Field Trips and Worksheets

Erin is home for the week.  It is weird when big kids come home... because I forget they are usually not here, or that they are leaving again soon, and it is just normal to have her here.  In fact, I nearly made the mistake of insisting that the rest of the kids keep up with school each day before I came to my senses and realized that their big sister is only here for one week!  And they should be sure to catch up on all the movie watching and game playing and trampoline jumping with her that they have missed out on in the past few months and which they will be unable to do for another several months once she heads out of here again this weekend. Besides...she sleeps till noon, they can get a bit of school in then.

We did take Erin with us on our scheduled 'field trip' this week.  My kids think 'field trip' is a funny word that I use for no clear reason by the way.  I mean, to them, going to a museum or a zoo or the library or a swimming pool or the mountains in the middle of the day in the middle of what the rest of the world considers a 'school year,' is not at all weird and is, in fact, preferable to going to said places when everyone else is out of school and free to do so also.  But I still can't get past that word that really meant "woo-hoo, we aren't really having school at all today!"  There is one major difference between our field trips and the ones I occasionally (ok, rarely, like once a year if I was lucky) went on as a school kid.... worksheets.  You know how the teacher would try to console themselves that this zoo trip was actually educational by making sure you had a highly thought provoking, fill-in-the-blank, worksheet with you as you trotted through the zoo? Making what should have been wicked fun (and probably way more educational, let's face it) into a chore on which you would actually be graded?!  Yeah.  No worksheets here.  I am pretty proud of the fact that I have never once asked my kids to fill in a worksheet at the zoo.  They do bring sketch books.  At the museum in Denver they bring clues to where all the gnomes are hidden in the displays.  But no worksheets. None.

Anyway, we have made a point of visiting various local museums over the past few months.  Mostly of the free variety.  We have seen the Colorado Springs Fine Arts center and the Pioneer Museum and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science (ok...not free....and the art one was on a free DAY, not always free either) and this last one was the Fire Museum.  Which was little and cute (and free) and best of all had old fire trucks in it...including one we could climb on!  How cool is that.  And, unlike our other recent museum trips... I actually brought a camera and so this happened (oh....and we weren't alone, we had homeschooling friends along with us, so if kids who you don't recognize as mine pop up in the occasional picture...yeah, not mine):

After, we drove over to see the Fallen Firefighters memorial which led to all the memorials to pretty much everything in the park which led to discussions of 9-11, POWs in Vietnam, and the Timber Wolves in World War II (never heard of them before, but there was a memorial there).  See, who needs worksheets?