mercyGirl is on a local swim team
and loving it.
she’s naturally competitive
and enjoys pushing herself to do better.
she recently had her first mini-swim meet.
whew! why didn’t anyone tell me how long those meets are.
still, i was proud to see my little-bit to do her thing.
watch her go!
just when i thought we’d have to skip this year’s program
because there was nothing new for my girls,
the National Building Museum added more exciting and relevant topics
to their children’s programs this past January.
radianceGirl became a cartographer for a couple hours
while mercyGirl and signGirl built a green roof.
as with all workshops at the NBM that my girls have been to,
they didn’t just talk about stuff;
they designed/built stuff too.
isn’t that what architecture is all about?
the overlay of this map shares her vision of her neighborhood done her way.
just add soil to these homes for a sustainable green roof.
found some good reads in the building zone
while the big girls were doing their workshops,
prayerGirl was really diggin’ the Building Zone.
girls can dig, too
the ultimate sandbox for a rainy, cold winter day
the next NBM Homeschool Day is in March.
at $10 a session, some programs are already sold out.
see you there?
it was all about optics last december during homeschoool day at the Navy Museum.
they explored lasers, prisms, reflection, the concepts of convex and concave,
learning all about light waves, colors and how light behaves.
these razzle dazzle stripes are used by zebra and ships in the US navy to confuse attackers.
cool color-mixing glasses
examining objects under a magnifier
periscope play
kaleidoscopic mirror fun
we’d already seen 1001 inventions twice,
but the national geographic museum kept us coming back with
its free, hands-on workshop with Ideaventions
exploring modern applications of historic innovations.
the girls used digital microscopes,
programmed musically-inclined LEGO robotics kits to play the drums,
and used the engineering cycle to design, build, and test structures
on an earthquake table.
watch signGirl have her structure tested on the earthquake table:
last January at Homeschool at the Navy Museum
the girls explored Sound Science:
the nature of sound waves and how it travels through air, water and solids.
she made sand vibrate on the foil with a tuning fork and mallet.
inner vibrations (like stevie wonder)
classic sound science: telephone! (a little photoshop helps you actually see the string)
girl-made two-string guitar
guess what you’ll hear when you put a bean, coin, ball, or (my favorite) metal nut…
…inside an inflated balloon and whirl it around.
i’m not gonna tell. you’ll have to try it yourself.
a member of a homeschool group email list
recommended the free curriculum at Nutrition for Healthy Kids.
it’s opened up my children’s eyes to contemporary food issues.
we’ve just about completed unit 1
which covers organic foods, genetically modified foods,
and artificial sweeteners like splenda, aspartame and high fructose corn syrup.
my girls have started looking for the UDSA organic seal themselves
as well as scrutinizing the ingredients of foods they like
for harmful artificial sweeteners
along with the non-halal stuff they already look for.
in lesson 1 we did a taste test between organic and conventional apples.
wow! the difference was so clear.
can you tell by looking which apple is organic?
the winter drop-in programs at the National Gallery of Art
are starting again.
Stories in Art, for ages 4-7, includes spending time looking at one artwork in the collection,
reading a related story,
and then making their own artwork.
in Artful Conversations children ages 8 – 11 and their families spend a whole hour
exploring a single work of art with a museum educator as their guide.
they say that most people spend less than 10 seconds
looking at a single piece of artwork.
these educators are skilled at guiding our eyes to what we may not normally notice
in our average gallery stroll.
after we’ve finished with a program,
i always feel like we’ve made a new friend
we attended Artful Conversations this past weekend
and spent time with French painter Francis Picabia’s The Procession, Seville.
when we met The Procession it was a pyramidal jumble of geometric shapes.
when we left, we knew where Picabia got his inspiration,
had a more clear idea what the painting was about,
why he painted it in the style that he did,
and we did a little sketching of our own.
i love the format of these mini-workshops.
as a homeschooling mom,
i enjoy learning alongside my children
and watching them interact with other educators in our world.
we’ve been attending either Stories in Art or Artful Conversations
for about three years, i think.
our attendance is a testimony unto itself.
here’s where i need your help:
looking at the winter schedule i notice that there are less workshops each day
and less days of workshops.
they used to have at least one weekday of workshops
and they used to have an additional workshop at 2:30pm.
like many other kids,
my kids have Saturday-morning activities,
so that the 2:30pm session that they used to have worked perfectly for us.
as a matter of fact, we would usually get to the sign-up table at 2:29PM.
it was also great to have the less crowded weekday option
available for those of us that don’t attend school.
would you join me in contacting the museum at (202) 789-3030 or family@nga.gov
to politely request that they offer these insightful family programs
once during the week
and/or a little later in the early weekend-afternoons?
thank you in advance,
and we’ll see you there.
