Weekly Report... Fireworks & Sea Stars...

This week, we had all the fun of fireworks, and a field trip to the Bodega Marine Lab! The field trip, led by a docent, lasted about 2 hours. We learned about the geology and history of the area (straddling a fault line, thank goodness they never put that nuclear power plant in!); looked at fish and sea stars; took a tour of the "wet lab"; saw an eel fish; learned a bit about ecology; and more!

 We brought our visiting Flat Stanleys with us! They are visiting us from North Carolina, and ours just headed out to Virginia!

 Starfish/sea stars are always a huge hit with my kids!

A skeleton from a local porpoise - I didn't even know we had these around here!

A whale "hand" (i.e. flipper)

We might get a "field trip follow-up" too, where the docent comes to your facility with projects on hand! This field trip really got my kids thinking too about the environment and recycling. I think we may follow up on this by doing a creek clean-up day, and maybe the annual coastal clean-up day, learn more about recycling and what happens to plastics that enter the watershed, etc.

We read as usual, I worked on a possible Afternoon Basket book list for the fall, they played outside, went swimming, and relaxed! I am really enjoying having the whole family home for a little while. M is healing, but there is, quite understandably, a lot of pain--some days are better, some are worse. Today I'll happily be making zucchini bread, now that our zucchini seem to be coming in full force!

Next week, I'd like to add a little more structure back into our days. There do seem to be an awful lot of late nights lately, which lead to late morning starts, and somehow the whole day is gone before we get much done! I have three academic-related goals for next week: two of them have to do with preparing for the local Civil War Days next weekend (although being in California, I really don't think there were any "local" war happenings), and one to do with Cassia...
1. Watch the next episode of America; The Story of Us (the Civil War episode)
2. Start reading "Turn Homeward, Hannalee" (Patricia Beatty is one of my favorite historical fiction/children's authors ever!)
3. Sit down with Cassia for reading work!

It has been a good week, though it went by far too quickly! Hope yours was good too, and don't forget to head over to Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers for more weekly wrap-ups (see sidebar link!)!!