Field Trip - Nature Lab

A mother-daughter pic. This is how a rattlesnake would "see" us.

The Nature Lab at the Natural History Museum has so much to see. There are exhibits about newts, crayfish, bullfrogs, spiders, geckos, ants, turtles, rats, rattlesnakes, tarantulas, and more. Los Angeles has a lot of wildlife, but the buildings and freeways can make it a challenge to find. The nature lab has live animals, touch screens, and little holes to peek into that contain specimens. My three-year-old's favorite feature was the rattlesnake vision camera.

(Rattlesnakes sense infrared thermal radiation, which means they can see radiant heat.)

"Your House is Their House" shows how bed bugs and roaches are part of L.A.'s wildlife.

Field Trip - A Day at the Marina

Waiting for the WaterBus

Today we met up with our home(pre)school group for a boat ride in the marina. We docked at Fisherman's Village and ate sack lunches (or, in our case, ice cream cones), and then rode back to Mother's Beach where we had parked.

Walking along the shore with Daddy

Sew Much Fun

My three-year-old using straight pins

Last week, we went to a store where customers can design their own clothes. They have dress forms, baskets of scrap fabric, and a seemingly limitless supply of straight pins for little girls to play coutourier. My daughter spent an hour - AN HOUR! - pinning fabric to a form while I sat back at watched her practice her fine motor skills.

The dress she got to take home was slightly less avant garde.

The dress we were able to buy. (This is before it was sewn.)

First she picked a "base" - a green dress. Then I told her she could pick 5 items to go on it. She chose a jewel, three patches, and a sequined ribbon. The store employee arranged the items - with my three-year-old's approval. (My daughter insisted the yellow ladybug go in the middle of the dress.)

This fun experience could be replicated as a home birthday party. All it would take is a sewing machine, inexpensive t-shirts, and various accoutrements.

Out-of-Door Life: Beach Balance

Happy 75th Birthday Ito!

At her Ito's (short for abuelito) cowboy-themed party in Central California

Out-of-Door Life: In Her Grandparents' Backyard

Helping Grandma Susan pick grapes

Your Child is an Artist #7

In Chapter 15 ("Let Him Do it His Way"), Zaidenberg writes that the three ingredients for creative growth are:

1)IMAGINATION

2)COURAGE

3)VISION

"If a child insists on making a horse green, let him; your function as a teacher would be solely to show him that green may be made with yellow and blue pigment" (93).

I love this quote. Reading it makes me teary-eyed. Before I began teaching full-time, I worked as a substitute teacher. (That was over a decade ago!) One of my assignments was in a preschool classroom, and the lesson plan called for me to sit at a kidney shaped table during centers-rotation and supervise four-year-olds paint pumpkins orange and cats black. (It was October.) I hated having to tell little ones who wanted to paint their cats orange that they couldn't. (There ARE orange cats! Chagall painted a cat GREEN!) But I was a rule-follower and I made sure all of those four-year-olds painted their cats black.

I can add this example to the list of reasons why I'm happy to be homeschooling. This lesson taught nothing of value. I'm sure the purpose was to teach colors, but these children already knew the names of the colors, and even if they didn't, they would have learned them eventually. 

"Encourage fearless exploration. Teach him to see cause and effect but let him find the Q.E.D.* himself and it will not necessarily be the same solution as yours. Do not force your mental heirlooms on him. Let him do it his way" (93).

I'll let her do it her way.

*Q.E.D.: an abbreviation for the Latin quod erat demonstrandum which means "which was to be demonstrated." Synonym for solution.