A Week of Science, Nature, Poetry and Activism.

I had so much to share and theeeeeeennn the power went out.

We’ve just gotten the lights back on after a nasty storm on Tuesday.  A large branch came through our backyard, but luckily no one was hurt and there was no major damage.

So here’s a little catch up:

We kept ourselves pretty busy last week with a couple trips to the river, the park and the Science Museum of Virginia.

Getting the kids more in touch with nature is one of the primary reasons that we’re homeschooling next year; I’ll definitely write about our nature walks in the future but there’s so much to talk about I’ll have to skip over that for now.

The Science Museum of Virginia has a special Science After Dark event on the third Friday of every month. While we used to be members of the Science Museum, we had not been since they opened their newest exhibit, Speed. Speed is all about… well… speed and it takes place under the sprawling fuselage of an SR-71 Blackbird. We had been skipping over the old exhibit in that space on our last visits, so it was pretty exciting to see how they had revamped the space, somehow jamming the jet into the museum as though it were a ship inside a bottle.

 

At the exhibit, we compared rates of plant growth, watched high speed videos in slow motion, played air hockey against a robot, watched the traffic of the city on timelapse (and saw ourselves enter the museum), raced down a track to clock our own speed and even withstood hurricane winds… and we definitely didn’t check out everything.

In addition to Speed, there was a new (to us) play area for younger kids that all the boys loved.

There’s always a ton going on at the Science Museum of Virginia but Science after Dark offered a few additional activities like making marble mazes and floating bubbles.  Langston loved the giant lite brite.

The Science Museum of Virginia has been making some major changes in the past few years and if you haven’t been, it’s definitely worth the trip.

On Sunday we had an opportunity to participate in a really cool event: Haikus for Change. McLean Jesse and Liz Blake White, the two wonderful women behind this project, wanted a creative and unique way of reaching out to our legislators – through haiku.

Participants were encouraged to boil down their thoughts, hopes, and concerns about recent events into just 17 syllables, which would then be copied and mailed off to our local representatives.   Max participated by working with me  to collaboratively write his very first haiku (which he has asked for me not to share, but will be mailed).

 

Thinking about homeschool next year has definitely given me a different perspective on how we’ve spent our days.  While I still find the concept of homeschool mildly terrifying, it has been encouraging  to find that opportunities to learn about the natural world, physics, civics and poetry came so readily in our daily lives.  Not all weeks will be this way of course, but this was a good one and has helped me personally in my effort to change how I think about education.