Fort Worth Nature Center

I love being in nature. It restores me. I want my children to enjoy nature like I do. So I try to get them out in natural settings as much as possible. It's also good for the wiggles. It also gives us a space for exploration. I think little minds need time to just explore and not be rushed. So many places (museums especially) I see adults rushing children from one thing to the other. Children need time to soak in information. They need to have time to experience something. When I go to a museum with my children I like to let them take their time on the things that interest them. I don't want to rush through so we can see everything in the whole dang place. That defeats the point, to me. Tangent! Ok, so back to nature. I like the slow pace that nature promotes. I like the peace it brings. I think we need more of that in our lives. Also, I think too many people are so cut off from the natural world around them. When we eat meat we don't go hunt the animal, kill it, skin it and cut it up, then cook and eat it. We go buy frozen chicken breasts that have no bones, no skin, no fat. And no one realizes the waste that goes into that product. What happened to the rest of the chicken? No, they don't think about that. Another tangent! Sorry, I'm on one. But this is something I think about. A lot. I think a lot of the problems that we are faced with in our world today come from people not connecting things in their life to the world around them. We don't connect the chicken breasts with the rest of the chicken and wonder what happened to it. We don't connect TV dinners with what they really should be and how they got the way they are. We don't connect the labor it takes to make a truly good product. We just want to buy cheap junk from Wal Mart because we can't really appreciate the true value of a product well made by skilled hands. Why? Because we have no idea what it takes to make things. We have gotten too far away from making things, from producing things for ourselves. So that is another reason to be in nature. To connect ourselves to the world around us.

We spent a day (or about four hours) at the Fort Worth Nature Center. It was wonderful. We visited the visitor center and looked at the animals, and we did some hiking. But my favorite part was right at the end. We found a little trail and followed it to an area where quite a lot of erosion had occurred. There was a cliff of rock and sand. So we talked about erosion. And then we found sandstone and sand. It was really neat because there was sandstone, sand, and almost formed sandstone that was easy to break apart. So we talked about how sandstone is formed. Then we tried to form it out of the sand. We found out we couldn't put enough pressure on it to get it to stick very well together. So that taught (I hope) the kids how hard it would have to be pressed to turn into a stone. Then Lily wondered what pushed it hard enough to actually turn it into stone. So we talked about that. It was a really neat conversation, and it was such a perfect place to talk about those subjects. It really had a chance to click and sink in, I think. Obviously they are young and probably won't remember much, but maybe they will. And maybe it would make it easier for them to understand later on.

What the blarney?!

Alright, so this post isn't really blarney, but it sure is fun to say. And it really isn't about Ireland either. It's about.....Scotland! Or our Scottish night, anyway.

My idea of studying a country is tasting their food and seeing their scenery. So we have had a few international nights (as we call them) in our family. This time we did Scotland, because James just came back from Scotland and brought me a cookbook! The perfect gift for me and for an international night.

We included some other homeschooling friends of ours, the Dukes, and I'm just glad she was as laid back about it all as I am. We talked about each having our kids do projects relating to the country (which we might do better next time, or not), but we didn't do much in that area. Instead we each chose some recipes that seemed to be pretty standard Scottish fare, made them, ate them, and then watched a travel film about Edinburgh. My favorite way to study a country. Although, unfortunately, this time we all got sick the next day (and it was NOT food poisoning), so I may not be able to eat gingerbread for a while.....ugh.

On a happier note, we will be doing one of these international nights once a month, and next month is Australia. I wonder, should order some kangaroo meat?

I forgot to take pictures until it was just about over, but here are the few I got.

Homeschool day at the museum

Can we say overachiever? Maybe. We went to the home school chemistry day at the Fort Worth children's museum today, and most of the activities were meant for children starting in grade 3. Darn. Luckily they did have a few things we could do.

They had some fun experiments including exploding somethings.....I didn't get too close to those, but David and Quincy staid there for longer than any other child and would have staid there watching the caps blow off the little bottle things (nice, I don't know any of the correct terms) for hours. I'm pretty sure they were filling the little viles with dry ice or some other equivalent then capping them off to seal in the gasses. They also had this really neat paper-coloring thing. They took shaving cream, added food coloring, put the shaving cream on the paper in various colors, then scraped it off. It ended up making this neat swirly kind of pattern on the paper. It was really cool, especially because you could just scrape the shaving cream off one paper and then just use it on the next one too. There was a dry ice demonstration which was pretty neat. The presenter had some dry ice in a clear box, then blew some bubbles for the kids. They observed what happened to them first outside the box them she blew some in the box and then they observed what happened there. They floated on top of the carbon dioxide, so they were able to see the effects of the gas even if they couldn't see the gas. Then she made a cloud and explained how a cloud is a liquid because you can't see a gas. I'm still not convinced it is a liquid, because it was only a cloud because of the gas to which the liquid was adhering. I would still say a cloud is neither a gas or a liquid, but some symbiotic relationship between the two. I guess I should study up on that a little more. There was also a little demonstration/explanation on smell. And apparently the reason things smell different is because of the way molecules are shaped. Very interesting.

Here are some--not very good--pictures (I gotta get me a camera).

 

As the kids were doing some of the experiments I thought I would practice being friendly (because sometimes I really do need practice with that). So I asked one of the presenters if she were a student at the university helping with the event. Um....she was a professor. D'oh! She really looked like she could have been twenty. Oh well. But I did learn some fascinating things. She studies....I mean, teaches about (and researches, so that's studying, right?) inorganic matter. Namely, metals. But her focus is metals and how they affect our bodies (once again, I can't think of the correct terminology. I want to say physiology, but I don't think that's the word she used). Metals are essential to life, but there are certain pathways in our bodies that they are supposed to follow. Occasionally (and no one knows why yet) that pathway will break down (from aging, but that's not very specific) and the metals will go to the wrong place. She said they are dong research on those pathway breakdowns and Alzheimer's (which I must have because I had the word until I was supposed to write it and then my brain blanked for a full minute trying to recall it). She also mentioned other terminal diseases but focused mainly on Alzheimer's. It was something I had never even thought of. I knew we needed metals, and I knew too much lead can be corrosive, but even metals in healthy amounts could contribute to some diseases from our bodies slow decay over time (aging) because they go to the wrong places. Fascinating. Or maybe I'm just a nerd.

Bookmaking

Lily is always wanting to make books, so we decided to visit a lady who knows how to really make books. Karen D Hollister (hollisterbooks.com) is a bookmaker fairly near us and was kind enough to let us visit her shop. She showed us some books she has made then showed us how to make our own book. Lily loved it! David and Quincy enjoyed it too, but got tired of it fairly quickly.

 

 

I not only learned about making books, but our visit also reminded me of how many wonderful people there are in this world. Karen is a very kind soul and was so willing to share. Thank you!

 

This first picture is not of our visit, but is our attempt at making books on our own. The one on the left is a book I recovered because it was falling apart. The one on the right is a book we made for Lily. We used fabric to cover them.