California Field Trip #6: San Francisco Zoo

Showing double productivity, since this is something else that we're trying to do a lot of this year, we made it to another zoo!

I was thrilled to see that the San Francisco Zoo includes each animal's scientific name on its info board, because the girls and I LOVE taxonomy! I wish that they'd also included the translation, though--I know my Greek and Latin well enough to translate many names (such as old one-horned horny nose there), but not enough to satisfy our curiosity at every exhibit:

The tiger exhibits were especially noteworthy, because we love the tigers--

--the tigers always seem to want to kill us--

--and we followed the news reports several years ago of the tiger who escaped from its exhibit in the San Francisco Zoo several years ago and killed a visitor. The old tiger grotto looked very similar to the one still in place at the Louisville Zoo, but the new one not only has the tigers behind glass, like at the Indianapolis Zoo, but also with a concrete moat that they can play in, but that increases the distance they'd have to jump to get over the glass fence to 19 feet:

Personally, I don't put anything past a predator on the attack, but the extra fencing, and the signs everywhere that now remind people to stay quiet around the animals and not antagonize them, will hopefully keep the tigers safe from US now.

And of COURSE Will somehow found a bug collection to admire:

I shudder to tell you that that's our big spring project.

California Field Trip #5: California State Capitol Building

Well, we're driving right through Sacramento, so we might as well stop and see the capitol building!

Of COURSE there's a redwood growing on the capitol grounds!

Such a balmy capitol building--the Indy one is covered in a foot of snow right now!

Sure, it was just a short field trip--more of a detour, really--but now the kids have a memory to go with their answer to "What is the capital of California?"

P.S. Here's an interactive kids' web site for the capitol building, to add even more context.

California Field Trip #4: Gold Country

On Thanksgiving day every year, we drive up from the Bay area to the Sierra Nevadas, and we stay there for a few days of family reunion festivities. For the day after Thanksgiving this year, instead of shooting, we took a family hike at South Yuba River State Park, location of the longest single-span covered bridge in the world--

--and an excellent place for this very engrossing California activity:

And search for gold we did! Lacking gold pans (something that I plan to remedy before our great Out West trip in 2014), we searched by hand in the cold, cold, COLD water--

--and I'm sad to say that although we found plenty of flakes of shiny mica, we did NOT strike it rich.

Ah, well, something for next time...

Although Matt and I stayed OUT of that cold, cold, COLD water, the kids just could not seem to help themselves--

--although they had varying levels of success with not ending up freezing and wet and miserable:

It's a good thing that dry clothes and leftover mincemeat pie await!

Work Plans for the Week of December 9, 2013

We're back at school, more or less. I'd been hoping that after two weeks' vacation for Thanksgiving and travel, our school routine would feel good to get back to for everyone... and in some ways, it did. We were all happy to be at our regular Monday volunteer gig again (We taste-tested pomegranates! Marveled over the many uses of powdered egg! And discovered that crates of celery are, for some reason, about the heaviest things I've ever had to lift!), and the girls readily accepted my insistence that an afternoon sledding at the park means an evening at school (yet another reason to LOVE homeschool!), but my Will, in particular, has needed many iterations of the "I can sit here with you, but I cannot learn this material for you, nor will I bully you into learning" lecture, sigh, and both times that we have needed to leave the house today, I have managed to work myself up into manic, frustrated tears--it should not take 40 minutes, constant reminders, raised voices, and manic, frustrated tears to get us out the door to go somewhere that a child enjoys going to! ARGH!!!

Anyway, tears dried, traffic battled, here we are at one child's aerial silks class, the other child working contentedly on her reading assignment while I get a little work done, myself.

MONDAY: I've mixed up our regular schedule a bit this week--I've ditched a couple of assignments each day and replaced them with a daily Christmas project and, for Will, daily exploration of a math/science online computer program that I've got a free two-week trial for. I've discovered through experience that the kids love these sorts of programs, but also that they tire of them quickly, so two weeks of activity is probably just about right. For the Christmas projects, I expect that some of them will be crafty in nature, but I've also discovered through experience that I can use the kids' general Christmas enthusiasm to get some real help with holiday chores. Today, for example, they're writing Christmas cards to our nearest and dearest, so I can check that job off my list!

Will's still happy with the recorder, but Syd, over Thanksgiving, was inspired to give piano a try. She has so many relatives on the West coast who play piano, and eagerly took a piano lesson from her grandma before we left. I'm willing to pay for piano lessons for her, but I know how challenging she can find formal lessons when she doesn't automatically take to the subject, and I know how her frustrated feelings manifest in acting uncooperative, so I'm going to make her take several weeks' worth of keyboard lessons from me, first, to see if she's ready for this.

