Well-we really DID spend the night at the museum!!!
Oh yeah baby-Before we left, William said "This is going to be the best night of my life!"
And it ended up being pretty phenomenal.
We went to the Royal Tyrell Dinosaur museum. It's in the top 5 in the WORLD for best dinosaur museums. But it's 3 and a half hours away. So we listened to Story of the World and more Story of the Word and MORE Story of the World.
They did four experiences for us. 1-Put together a Raptor skeleton while learning about each part. 2-dig up bones and things from man mad "dirt and rock" 3-Making a cast from a REAL mold and talking about fossils and 4-having a flashlight tour of the museum.
Magical.
That night the boys slept next to their best friends (the Blackmores) and I gave them glow sticks, and they were in heaven under the biggest Tyrannosaurus Rex you've ever seen.
The next morning, after a lovely breakfast and a few short movies, they let us have admission to the museum for the day. What a museum!
And close to the museum is the biggest dinosaur sculpture in the world, so of course we had to go up that!
The whole experience went so perfectly with our ancient history year.
Of course, we have moved on from dinosaurs in history. We continued to learn about Egypt. We made Cartouches and we made papyrus. We studied about king Tut and the valley of the kings, but we also talked about Joseph being sold to Egypt and bringing Israel there. I had this awesome book I just bought....but I couldn't find it! Rrughghghh.
And I'm not sure if this counts as history or not, but Hyrum went to an ancient Persia murder mystery party that his Auntie Bear hosted. Check out his costume:
He's supposed to be a merchant, so I think he's trying to sell that mouse. LOL
As for science, one science day, the travelling planetarium came to town! It went to the elementary school, and John made sure we were part of the experience. It was so fun. It was like a bouncy castle without the bouncy part. He showed us constellations and talked about planets.
He also brought a real meteorite, and all my kids insisted on having their picture taken with it.
And as for my science club, I did my most epic class of the year, if not of all time: DRY ICE!
Not only a dry ice party, I Halloween Dress up dry ice party!
I spent all morning running to Lethbridge to get it (the man was super kind. I told him I wanted 20 lbs and he said that would be $70 and I was crest fallen, so he asked what it was for and I said it was for classes to to science experiments with kids, and he gave it to me for $20.) You have to go to a welding supply store in Canada to get dry ice. In the US you can get it everywhere.
I had tons of moms and Dustin helping me, and we did it all: we did huge bubbles and small bubbles and even "boo" bubbles, we did fake liquid nitrogen to freeze gummy worms in 30 seconds, we made a carbonated drink and ice cream, we put out fire, we wiggled coins, we had floating bubbles, we "carved" a pumpkin in an instant, and we blew up balloons (I'm sure I'm forgetting some of the stuff we did.)
But not only did we do all that, we did it TWICE! There were almost 40 kids in total. Crazy
The only thing we didn't do twice was....ummm...a dry ice bomb.
Not sure the neighbours appreciated that.
Don't you love the endermen? Maxwell made that hat, and its eyes glow and can hold speakers for the endermen song to play.
And I realize that I haven't been posting much about the "essentials" Don't worry, we HAVE been doing them. In fact, Maxwell just got a 28 on the practice ACT math test! Proud mumma moment.
Hyrum and Daniel are both doing level "G" in Rightstart even though they are opposite ends of the book. Hyrum just did an awesome lesson where he had to find the hight of things using similar triangles.
In one problem, he has to see the top of the object in a mirror as part of creating the similar triangles, so we found out how tall our house was:
And last but not least, I went to a dyslexia conference in Calgary put on by the Decoding Dyslexia Alberta Chapter. I'm so glad I did. It's good to know that I'm not alone in Alberta, and there are already steps being taken to help those with dyslexia here. They were of the Sally Shaywitz mindset, just like me (i.e. not into vision therapy and or the Gift of Dyslexia guy, but instead independent scientific research only please.)
Although, it really bugged me that they were selling the "Teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons" book. If you're dyslexic, BURN THAT BOOK! but if not, it will work for you great.
No comments:
Post a Comment