Northwest Trip Days 4 and 5 - Prineville

Sabbath!  Sabbaths on the road are never as restful and peaceful as at home, but we had a beautiful day nonetheless.

After a sandwich picnic in the park we got to explore the High Desert Museum with all the local family members (memberships are a wonderful thing!).

Ethan getting a chance to drive Grandpa Bigelow's scooter

Katie's turn

Uncle Ray using a watering can to wash off my little dirt magnet

Get her to the cement quick!  He made the mistake of putting
her down where he cleaned her off and she immediately got
muddy again.

Sunday we got to celebrate Grandpa Bigelow's 82nd birthday with a barbecue before heading back home.

The kids really got an in-depth, first-hand look at differences in climate.  They knew we were in a desert, but seemed so confused, since their preconceptions of "desert" meant sand and cacti.  They understand now a little bit better the real, designed reason for sprinklers, and even got a lesson in why it's so important to be careful about fires in a dry area.    

In Indiana we can have a bonfire anytime we want.  Grandpa Currier brings out his propane torch, lights the burn pile, and we have a grand time sitting around with no worries of the fire spreading.

On our drive home Sunday afternoon we saw hazy smoke off in the distance.  By the time we got closer we could tell that there was most definitely a forest fire to the east.  Perfect scenario for an impromptu fire safety talk.

Northwest Trip Day 3 - McKenzie Pass

Third time in a row to wake up in a different place...the kids are doing amazingly well for that, for which I'm extremely grateful.

Once everyone was ready to go we went to meet up with the owner of a small gluten-making business.  They weren't making anything, since it was Friday, but he took us through his process (sorry, no pictures!)  I'm really looking forward to trying some of his "secrets" to get the perfect gluten texture.  There are so many things he does that normal gluten recipes don't include.

Thankfully Ethan fell asleep in the car so he didn't realize how long of a drive it was to get to our next stop.  Two hours later we got to the top of McKenzie Pass.  The lava flows were pretty cool to see!

Lava lookout at the top of the Pass

The Three Sisters

Ethan discovering just how light lava rock is

Katie's little piece of lava rock

You can see how definite the edge of the lava flow is

We stopped for a yummy pizza meal in Sisters.  It's definitely a tourist/resort town, but the perks are some great hole-in-the-wall restaurants.

But the highlight of the kids' day wasn't any of this.  The evening spent playing outdoors in Grandma Bigelow's dirt and front yard sprinkler was just what they needed.

Northwest Vacation Day 2

Let the field trips begin!  I’m really having to focus on being a flexible homeschooler.  I hadn’t planned too much anyways, but no actual “bookwork” has gotten done. 

My dad substitutes at YV Tech (a local vocational high school) and wanted to take us along for their special “Passing of the Key” ceremony for their new facilities.  The kids weren’t overly thrilled about sitting through several speeches, but I think the fruit kabobs, crackers, and ice cream sundaes made up for that part. J

After the formalities were over we got to walk around to all the classrooms/departments as the students gave tours and answered questions. 

Talking to the culinary students

Fire department!

Firefighter knots

Walking the campus with Grandpa Lester

Grandpa Lester's territory - the automotive department

The nursing classroom.  Katie was excited to go in,
but wouldn't let me take a picture of her with the
skeleton unless I took the pink tutu off and she
could wear it!

First year robotics students

The Frisbee thrower

 The highlight came at the very end as we were walking out, when a couple of the fire department students asked the kids if they wanted to sit in the emergency vehicles.

She looks a little too thrilled to be in the
backseat of a trooper car :)

Our second lesson in flexibility was a bigger disappointment to the kiddos.  We planned to go to John Day Dam on our way down to central Oregon to visit the great-grandparents.  Unfortunately we couldn't get very close to it and were on the wrong side of the river to get to the Visitor Center.  My dad did see a barge ready to enter the locks, so he quickly raced the car back up the ridge so that we could at least see it entering and exiting.  You can tell from the picture we weren't very close at all, but we could see it a bit.  The kids played in the dirt while we waited for the water to rise in the lock and then got to watch as the barge exited on the higher side.  Hopefully we'll have more luck in a few weeks when we visit Bonneville Dam.

The barge and locks are on the bottom left part of the river.

Northwest Vacation Day 1

The long-anticipated day has finally come.  The kids were so excited when I woke them up at 4:30 this morning to get ready to go to the airport.  My thought of a nice nap on the airplane was nowhere on their radar.  They were too wired up for that.  Thankfully I had packed plenty of activities and toys to entertain two tired kiddos.  They were pretty happy when I brought out the magnetic travel Tangrams I purchased the night before.  The actual puzzles were way beyond Katie, but she loved making her own designs.  I kept hearing squeals of “Mommy, look what I made!”  The puzzles were a little above Ethan, too, but he enjoyed looking at the answers on the back and copying the designs.  It was a perfect spatial reasoning activity for him.  He made quite a few before he was ready to move on to anything else.

