crawling up the leg of our canopy onto the inside of the roof on Friday before I pulled him down and put him in the planter nearby. While learning about snails, we discussed spiral shapes (the shell), what snails eat (biology), tracking movement of an animal, we even took advantage of being on a college campus and visited the main library where we found the juvenile literature section and did a bit of research on them.