TUESDAY: Peace Hill Press had a Cyber Monday sale, so I bought the digital files of First Language Lessons, volume 3, and I'm eager to start our first lesson! There are more word ladders for logic, and an extra lesson on acids and bases before the girls move on in their chemistry set. Will also has a math enrichment class that she'll be going to on Tuesdays now, which may give me and Syd just enough time to make that model volcano.

WEDNESDAY: In addition to math and memory work, which never cease, Will has a meeting of her online Magic Tree House Club, which also entails listening to the audiobook of Revolutionary War on Wednesday. She LOVES Magic Tree House Club, and is going to be stoked.

THURSDAY: I finally took my  own advice and moved one of our subjects away from our overbooked Thursdays, so what's left looks quite manageable. This Yorkshire pudding business is going to be a new one for Syd AND me (What, no raisin bread?!? We finally ran out of raisins, and I didn't want to make a special trip to the store), but she loves Harry Potter so much that I wanted her to learn how to make something British, and I hope that Will can figure out the Spacewar ROM that I downloaded for her, because I sure can't! It's the very first videogame, though, so we've got to give it a shot.

FRIDAY: I'd forgotten that Will's ice skating class is dismissed until January, or I would have put another school assignment there--lucky kids! Instead, we've got some geography to finish up that we didn't get to on that last hectic Friday before Thanksgiving vacation, and since we just saw real, live papyrus growing in a pot, I'm pulling out a papyrus papermaking kit that I bought this past summer. I really want us to make canopic jars, but I do NOT have the energy to source old baby food jars and clean the labels off right now. That sounds like a mid-January sort of project, don't you think?

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: On Saturday, I'm having the girls try out a once-a-month nature class that I'm hoping they like (nature skills = yay, of course, but so does one day a month just for me and my Matt!), and there are a couple of other activities that we can do that day--a puppet-making workshop at the library, a symphony concert at the hands-on-science museum--but other than that, we're free as birds! Just between you and me, though, I'm hoping that there's a really great football game on TV on Sunday. Matt watches football on the cable TVs on our university's campus, and he always takes the girls with him. A whole evening, just me?

That suits me JUST fine.

California Field Trip #3: The Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose

It took a trip to California to really bring our study of Ancient Egypt to life. The Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum, right in San Jose, boasts an absolutely epic collection of Egyptian artifacts, and that's where we and the girls' grandpa spent one very happy morning:

I bought the girls these little "passports" that had questions and activities for the various exhibits, and stamps to collect in all the galleries. It was just the thing to keep the younger kid occupied and engaged--

--while the older kid and I shared an audio tour (it's a free download!):

Isis with Osiris' coffin, just like in The Story of the World!

Matt reckons that their Egyptian tomb recreation is an even more elaborate version of the one in the Children's Museum of Indianapolis--there aren't that many pristinely-preserved tombs to recreate, you know:

Look--cuneiform! We've read about it, we've copied it, we've downloaded images of it and pasted them on our timeline, but this is the first time that we've seen it in real life:

And as a counterpoint... look--papyrus!!!

California sunshine? It's verra bright.

giant Senet

 The girls gained a ton of valuable context to our studies here, and I got some more great ideas and great inspiration:

Model pyramids! Kid-made Senet games! Home-sewn Egyptian costumes! Mythology skits!

I'm more sure than ever that we will NEVER move beyond Ancient Egypt in our history studies, sigh.

California Field Trip #2: San Francisco

San Francisco in the winter is SO much nicer than San Francisco in the summer. If you go to San Francisco in the summer you'll freeze your butt off, but in the winter it's gorgeous and pleasant--often foggy, but it IS San Francisco...

We didn't even have the fog on this winter visit, which included all our favorite traditions, first of which is always a nice lunch with the extended family in one of the many seafood restaurants on the piers. We didn't do oysters this year, but both girls were nevertheless adventurous eaters--Will had rock fish, and tasted her Uncle Carlos' baby squid tentacles, and Syd ate a calamari "steak" sandwich. Yum!

After lunch, while the rest of the family shopped, we strolled past Boudin, of course--

This baker, unlike last year's, didn't *really* want to be in the show window, and stoutly ignored us as she worked. After she finished this crab, however, she lifted it up to show the audience, as she'd been trained to, and Syd burst into applause. The baker smiled in spite of herself.

 --where we bought the girls a sourdough sea turtle each, of COURSE, and then went to pay homage to the sea lions. Of course.

Pier 39 is SO touristy, but it does have fun, festive things to pose in front of:

Matt laughed at me because after I took this photo, a strange couple handed me their iphone and asked me to take a photo of them, too. They wanted a boring old front shot, but you can't see the TREE that way(!!!), so I insisted on lying back down on the ground and getting this exact same shot of them.

After this, the family picked us up, drove us over by Crissy Field, and then went off shopping again. We did a little more looking around--

The girls were unimpressed with Alcatraz--until I told them that this is also where Azkaban is!

--and then did some climbing and jumping and digging and running while the sun set:

And that's what you call a full afternoon in San Francisco!