First Day of Second Grade: Spelunking at the Moaning Caverns

Although we officially start today, we wanted to begin the school year with a field trip that included David. Yesterday, the whole family drove down to Vallecito, Ca. to go spelunking in the Moaning Caverns. We will be studying earth science for the first 18 weeks so a cavern tour was very fitting.

Highway signs have dotted our region for decades, but this was a first-time experience for all of us. We didn't really know what to expect but were willing to venture below the earth anyway.

Aidyn in the gift shop

Aidyn and me

The entrance to the Moaning Cavern sits inside the gift shop where narrow, steep stairs descend between craggy rocks. Soon enough, spelunkers reach a iron spiral staircase that reaches 165 feet into the cavern.

Aidyn, bravely descending the stairs

Aidyn and David, with Grandma trailing behind

My courageous boy

Aidyn and I, down the spiral staircase

Aidyn, me, and Grandma

Once we reached the bottom, it was astounding how far below the surface we were. There were interesting rock formations with funny names (like the Chocolate Waterfalls).

David snapped this picture while I was in awe of the depth

This is what I saw

Safe and sound at the bottom

This is the bottom of the cavern entrance where our tour guide explained that prehistoric people reached the bottom in only 7 seconds... (bones on display in a glass case by the gift shop)

Barely noticeable, this pool of water creates a moaning echo each time a drop of water falls in it

Aidyn is excited to return for zip-lining, which was closed while we were there. When he's 12, he wants to try rappelling into the cavern, but that looked terrifying from our side! 

All in all, not a bad first day of school although atypical. : )

8 Out-of-the-Box Summer Activities You've Got to Try

I admit it: I'm a little sad to start putting away the curriculum from this school year. But the days are stretching longer, the sun is beaming and summer is peeking from around the corner.

We've made our bucket list and put the usual summertime activities on it, but why not do something extra silly? If summer is our time to let loose, why not do some out-of-the-box activities that will create wonderfully personal memories? Below are 8 ways to do just that:

1. Host a glow-in-the-dark bowling game.

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2. Have a Ice Excavation Day.

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We tried this during the year (wish I took pictures!), but it consumed the whole day, was a ton of fun, and brought up so many questions about animals who really fossilized in ice and how to break/melt ice (hint: try salt...).

3. Throw an informal party and invite a clown to your house!



We're pretty lucky to know this clown personally. She's amazing at everything she does, and she's super fun and bubbly. She works in the central valley of California and you can visit her page HERE!

Search your area for clowns and invite one over to wow your guests.

4. Take a hike.

Everyone has some natural beauty around them that has yet to be explored. It's always some state park, river, creek, forest that you've heard about but have actually never been to. Go explore it!

One of our most fun activities last summer was trekking up Mount Diablo. We didn't even go with the intention of learning anything, but we found a quiet little path near the peak with these simple brochures about the trail.

We followed the trail and read the brochure aloud. There were 14 stop points and a little blurb about a specific geologic feature or the flora along the trail. We learned to identify chert, greenstone, and graywacke. We also spied a few reptiles darting under the chapparal.

Not only that, but we had fun, built confidence in climbing huge rocks, and gained a new perspective looking out on the mountaintop.

What natural wonders are waiting for you to explore?

5. Feast on a medieval dinner.

Brush up on your medieval etiquette and ban the silverware! Serve a hearty meal any peasant would love.

While you're chomping on delectables, talk about medieval happenings!

We had a TON of fun when we did this last summer! We got messy, we got full, and we laughed, all while learning a little bit about medieval times.


6. Travel back in time and enjoy a 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, or 90s Saturday morning.

This took a fair amount of planning, but our 80s Saturday morning was the BEST morning we had all summer.

Here's how:

1. Find out what was playing on a typical Saturday morning of your chosen decade. Here's a wiki article showing the TV grid for Saturday mornings all the way to 1960. The 50s technically did not have a Saturday morning cartoon lineup, but you can still pull some 50s shows together to watch.

2. Make a playlist on YouTube and add episodes of your chosen shows. Look for 3-part episodes and insert commercials from that decade. If you have an XBOX or another system that allows you to watch YouTube on your TV, you're set. If you don't, play movies from your chosen decade.

3. Pack away any toy that screams modern day. Take out any toys you might still have from that decade (we pulled out all the old Star Wars figures). Visit flea markets and thrift stores to find toys from your decade. 

4. Explicitly choose your breakfast. For 80s Saturday morning, we chose the then-popular Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Visit the breakfast timeline to see which cereals were most popular.

