Field Trip: Marine Life Center

We took a second beachy field trip a couple weeks ago--this time to the nearby Marine Life Center. My little sister came along, too.

Imagine the smallest aquarium ever--just one room. Where the biggest specimen is a small octopus. That's the Marine Life Center.


It's right on the water. Lucky for us, it was a gorgeous day.


This is looking down into part of the big tank in the middle of the room. There are three smaller tanks around the sides, and an even smaller touch tank.


That...is an octopus. Octopuses gross me out. I didn't tell Little Boy that, though. No need to taint his relationship with mushy sea creatures.


A rainbow trout. I had no idea rainbow trout lived in saltwater.


That's a flounder. Doesn't look much like Flounder in The Little Mermaid, does it? Just sayin'.


Lots of sea anemones. These ones weren't for touching.


This guy was probably six inches across. He stood there and watched us for several minutes.


My sister holding a hermit crab in the touch tank. The touch tank has starfish, hermit crabs, sea cucumber-y things (I'm not exactly sure what they were), and anemones--you can touch them all, as long as you keep them underwater.


And check that out--Little Boy actually stuck his hand in the freezing-cold water to touch a starfish. He wouldn't touch the underside of it, though--that was "too scary."

It's Easy to Know What to Teach

"It's easy to know what to teach. The scriptures and our prophets are clear about what to teach our children. Nephi summarizes it in this verse, 'And we talk of Christ, we rejoice in Christ, we preach of Christ, we prophesy of Christ . . . that our children may know to what source they may look for a remission of their sins' (2 Nephi 25:26)."

-Margaret S. Lifferth

Scripture Reading Challenge

Our family kinda stinks at regular scripture-reading. So when I saw the Summer Scripture Reading Challenge on Scriptures4Kids.com, AND that they had a reading chart for little kids, I thought it might work for us.

It did.


[I apologize for the lame photo.]

See? We put a little sticker on the chart for each day that we read scriptures together. When we filled up the chart, we had a little family outing to Dairy Queen--which was an excellent reward, since Little Boy will finally eat ice cream.

And then we printed out a new chart and started over.

We still don't manage to read scriptures together every day, but we usually read a few times a week. And that's a lot more often than before.



[Cross-posted at Teach Me to Walk.]

Protect Our Children from Wordly Influences

"While circumstances do vary and the ideal isn’t always possible, I believe it is by divine design that the role of motherhood emphasizes the nurturing and teaching of the next generation...Teaching the gospel of Jesus Christ in the home adds another layer of insulation to protect our children from worldly influences."
-L. Tom Perry

Easy Project

The other day I thought to myself, "Self, we don't do enough art projects around here."

So I busted out some paper, glue, and cotton balls.


And we made a fuzzy bunny.

The bunny didn't have anything to do with anything else that we're doing for preschool right now. But it was fun.

Mixing Colors

We worked on colors a little bit last week. Little Boy knows the names of the colors already, so we went a little bit beyond that and learned about mixing colors.



I have some food coloring in little jars that my mom gave me awhile ago--the ghostly white things floating in the bowl up there are toothpicks that we used to scoop the color out of the jars. We put red, yellow, and blue in bowls of water, and then mixed colors in the cups.

I'm not sure Little Boy really "gets" it yet. He doesn't remember now which primary colors to mix to get each secondary color. But at least he understands that colors can be mixed to make new colors.

Field Trip: The Beach

I have a lot of pictures here, so I'm not going to type much. We'd been learning about the beach, so we took a trip to the nearest one (it's more of a seashore than a beach, I think--you'll see in the pictures).


My baby sister drove--she needs a lot of practice hours before she can get her license.


Little Boy hadn't been to the beach (seashore?) in at least a year.


We had this part of the beach to ourselves. Rocky, huh?


My brother tagged along, too.


Little Boy found a tiny shell--you can't tell in the photo, but the shell is fingernail-sized.


I wouldn't recommend swimming in this water (although some people do). We wear rain boots instead.


We saw barnacles, little crabs, seaweed, gulls, and seashells--all things we'd learned about at home. And Little Boy thought that was kinda cool. But really, all a three-year-old boy wants to do at the beach is throw rocks in the water.

{cross-posted at Teach Me To Walk}

Butterfly Math

Little Boy loves math. He likes other subjects, but math is his #1. So I try to work in some extra math activities once in awhile.

I printed out this butterfly number matching game from Along the Way. I liked what she did with it, and I had Little Boy do something similar.


I hung these butterflies from the counter on one side of the room. Little Boy had to "catch" a butterfly with a little net and count the spots on the butterfly.


Then he had to run to the other side of the room and match the butterflies with the right flower. [I've been trying to find ways to add more movement to some of our activities--using up Little Boy energy is always a good thing.]

And what did he think of it?


I think he liked it. That's a happy little man.

Field Trip: Old Settler's Picnic

Our little town has a carnival-type shindig on the last weekend of July every year. They call it "Old Settler's," and they let you tour some little log cabins for free, but really? It's mostly a carnival.

And since I'm trying to get our little family out of the house more on little field trips, Little Boy and I went.

But we didn't go on any rides--I'm kinda scared of traveling-carnival-type rides. And I'm cheap. But we DID visit the petting zoo.

And I didn't take any pictures.

But I promise, it was very cute.

I DID take a picture of this, though:

{I was too lazy to edit this photo. Sorry.}

Little Boy loves cars, trains, buses, trucks...and tractors. Definitely tractors. So he was pretty tickled to sit up on a big green tractor all by himself.

So I'm gonna call this a 'field trip.' Because we learned how to pet farm animals...and how to sit on tractors.

Yeah, that's it.

Do Our Children Know What We Know?

{image source}
"For youth, there is no substitute for seeing the gospel lived in our daily lives. The stripling warriors did not have to wonder what their parents believed. They said, 'We do not doubt our mothers knew it' (see Alma 56:47–48). Do our children know what we know?"
-Robert D. Hales