Hatfield Marine Science Center homeschool day

By -
The two girls and I were up early this morning and heading to the coast! Hatfield Marine science center had their homeschool day today and it sounded like it would be fun! We drove a while then hopped out of the car in Depot Bay, Oregon to appreciate the beautiful fall morning at the coast!
We checked out the waves a bit then headed on to our destination.
We got split into three different groups, and we were off to do some science!

First stop was Denizens of the Deep...The kids learned all about some of the different adaptations fish had in the deep sea and then got to make their own "deep sea fish".




 I need to try and get a better picture of Kaitlyn's under a black light, but Arianna's showed up pretty well! You notice the Lure it uses to attract it's food, the lights around it's eyes to help it see better and of course all the pretty bio-luminescent defense and alarm system (you know to attract a larger prey item than the one that's trying to eat it so it might escape!).  After that it was lunch and some free time to explore the visitor center before the rest of the activities.


Once groups started back up it was time to learn about marking and release/recapture to estimate marine populations...
Doesn't she look like an excited bean counter! It was a rather difficult for some of the families with the younger kids to try and get sample marked and added back into the population and then try and estimate how many total..My kids now have a better idea of what a grind this could be and have decided that probably being a fish counter wouldn't be a great job for them to have. LOL.
Of course after learning how to figure out populations it was time to dissect a few samples!





Arianna says "You know, I don't like dissecting as much as I thought I would". They both did great though and are looking forward to another trip there at some point :)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Change can be good....

By -
And we are doing a lot of it! We are switching charter schools this summer and it's been an interesting  process to switch from the first that pretty much let us "unschooling" for three years we were there, to the new school which wants a lot more information, and an actual "plan" for each of the kids. All three kids will be in the new school together. There are some big advantages to the new school. $2000 per child per year to help buy curriculum, memberships. outside classes/lessons, field trips, etc. (but again, a lot more reporting). So the older kids got to make a lot of fun decisions on what they wanted to do this year. I started by breaking down the year into 3 sections and filling out what classes they wanted to do after I had their list. I keep having to remind them they don't have to do "all the things" in one year but they are so excited I'm going to have to see how it goes once they actually start the classes. They'll be doing...
Read more

Back to school, sort of.

By -
Image
After we got home from our camping trip, we had Oma and Opa come to visit for a couple of weeks. The kids always love seeing them and not a LOT of school got done..because..well, life happens. We started slowly with a few things here and there but didn't hit our full schedule until the end of September/First full week of October. Most of our new stuff arrived for the year. So it was fun looking thru everything! For our social studies/geography/culture studies the kids picked out a few different books. We are still working on some of our books from last year so this was just rounding out a few areas. Then of course they have the "country club" that meets every other week and we have each "student" and/or their family present a different country (they get to choose) and generally have a small talk about the country, do a project, get to taste some yummy food from each country and then the kids go out and play for 20 minutes or so afterwards. Some of the oth...
Read more

Weekly update

By -
Image
What a week! Monday was the ODFW fieldtrip to feed Elk at Jewell Meadows, then up to discover 2 waterfalls, play at Fort Stevens (since Fort Clatsop was down for the government shutdown), dinner in Tillamook, spent a night in Garibaldi and then headed home on Tuesday. Friday was Seaside Aquarium and SNOW on the way there! Ended up taking home a different route to avoid the snow and it took 4.5 hours! WOW!! With us being home and gone all week today is a clean house, catch up on stuff, and maybe a game for family game night tonight but not a long Dungeon and Dragons game. I started a Women's group for exploring the outdoors in Oregon with weekly walks (no kids!) and mom and me monday hikes for moms/kids or if you don't mind kids and want some nice easy starter hikes. The kids are all excited about the 52 hike challenge and want to make sure they get all 52 hikes in! Next week is a bit quieter thankfully, we are all pretty tired from this week!
Read more