Hello? Who's There?

Today, we spent some time learning how to properly answer the phone and respond to a caller's inquiries. I used my cell phone to call the home phone and the boys took turns "answering" the phone. Here's how it was supposed to go:

Boy: Hello?
Me: Hi, is your mom there?
Boy: May I ask who is calling please?
Me: Jim Jenkins
Boy: Just one moment please. (tell me who is on the phone and ask if I can speak)
She is not available at the moment, may I have her call you back?
Me: Yes, please have her call me at: 800.888.8888
Boy: (wait to hang up until the other person has hung up the phone)

Then, we switched it up some to try to throw them off. Here's what I got after a few rounds:

Nicholas: Hello?
Me: Hi, who am I speaking with?
Nicholas: (giggle and look of mischief) Abe Lincoln

Nice.

National Building Museum

Field Trip Week included a trip to the National Building Museum. We spent a couple of hours in the construction room, where there were a variety of building materials for the kids to use. Unfortunately, the Cherry Blossom 10K expo was set up in their main area, so many of the usual hands-on exhibits for older kids were not available. We look forward to returning soon. Here are some photos of the busy builders:

GRACE (Greater Reston Arts Center)

One of the places we've been eagerly waiting to visit this year is the GRACE center. They moved it to Reston Town Center into a beautiful, loft-like space with a lot of light. We saw an exhibit by local high school kids on "Roots." After looking at their work, Evan and Nicholas each had an "art bucket," full of supplies to create their own art inspired by the exhibit. While they worked diligently at their art, I chased the girl all over the museum. She made her mark on the "Collaberative Art" wall.

Evan's finished work








Nicholas' finished work






Sarah

Naturalist Museum

We are having a sort of "catch up/field trip" week this week. We have some work to finish from previous weeks, some areas of study we wanted to explore more fully, and many field trip locations in the area to explore. So, we took a week to accomplish some of those things. Yesterday, we spent some time at the Smithsonian Naturalist Museum. This is one of the best educational museums I've been to anywhere and it's 15 minutes from our house, in Leesburg! While here, we looked at a full-size grizzly bear skin (see photos), classified spiders and insects, learned about microscopic insects which live on animals (rabies, scabies, fleas, oh my), searched for arthropod homes amongst a huge pile of shells, and learned about quartz and jasper. That was in an hour and a half. Whew.

Beans, Beans, The Magical Fruit

We have just started a unit on plants. To get us started, we grew bean seeds in the windowsill inside of wet paper towels in baggies. The boys made observations each day for ten days. Here's what we saw:

We were able to grow it from a simple seed to a plant with roots, stem, and leaves.













Part two of this project is planting the seeds in soil. We'll keep you posted.

Aquiary

Yesterday, we went here to the Loudoun County Aquiary. Follow the link to learn more. We learned a lot about how our water sanitation facility works, how much water people use, what kinds of household chemicals should not go down our drains, and how valuable water is around the world. Here are some pictures from our adventure:

Here, the boys are guessing how much water it takes to do everyday tasks such as flushing a toilet, taking a shower, watering your yard. Once they guessed, they were able to press a button in the sink and the correct amount of gallons would light up on the shower door. Very cool.





At this exhibit, the boys learned how
valuable it is to have a clean water source and readily available water. They are trying to lift these buckets filled with water, which are commonly carried for miles by children all around the world. As you can see, they found it quite difficult and were thankful for faucets in their house to get clean, fresh water.

Where Have You Been?

Wow. It's been a long time since our last post. If you are still reading this, thanks for standing by. Here's what we have been up to the last couple of months:

Evan's hypothesizing Nicholas' hypotheses'
Light! We learned about light, including what makes something transparent, translucent, or opaque. We performed a light experiment with various objects. Both boys only had one wrong hypotheses. They thought that red paper would be opaque. In fact, we learned it is translucent, as are many different colored construction papers.

D.C. with family! Uncle Pat and Aunt Michelle came to visit. Jon took the day off work, and we enjoyed some first views of cherry blossoms. We also did the monument loop, which we always enjoy, especially when it's 65 and sunny.
Michelle and Pat