Tuesday, January 25, 2011

The Earth and the space center museum

Lately we've been really caught up in Orion's learning disability testing (the school district is really cutting it close). They have until January 30 to hold the final meeting, and we just finished testing last week. I still don't have a date for the final meeting, and I'm getting antsy.

Besides that, we've been diligently studying the Earth. Our unit on the earth was only supposed to last a week, but the boys have enjoyed it so much. We kept going more in depth, and adding different projects to our unit too. Now our earth unit has turned into a presentation, that the boys are excited about presenting to Daddy, and then again to my Grandma and Aunt. Bonus points for this project getting in some public speaking practice :)

Last week I took them on a field trip to the Columbia Space Center, and they had such a blast! They really enjoyed learning different space related things. I was hoping they would have more on the earth, but that's okay, they had fun anyway and it was educational.
Posing with a real astronaut suit. You can actually climb into the back and take pictures in the suit, it was really neat.

Flight simulator, taking turns landing our shuttle back on earth. Orion was the only one who didn't crash us, even with me taking a turn lol.

Catching parachuting shuttles and men. This was to show them the different types of parachutes used to slow down the shuttles as they come to earth.
Dropping marbles in and watching them spin around the giant funnel thing. It's supposed to simulate how the planets orbit around in space, and there were different sized marbles to try it with. We stood at this station for half an hour lol.
The boys launching pressurized 2 liter bottles. I'm glad the museum was kind of empty, or there would have been a line for this!
Lego robots that you program with a computer. The boys loved this!
Orion programming his robot for the next mission. I am now looking into finding a robot building club for the boys, since they enjoyed this so much :)


I'll be back in a few days with how the presentations went, and of course pictures!

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