We spent four out of five days last week out of the house. Monday we headed off, with our friends Mary and Alisha, to the Museum of Natural History at Roger Williams Park for Homeschool Adventures: Archaeology. It was a dismal day, and when we arrived, it didn't look very promising. The front door was locked as we were a few minutes early and there were very few cars in the parking lot. We waited, sheltered from the rain, under a doorway, until 10am and still the doors didn't open! Thinking that we were at the wrong door, I called the phone number listed for the museum and lo! the doors opened. The museum appears small and we couldn't imagine how we were going to fill four hours. We had signed up for the Planetarium show at 1pm and a dig at 12noon - what were we going to do until then as there appeared to be no other activities available? I had envisioned stations for the students to explore archaeology concepts but that didn't appear to be the case. The docent directed us to a table in the corner that held a variety of pamphlets. I picked up two scavenger hunt sheets - All Things Connected, Native American Creations and Pacific Explorers and off we headed to the galleries. Sophia and Alisha really enjoyed working together on the scavenger hunt sheets as they read the display cards on the exhibits and hunted for the answers. It was amazing how much more we stopped and actually learned from the cards, rather than just walking through the museum and giving a cursory glance at the exhibits. Time flew by, as we completed the Native American sheet and headed upstairs to the Pacific Explorers gallery. Sophia was able to show Alisha her birthplace, Saipan, on the large map of Oceania, and the variety of wood and shell artifacts was really amazing. We were headed in the direction of the Orchards in the Ocean State gallery when we stopped to listen to a presentation on some of the artifacts held by the museum. The girls actually were able to touch the some of the artifacts which I thought was amazing and there were some very fine shabtis and scarabs. All that watching of The Mummy has, in fact, been educational! While we were listening to the presentation, the museum educator came up to us and said that the Planetarium show was being moved up since there were so few homeschoolers present. So, we headed off to the Planetarium show which ended up like so many others - give us a warm, dark room with reclining seats after we'd been walking around for a while and what do you get - naptime! It was really hard to keep my eyes open and Mary didn't even try - we woke her up when it was time to go! The girls proceeded downstairs for their dig which involved carefully searching through tubs of sand to find buried artifacts, putting the pieces together, and then figuring out which was the earliest artifact by a means know as stratification - in other words, what came where in the layers. One of the pieces was a picture of the Rosetta Stone. Another set of tubs yielded clues about a particular civilization - had they had tools and did they hunt, etc? I could recognize details from our readings from The Story of the World, Volume I in Sophia's answers. After the dig, we decided to leave and eat our lunch on the way home. We would leave Orchards in the Ocean State and the remaining gallery for our next visit which will focus on fossils. I'm not sure we're going to do the whole six sessions in the series, unless there are some changes to the galleries, but we enjoyed the first session and look forward to the next one.
Tuesday saw us at the co-op and then off to ice skating. This session of the co-op is winding down - Rainbow Science has been very interesting and a great learning experience as it is done in a group setting. I've certainly learned more about science than I would have otherwise. I led another session of the Home Economics class and we made Christmas ornaments - round, gold balls painted with a variety of themes based on the girls' interests. Sophia's, of course, was covered with dog paws and bones! It was freezing at the rink as usual although Sophia and Alisha didn't complain and the moms keep busy chatting about homeschool curriculum and Christmas.
Wednesday was another session of Zoo School at Franklin Park Zoo. This month's session focused on primates and the students made an enrichment item (from cardboard boxes) that they took to the Tropical Forest where the zookeeper placed them in the tamarinds cage. It was cute to see the little creatures cautiously approach the boxes and then explore them once they found that there was food inside. There was quite a bit of snow on the ground so we were glad to be inside the warmth of the Tropical Forest.
On Thursday, we headed to Providence for the State Ballet of Rhode Island's presentation of Coppelia. We had not seen this ballet before and we thoroughly enjoyed it. The morning was made all the more interesting by the fact that it was the company's final dress rehearsal and the whole presentation was a teaching ballet within a ballet type of experience. Herci Marsden, the Artistic Director and Co-Founder of the State Ballet of Rhode Island, appeared before each act to give us an idea of what we would see and all set changes were made with the curtain raised so the students (and parents) could see what is involved in staging a production. She also enlisted the help of the dancers to demonstrate a variety of ballet positions and moves and explained that the language of the ballet is French. The State Ballet of Rhode Island is the state's first classical ballet company in residence.
Thursday evening found us at the Rhode Island Christian Home Educators (RICHES) monthly meeting and holiday cookie exchange. There was a great turnout and lots of cookies and we enjoyed a (late!) evening of fellowship. Needless to say, we slept in on Friday and we busy doing chores as we got ready for Vic's return from Florida that evening.
So, here we are with another week ahead of us. There is the usual sprinkling of events - sewing on Monday, co-op and skating on Tuesday, and planning meeting for the next session of the co-op on Thursday evening. We are getting back on track with our Christmas Unit Study and looking forward to our trip to Boston this weekend to see "White Christmas" at the Wang Theatre.
Pamela
