Parents as Teachers

Nicholas and I have been blessed to find a group of great moms who share an interest in homeschooling. The group is called Parents as Teachers and it meets every Wednesday. We rotate through the group so that each week a different mom gets to create the lesson plan and activity for that week's co-op class. Sometimes the class is at someone's house, other times it is held somewhere else in the community. Here are descriptions of some of the more recent classes we've had.

LISDOLA
A trip to the Lewisville Independent School District Outdoor Learning Area. What a wonderful joy to find this so close to our home. We only did a few of the activities but had a great time. We went on a walk through the woods - Nicholas was the leader of the pack for much of the time.



We even got to catch bugs in jars. Nicholas started out by holding his empty cup in the air and saying, "Here buggy, buggy, buggy! Come on buggy!" We did eventually catch several cool bugs which we got to look at through a magnifying glass.



We also got to go on the Unnatural Objects Trail. It is a designated trail through the woods in which there have been placed 20 objects that are not natural to the woods. Items included a light bulb, clothes hanger, chair, umbrella, pencil, tennis ball, string, measuring tape, car air freshener, scissors, golf ball, just to name a few. We looked high and low, in the tops of the trees and on the ground, and eventually we found all 20 items!



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MUSIC CONSERVATORY OF TEXAS IN FLOWER MOUND
Learning about muscial instruments at the Music Conservatory of Texas in Flower Mound. The lesson was focused on four types of instrument: piano, saxophone, guitar, and drums. For each instrument we got to lesson on the mechanism by which music is made through it, heard it played, and then we got to play the instruments ourselves. We have quite a musical group!



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COLORS AND PAINTING
It was a beautiful day so we were happy to have class outside. We used paint to blend colors to create new colors.



We walked through paint barefoot to make footprints on paper.



We used cups with colored cellophane bottoms to watch the sun make colorful circles on the ground then combined multiple cups to see how the colors blended to make new colors.



We even played with using brand new toilet plungers to stamp colorful circles on our paper! What fun!



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FORT WORTH BOTANICAL GARDENS
We spent a morning at the Fort Worth Botanical Gardens. We saw many wonderful trees, flowers, and fountains and did many of the educational activities along the beautiful new boardwalk. We learned about the tallest trees, the songs of different birds, how the eggs of different animals look, identified footprints of different animals, and played with "whisper tubes". We love being outside and this was a perfect way to join education and the great outdoors!