Earlier this year, when we couldn’t get in a visit at the Science Museum, we visited the Mississippi River museum in the lobby instead. At that time, I picked up a brochure showing all the places to visit in the Mississippi National River and Recreational Area, which runs from Ramsey to below Hastings (72 miles in all). I thought it would be great fun to set out to visit all the places on the map (wayside rests, parks, nature preserves, historic sites) starting at the beginning of summer since we hadn’t switched over to homeschool yet. I figured we might go into the Fall with it and thought that sounded fine.
However, since launching our homeschool early, I got excited to realize we would be starting this odyssey sooner!
We were waiting for the weather to warm up on a day without other planned activities and so this week we were finally able to get started. Today’s visit included a failed search to find the marker at Pilot Know (although Lauren found it later on Google Earth), a trip down Sibley Memorial Highway, free lunch at Ikea (yay for Tuesdays and I picked up a glass top I wanted for our dressers), a wonderful trek down the MN River Valley just above its confluence with the Mississippi, a side trip to by dry ice (since we were out and about anyway) and an impromptu visit to Woodlake Nature Center (since we were going right past there on our way home).
This was an extremely joyful day for me personally. I am so glad to be free from forced learning, a set schedule and a list of need-to-learns. We had some paper packets that I printed out from the refuge but I gave them out openly for the girls to choose how they wanted to work with them. Some took to them more, some less. Natalie was not particularly excited about them so I just handed her my camera and asked her to record what she saw along the path. I truly looked forward to reviewing her pictures to see what caught her eye.
There was adventure, excitement – 18 garter snakes – very cool marsh creatures, and much more. I am extremely grateful for the freedom and space to live and learn this way.
Below is a video I created with some of the best of the over 500 photos we shot. The day after going, when we were all working separately to process our day (writing, drawing, photo editing, etc) Lauren showed me a Flipagram that she and Gloria had made and I was intrigued by the idea of making a video out of all our photos. Blogging 100 pictures didn’t seem that fun…putting on scrapbook pages would have taken days! But in the space of about an hour, I learned how to do more needed skills in Lightroom, how to run Windows Movie Maker, extract and edit music for the background and publish a finished project. Learning can REALLY accelerate when it’s wanted or needed. If I had to sit down and try to learn these things without a meaningful framework or an interesting finished project, I would probably be bored to tears.
The next day, I put all my new skills to work to create a video that I am really excited about – something we can all look back on later, just like the girls can look back on how they recorded the day. The music is something I grabbed on the way out the door – we listened to the entire CD in the car and had a blast talking about what we heard in the music: everything from Peach racing on Mario Kart to fairy coronations.
