Preschool on the Go

I'm gonna tell you a secret about home schooling:

You don't have to actually be at home to do it.

I know, revolutionary! Ha. We do school at home 99% of the time, because...well, we're home a lot. And usually when we're on the go, we skip school for the day.

But once in awhile, if we're going to be in the car and Little Boy will be sitting for a long time, we take a little school with us.

{Note: No, he's not wearing a seatbelt in the photo. We were in a parking lot, waiting for Isaac.}

I love clipboards, by the way. Best school-away-from-home tool ever.

Library Llamas

No, really. There were llamas at our library.

Well, outside our library.



This was the only photo I got that doesn't have millions of random strangers' faces in it. See the baby llama? One of the cutest things I have ever seen.

{Cross-posted at Teach Me to Walk}

Down on the Farm

Social Studies: Memorial Day

If there's one thing that I've learned from all of this homeschooling stuff, it's that I have to teach Little Boy at his level. (Duh, I know. But sometimes I forget.)

So that's why when we went to the local...memorial park, I think? (Is there a difference between that and a cemetery?), and Little Boy was pretty bored by the whole thing:

we ended up talking mostly about flags instead of history.

Which is good, I guess, since I have a feeling that the Fourth of July will go the same way.

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."

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}

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.