Homeschool Tuesday

I have a homeschooling blog that I did a pretty good job of updating for a pretty long time. But last year, what with all the house selling and moving and all that, things kind of fell apart. We're also kind of at the point in our homeschooling where we've been doing it for awhile, and we're pretty happy with all the stuff we're using/doing, and writing a weekly report like I used to do started to get pretty....boring. So I'm going to try some blog consolidation. I'm aiming for one homeschool/kid activity post a week. I'm calling it Homeschool Tuesday because today is Tuesday, but I may well move the day. Or give up on having a specific day and just do it whenever. This way, I don't feel like I need to write repetitive weekly reports AND I don't have to come up with a new header for the old blog (we changed names when we moved, from Dogwood Forest Creek School to Boxy Colonial Academy, so I needed to update the name of the old blog. But see how well the school name fits in with the existing blog name here? Exciting!)

Here we go!

Last weekend we decided to make a point NOT to spend the whole weekend on regular activities and house stuff. We still did plenty of that stuff, too, but before our Saturday Ikea trip we went to the Chattahoochee Nature Center for Creepy Critter Day. My sister-in-law, Rebecca, works at the nature center and she and my brother gave us a membership for Christmas last year. But, umm, we didn't get around to activating it until Saturday (moving! selling house! so busy!) But we love the nature center, and now we live much closer to it, so we will definitely be trying very hard to get over there more regularly.

They have a  nature exchange there that we've been hoarding stuff for for a long time. So we started off there. Gus showed off the giant pinecone he found in California last spring and some sand from Cape Cod (uhh, two summers ago). He used some of his points to get a piece of quartz and Milo used the points he had from a long time ago to get a piece of obsidian (which is awesome, I understand, because of Minecraft. Somehow or another).

Then we went to see the main event of Creepy Critter Day....the bat presentation! The bat lady sure could talk for a long time about bats. She warned us at the beginning about how much she loved bats and how long she could talk about them. My kids mostly enjoyed it (there were slides!), but I felt kind of bad for the people who had toddlers and preschoolers in there.

The payoff for listening to all the talk about microbats and megabats and which bats live in Georgia and all that came at the end, when the bat lady brought out:

Isn't he cute? For a bat? He's an Egyptian fruit bat, if I remember right. Gus was excited about the bat's cuteness:

After learning about bats, we went outside and started to listen to another presentation, this one about snakes. But the kids were a little restless after bat hour, so we decided to go for a short hike on the boardwalk by the river instead.

Then we went to Ikea. But we'll be back soon. We're hoping to go to Halloween Hikes there. And Gus is thinking of having his birthday party there this year. And they have homeschool days one Monday a month....we haven't been able to get there yet this year because we had classes, but we've rearranged things now, so we might be able to make it next time!