{this moment}

{this moment}

a friday ritual: a single moment to savor and share.

inspired by soulemama.com

On The Rocks, Splash of Art, With Friends

{this moment}

a friday ritual: a single moment to savor and share.

inspired by soulemama.com

{these words}

"Be who you are 

and say 

what you feel

because those 

who mind

don't matter 

and those

who matter

don't mind"

- Dr. Seuss

Charlestown!

Prudence the cannon.

Rigging galore.

On Old Ironsides.

That's a big mixer. aboard the U.S.S. Cassin Young

Cool knot on Old Ironsides! This is the oldest commissioned war ship in the world. Neat, huh?

The U.S.S Cassin Young destroyer was the biggest hit with Coleman, though. WWII buff that he is.

Design is everywhere.

There are meanings to all of the flags. We've got a cool book about this.

We spent a good part of Tuesday in Charlestown at the shipyard. The U.S.S. Constitution and the U.S.S. Cassin Young destroyer is located there. There's a fabulous museum! This visit is part of the freedom trail we'd planned to walk. I thought it would be great to start the tour here since it isn't as crowded as in town and the parking is easy. But Coleman was still sick - the whole darn vacation! - so this is both where we began and where we ended the tour. We did get a peak at the Bunker Hill Memorial from the shipyard. Well, we'll just have to do this again this summer, if we make it back to Boston. It was a beautiful, sunny and crisp New England day.

Interesting Stuff About This Stuff:

Marine Flag Meanings we've got the DK book on Ships and Sailing.
For a book club Coleman recently read Johnny Tremain, by Esther Forbes. The book is set in Boston at the start of the American Revolution.
The Constitution of the United States of America by Sam Fink, this is an illustrated book, one illustration for each line. It's lovely, I found it at a thrift store for $3. I'll bet it's at your local library.
Howard Zinn's A Young People's History of The United States: Columbus to the War on Terror

Trash Talk

We started an ongoing discussion about consumer waste a while back, brought on by The Story of Stuff.  One of my kind guides in navigating the new-to-me world of homeschooling gave me a link to another mom's blog which has a unit on plastics. We took some information from that post and watched some videos on the Pacific Garbage Patch that we found through her post. It got me thinking that this entire topic can be expanded on ten fold. That's when my mind began to short circuit. When I see all the magnificent possibilities I have an extremely difficult time compartmentalizing the pieces. Somehow I was able to manage choosing a place to begin,  making plastic in our kitchen. Which was a fun project, though the experiment I found on the web left out a lot of information about the process, for instance how long it takes to dry (a lot longer than I imagined-several days) and what's actually happening chemically. After doing the plastic experiment I found a more detailed Youtube video from Chemistry Corner. The plastic we made will decompose in about 35 to 45 YEARS. I guess it's better than never.

In a week and a half at our first Homeschool Maker's Meet we'll be making paper and paper beads from consumer waste, we've also got a couple projects planned which will use wood pallets. I've got a pallet pintrest board with a bunch of cool projects on it. I'm so excited for these Maker's Meets!

Tweet Tweet

We love birds. A new spark in interest on this subject happened at the feed store in Aptos. I was picking up some chicken feed recently and found a great laminated pocket guide to the birds of Monterey Bay. We've been pouring over this guide for a week or so. There are a lot of different birds around here. So many opportunities for learning here; habitat, behavior, observation and the vocabulary list alone is spectacular. An added bonus is we spend time outside looking for birds, in the backyard, in the forest, at the beach, the park, and any number of slough around here.
When we're outside we try to identify the birds we see. This can be particularly challenging because they move pretty darn fast and we've got a lot of work to do being still enough ourselves. My Audio School has a great series of videos on bird identification. We've just watched the first two so far, they are about ten minutes each and very informative. We're just really getting our feet wet on this subject, I'll let you know where this takes us (if it's interesting).


Some other interesting links for this subject:

All About Birds site; loving their Words About Birds page. Vocab, baby!

Birds, Cetaceans, Odes, Herps and More: natural history information about Monterey County


SIMon Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary


Monterey Bay Birding Festival: Come see 200 species of birds in one of the world's most picturesque areas of California on the Monterey Bay.
Date: September 13, 2012 - September 16, 2012
Time: Thurs. - Sat. 6:30am - 9pm, Sun. 6:30am - 12pm