Our Family Blog – Mike, Louanne, Nadia, Amelie, & Dani
They “stitched” a circuit to make the light work.
Nadia wanted to go to Engineers Week at the museum so we planned to go in after picking up Dani from museum school. It was a really cool set up and they had people there from IBM, Mouser and Lockheed Martin the day that we went. There were a lot of activities for the big girls to do and not much specifically hands on for someone Dani’s age, but she still had a lot of fun.
The girls had to have a photo right here 🙂
Ever since we did a unit study on horses Nadia has wanted to see an Arabian horse “in real life.” We have a friend who has some and we finally worked out a day where the weather and our schedules cooperated. It as a wonderful time to see the Traci’s beautiful horses. She has a 10 year old, a 3 year old and a 1 year old colt. They are all beautiful!
Asami in her casual Kimono with the girls.
This year we started a geography curriculum called “Expedition Earth” and it’s been a lot of fun. I plan on doing blog posts for each continent, but our study of Japan featured special guests so I wanted it to be a separate post. We have friends named Danielle and Mattias who were missionaries in Japan that moved here in September. Danielle found our blog online while in Japan and started communicating with us because of adoption. It’s really neat and I asked her if she could come and present to us about Japan during our study. She has connected with the Japanese community here in town and she asked if she could bring a Japanese friend over too. I said YES! Her friends name is Asami and she brought over her casual kimono and Japanese money. Danielle brought origami paper and Japanese snacks. After they taught us a lot about Japan we had a nice Italian lunch because that is what I was in charge of 😉
Origami
Learning to write numbers and our names in Japanese
Some of the snacks Danielle brought to share
Asami told us all kinds of interesting things about Japan. The girls thought this was so funny – you are supposed to slurp your noodles, especially if you are a guest so you don’t insult the hosts cooking. She explained the difference between casual and fancy kimonos and why they are worn. She told us about how hard it is to tie the bows correctly and how uncomfortable the wooden clogs are (she brought a pair to show us). She told us about all the hours that children go to school there plus the extra curricular activities and that by the time you are in high school, you are not getting a lot of sleep each night. She ended by doing a lot of Origami with the girls which Nadia was so excited over because she likes to look up origami ideas on the web. It was such a treat for our Japan study to have Asami and Danielle come to our home.
*If you are interested in the curriculum we are using for this study, please check out Confessions of a Homeschoooler.
At the beginning of February we finally worked it out to go to the Perot Museum using our Fort Worth Science and History Museum reciprocal membership. The place is so huge that we only made it through 2.5 floors, but we will definitely return soon.
We spent a lot of time in the area about space and the stars.
This was a cute little thing where the kids had to go to 6 different station to create their bird and then at the end they went to this screen to see the bird. Nadia loved it!
After we had been at the Perot about an hour my friend Maureen and her son Quinn met us for the rest of the visit. It was great fun!