Six Flags Homeschool Day!!

One of the first things Blaine wanted us to do 

once we decided to homeschool was take advantage of 

Six Flags Homeschool Day.

You see, this 10 year old LOVES roller coasters.

The bigger the better.

The flippier the more fantastic.

The speedier the more stupendous!

The cool thing about this day is the bang for the buck:

for a $20 ticket, we each got 

*entrance to the park

*a brown bag {delicious} lunch

*a return ticket good for all summer

Pretty awesome, considering that just a ticket can cost $40+!!

We hung out with our good friends, the Strange's, for the day.

So appreciate them letting us tagalong!

Ashley & Blaine are both adrenaline junkies!

They road in the very front car on several rides ...

 Dahlonega Mine Train ... my fave!

Scream Machine ... this one still makes my guts hurt ...

Headed up the super huge hill on Goliath ...

yeah - I had my phone out ... not super smart but had to get the photo!!

Headed up on Daredevil Dive ...

Fun times with this boy.

He love every single second.

Me too!

Bookworm??!

The title of this post may be a little bit of a stretch ...

but for my book-hoppin', never-finish-a-complete-book

9 year old,

I think it might be accurate.

When we started homeschooling,

and I picked our curriculum,

I knew that I wanted to expose Blaine to as much reading as possible.

Because it was NOT his favorite.

At all.

When we started the year,

I knew that 1 of 2 things would happen:

1.  He would completely revolt against reading

and there'd be hair-pulling and gnashing of teeth.

 2.  Or he'd learn to enjoy it.

Even just a little bit.

Well, praise the Lord,

the latter has happened.

There was a little bit of the former,

but thankfully, it was short-lived.

And now, 

the stack he holds in this picture represent a HUGE milestone for him.

(and we're only almost halfway thru the year!!)

Tellus Museum

This new adventure in homeschooling has brought many benefits.

One of the biggest is the Hamilton Mill Homeschool Moms group.

Just to be a party to the Facebook discussions has been priceless to me.

Anything can be asked and other, seasoned, homeschool moms are always

quick to encourage or advise.  

Did I say priceless??!

Anyway, another bonus of the group is field trips.

We took our first one to the Tellus Museum in Cartersville.

It was a fun morning of seeing dinosaurs,

digging for bones, 

mining for gold,

and making new friends.

That's one huge geode!

Dinosaur poop was a fave ...

He and my good friend Heather's daughter, Ashley ...

Shark teeth!

There's gold in them 'thar hills!

A Step Back in Time

This is the first book Blaine read for science this year.

It was really neat and he ended up loving it.

It was real diary excerpts from a boy named Noah Blake,

written way back in 1805.

We read about he and his father built their house,

built a mill,

farmed,

tended animals,

and turned a simple walk-over bridge

into a covered bridge.

Lots and lots of blood, sweat and tears involved.

We are all wimps compared to people that lived back then.

Anyway, after we read all about the construction of the covered bridge,

I thought it would be neat to see if we could actually visit one.

Turns out its a little harder than you think.

While covered bridges aren't that hard to find,

old ones that haven't been rebuilt or restored are.

But while we were camping at Victoria Bryant,

we headed out on a hunt.

And we found this beauty,

all but hidden off a country road in the middle of nowhere.

Thank goodness for GPS!

It seems the Cromer family owned several mills

and built this bridge a little after 1900.

It officially stopped being used in 1943.

So it wasn't built quite as long ago as the one in the book we read,

but it had some old features still intact.

The wooden pegs attest to the age of the bridge.

We read that they used these in bridges rather than iron nails

because the iron would cause the wood to rot.

The wooden pegs would expand once in place and create an almost

unbreakable bond.

Lots of people assume that nails weren't used due to the time it took to make them.

Now we know different!

So fun to see this little piece of history

and wonder, based on what we read, how it was used

and what life was like at the turn of the 20th century.

And to realize that no matter how much technology we have

and how smart we think we are,

people a hundred years ago were still smarter.

Simply because they had to be.