A Trip to the Museum

So if you look at my blog you may wonder if I am even still homeschooling.  Yes, yes I am and it is going well.  Alex is a self-teacher.  He just likes to go and get it done on his own.  Every once in a while I have to review some things with him and then we discuss things.  We are currently struggling with word problems.  I can't blame him, I can remember my own mom ready to pull out her hair because I could never understand them either.  Mixing English and Math is just wrong.

Anyway, I think I have mentioned before that as a family we love museums.  It is funny to people when we tell them we are going to the museum with all of our kids in tow, but really they want to go.  Well, for my husband's birthday he decided to take a day off of work and he wanted to go to the Houston Museum of Natural Science.  I had been DYING to go since I heard that they had gotten some new dinosaur fossils.  We loaded the kids into the car and off we went for the day.  We had planned on just doing the main exhibit hall and the planetarium.  I had told Alex that he didn't have any school work to do that day other than to write in his field guide.

I bought a notebook for Alex that is just for trips to museums and the zoo.  The pages are blank on top and lines to write on half of the page.  He was so excited to get it started.  It is all his, I don't tell him what to write, but I do help him with spelling.  The rule was that he had to take a picture of what he was writing about, title the page, and write at least three facts about that thing.  He was told that he had to make at least 5 entries.  At the end of the day he had ten!

We walked into the main hall and stopped at the first thing you see...a towering Diplodocus.  That dinosaur has been there forever!  I can remember seeing it as a very small child.  Alex immediately started writing down information when a museum employee waled up to us and asked if we had seen the new exhibit.  Of course we hadn't, so he led us to the WAY back of the hall, somewhere I didn't even know existed (hence it being NEW).  AWESOMENESS!  There are no other words to explain this exhibit.  It i set up chronologically and goes all the way up to modern man and mammals   We literally spent hours here!  We took a break for our planetarium show and lunch and then we went right back to where we left off.  I learned so much!  Oh, the kids learned a lot too.  When we were close to the end of the exhibit we were greeted by a paleontologist who answered EVERY question Alex threw his way and even Eric's silly questions too.  He was so patient with us.  I even had a question and he knew exactly what I was asking and he explained it in terms we could understand.  He did tell us that they offer group tours during the week for $30 for a group, or individualized tours...I forgot how much those were.  I really want to go back soon with some friends we homeschool with.  I know I could go endless times and not see everything.

Well, before we knew it, we were out of time and it was time to go home.  We didn't even see anything else in the museum!  We will be going back soon.  Alex and Eric still talk about it and ask when we are going back.  Alex learned a whole lot from the things he saw.  Since Alex likes to teach himself and take his learning into his own hands, I really tried to take a step back and let him make deductions and hypothesis on his own.  Towards the end we saw how the mammals changed and evolved into animals we see today.  We talked about the natural changing, adaptation and evolution of animals.  We also talked about what scientists believe were early man and how they looked different from us today.  He is a bright boy with a good head on his shoulders.  He had some amazing questions and when the answer was "I am not sure" to his questions, he nodded and said that we are still missing pieces to the puzzle.  He is 100% right and I couldn't have said it any better.  I am so grateful for children who want to learn and understand.  They aren't little geniuses and they are still 100% boy, but at the same time they appreciate knowledge and understand that without knowledge, there is nothing.

Eric liked this guy

This picture cracks me up!

Coprolites  Click the link and educate yourself.  The boys LOVED this

I love sloths... especially a GIANT one!

my boys