5. If you want, purchase other foods from your decade. This food timeline could help you out.

6. Plan an activity after watching cartoons and playing with toys. For our 70s Saturday morning, we went roller skating and played table tennis (with an actual set made from the 70s that we found at the flea market).

7. Talk about your decade, play music from your decade (you can search any decade on Pandora), and have fun!

7. Have a marshmallow fight.

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Or a balloon fight. Whatever.

8. Bring a book to life with FOOD!

There are so many wacky cookbooks at the library. Scan the selections and pick something you and your kids would love. Here's a booklist to get you started:

1. The Green Eggs and Ham Cookbook


2. The Winnie-the-Pooh Cookbook


3. The Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook


4. The Little House Cookbook
5. Roald Dahl's Even More Revolting Recipes
6. Disney's The Magic Kitchen Cookbook

I would love to hear more ideas about having a unique summer! If you have any ideas, please share!

Field Trip Friday: The Bone Room and The Great Stoneface Park in Berkeley

This Friday, Aidyn, his grandma, and I ventured to Berkeley's  Bone Room and their quaint (but Great!) Stoneface Park.

The Bone Room is a natural history store full of sticks and stones and feathery plumes. The place is packed with the unusual, everything from real human skulls and radiuses (radiusi?) to freeze-dried lizards and fossil dung.

Oh, yes.

We decided to make the trek because we just finished reading the first two chapters of Story of the World and learned about fossils and other little things that creatures leave behind. Earlier in the week, Aidyn made a mold of his hand after we watched an episode of Beakman's World on fossils.

 

We mixed a 2-to-1 solution of Plaster of Paris.

 

The hardest part for Aidyn was keeping still for 15 minutes. It was a challenge in patience.

Anyway, we went to the Bone Room to check out some real bones and fossils. There were counters full, shelves full, drawers bursting full, and little jars full and stuffed creatures mounted everywhere. Probably to scare the hell out of  amuse people like me, they had a gigantic Burmese python that looked like this one we saw at a library program a couple months ago:

We all had fun picking out little treasures to take home. Aidyn plucked a T-Rex flip book and a scorpion necklace (with a real, but thankfully dead, scorpion), his grandma purchased a spider necklace, and I grabbed some bone beads (for math next week, of course), obsidian arrowheads, a scorpion bottle opener for David, and a antique-y looking poster of the human skeleton.

We had lunch afterward in a cozy, colorful taqueria,

and, to get the wiggles out, we found a fitting park called The Great Stoneface Park. Nestled in the hills of a quaint neighborhood in Berkeley, a small corner of the natural face of the mountain is preserved. In the middle of these gorgeous homes, large (and I mean, large) boulders and oak trees remain.

 

Aidyn wasted no time scaling up the trees and rocks like the proud Capricorn goat that he is.

 

Here's a good shot of Aidyn and his grandma.

 

 

And here's Aidyn and I.

 

 

He was so in his element.

Here he got a little wistful and asked if we could move there so he could climb this tree forever.

And to think he could have been sitting at a desk all day.

 

 

 

Homeschool Hike

Early this afternoon, once I returned home from work, Aidyn, Grandma, and I set out for a leisurely hike. We searched for a trail I had discovered on trails.com, but found that it did not, in fact, exist! Luckily, we had a backup plan, but on the way we happened on another sort of trail. On a whim, we decided to hike that one instead. It was a cute, roughly mile-long path in Ripon that actually crosses over the Stanislaus River. Aidyn sat in his wagon and observed all the flora while Grandma and I talked, handed Aidyn assorted rocks and sticks to check out and alerted him to nearby squirrels and lizards.

My favorite part of the hike had to be when we all played "Pooh sticks." If you're not familiar with classic Winnie the Pooh stories, "Pooh Sticks" is a game where players toss a stick on one side of the bridge, dash over to the other side, and watch it reappear. We did this a number of times with both leaves and sticks. Aidyn even experimented with dropping a stick on the opposite side to see if it'd go backwards; thus, he learned something today about water currents.

Walking along the path, Grandma shared some sweet stories about her childhood that explained her love for trees. She remarked that on Sundays when she was a child, her dad used to gather the kids and take them out in the middle of nowhere under a tree and allow them to play. He'd always bring along a watermelon and slice pieces up for them to enjoy after they were done frolicking. So in learning about trees this week, Aidyn and I both had the opportunity to hear a sweet, nostalgic story and learn something new about Grandma.

Wonderful, explorative, naturesque day!