Hanging out at the park

While other kids are inside school sitting at desks being told to sit still and be quiet we decided to take our learning outside. We walked the nature trail which leads to a park in our neighborhood. Liam's latest passion is picking flowers which he does in abundance. Noah even got in on the action and picked a flower for identifying later. He was sure it was a bluebonnet but I told him it was too purple, bluebonnets were more blue. And not to be outdone, Maddox just decided to eat a couple of them. While we were on the playscape we found the coolest little spiders and just studied them for quite a while. The first one was fuzzy black with white spots and the other was tiny and looked like it could glow in the dark. The kids were fighting over who got to get closer. My husband would have died. My kids are more like me in that aspect, we love to study insects. I've showed Liam how to turn over big rocks and find all kinds of bugs.

Noah, being the boy that he is, brings a cigarette butt over to me and asks me why it has foam in it. I told him to go wash his hands and then ask me again. I figured that no matter how gross that was it could be turned into a learning experience. So we talked about cigarettes for a while which led to cigars which I HOPE led to Noah NEVER wanting to stick one of those things in his mouth!

While I was sitting with Maddox playing in the wood chips, Noah and Liam ran over to the sand and started playing. Noah made a really cool volcano complete with a little opening for the lava to come out. Which just yesterday he had decided he wanted to google "what is hotter than lava". So maybe he made his own little connection there.

We even got into a talk about how sound travels while Liam and Noah were talking to each other through the talkie tunnel thingie. Yes, that is the technical term. I said, "I wonder how the sound travels from you to Liam". And he told me it was by vibrations and we need to google that, mommy. :) I'm realizing that my goal as a sort of unschooling mommy is to get him to ask the questions and want to find the answers. So I try to think aloud and say a lot of "i wonder whys".

I really wish I would have brought my camera today because a short walk to the park ended up with sooo many learning experiences. But I'm sure there will be lots of next times. :) We could hear the kids at the school playing outside at recess and Liam says "what's that noise?". I said, "those are the kids at school having fun on the playground". And then I thought how sad that their fun is limited to 15 minutes (really 15 minutes of recess the whole day) while we are free outside with the only limit being our stomachs telling us it was lunch time!