"Mommy, Look what I made!"

Grandpa Lester and Grandma Audrey didn’t meet up with us until the evening, and since the freeway was closed for blasting the mountain we went over Chinook Pass and we got to see Mount Rainier up close.  The kids loved it.  Right up near the summit of the pass we stopped the vehicle so the kids could get out and play in the snow. 

The kids found a little snowman to play with.

Brr!! 

I may be a pretty fully integrated Hoosier, but driving the mountain roads, driving along the mountain rivers, and surrounded by the majestic mountains made me realize this is still home.  I’ll always be a Northwesterner at heart!

Happy 4th

Our first week has been a whirlwind.  My nice, neat lesson plans included lots of patriotic activities like music, Conner Prairie for the reading of the Declaration of Independence, making a flag themed fruit pizza together, July 4 crafts, etc., but moving prep got in the way.

Don't get me wrong.  We still had school, and the kids both learned quite a bit this week, just not the cutesy fun stuff.

We read lots of Independence Day books from the library.

They learned to use a tape measure and give me accurate (ok, so Katie's are a bit ambiguous still) measurements.  Ethan went and measured each bedroom for us so we would know dimensions for carpeting.

They both worked on their handwriting and math textbooks quite a bit.

They both got lots of cutting practice - Katie because it's part of her preschool practice, Ethan because he begged to as well.

They worked hard, helping to clean out all the junk from our new place and scrub everything down.  Katie got some good mopping practice in.  I think I'll have to utilize her newfound skill more often! :)

But we still got in a little bit of Independence Day fun.  Here are a few pictures of our bonfire/sparkler celebration. (factoid moment: did you know the colonists celebrated the first Independence Day with bonfires as well as fireworks?)  Katie is nicely tucked into bed at Grandma's house, and we're about to head out with Ethan for the "real" fireworks show.

Organization

I'm just by nature an organizer.  But along with the organization comes an OCD neat-freak component.  I'm not a fan of torn-out pages or odd-sized pages.  But I also don't care for dog-eared, smudged books that barely make it through the year intact.

So... I tore apart Katie's books!  Ok, not really.  I used a supper-heavy-duty paper cutter and cut the spines off her Kumon books (they don't come with perforated pages) so that I could easily grab the page I want her to work on.  I placed the front cover of each book on its own manila envelope and then stuck the pages inside, so now all I need to do is grab the one she needs to work on for the day.  Nice, neat organization!

This will also come in handy when we need to take our books on the road.  Now I won't have to haul every book along, but can just pull out the worksheets we need.  I may do this to more workbooks!

My next order of business was to figure out how to keep track of each subject as we complete assignments. The State of Indiana requires that I show "comparable education."  Well, not sure how I can prove that one unless I can show my kids' work.

We'll see how it all works out, but for now I have a file folder for each subject where I can stick completed work.  At the end of the year (or unit/project might be better, we'll see) I plan to digitally scan all the pages so I don't end up overrun with paper as the years progress.  Between that and this blog hopefully we'll have enough of a record of our homeschooling that we can satisfy any questions that could ever come our way.  :)

First Day!

The kids have been looking forward to the first day of school for quite a while now - Katie more-so than Ethan, but both have been counting the days.  They were pretty pumped up to find out that today we'd get to go school shopping.  Really, we already had most things on hand, but there were a few items that I either thought would be good to replace or would be nice additions, so out we went.  Of course, everything we came back with was either pink or blue.  Not much deviation from stereotypes in this household!

I promised them both that once supper was done we might be able to do some school even tonight, so even though our school year technically isn't starting till tomorrow (July 1), we started early.

As I was gathering the material,s Ethan was supposed to be doing a few things in his room.  He saw me with a Math book in my hand and got this look of absolute horror on his face.  "Not Math, Mommy!  I already did Math in Kindergarten.  I'm in first grade!!"  I about died laughing!  Once we assured him that a person learns math concepts all through school, not just in Kindergarten and that this was not the same book as he had last year, he got this look of relief on his face.  "Oh," and off he went.

I know the excitement won't last forever.  I'm already having to remind Ethan we take the tedious along with the fun.  But I do hope and pray that we can instill a love for learning and a thirst for knowledge in both their little hearts.  We had a special dedication prayer for each child this evening as they sat at the table for the first time.

"Dear Lord, please bless our home and our efforts to raise children for Your kingdom.  Draw us all closer to You through this journey.  Amen."