Field Trip!

Yesterday was our first day back with our homeschool co-op since before the holidays. We started the year with a field trip...that's the best way to start. We visited Devil's Millhopper, this is a huge sinkhole here in Gainesville, it is 500 feet wide and 120 feet deep. It was perfect weather, overcast and cool, I think is was in the mid 60s, but a bit humid because of impending storms that finally came through last night.

I got some great pics of the kids...
This is our whole group (minus 1 or 2), we are small with mostly younger kids.

My 2 mid-way down. We were not able to go all the way to the bottom walkway because there was about a half foot of water covering the bridge/walkway.

Visiting the sinkhole is tricky because you go down all the stairs to the bottom, I think there are around 130 steps descending into the sinkhole; then you have to climb back up all those stairs. So the kids go bouncing down the stairs and on the way back up, usually before the first landing they start complaining they are tired. Well, Elisabeth did her usual complaining but Joseph climbed all the stairs and then did the entire 1/2 mile perimeter trail and not once did he say he was tired, I was so proud of him.

Elisabeth told me over and over how much fun she had. I asked her to write a short paragraph about our trip when we got home. This is what she wrote:

"My Trip to Devil's Millhopper (in very big letters across the top of the page)

I went to Devil's Millhopper with homeschool group and saw all my friends. There is a new girl. I had lot's of fun! I saw bones and I found 3 leafs sweet gum and it's pod, swamp chestnut oak and saw palmetto. My favorite thing was the sink hole!"

I thought she did a great job! The only prompt I gave her was to write about what she saw on our trip.

I also finished Joseph's Tiger socks. I have some nice breaks in my day on campus that I am able to do some studying and knitting. He is a proud boy in his new socks. They have some room to grow and will be nice and warm when we go to Michigan in March.

My classes went very well this week. I think this is going to be a great semester. I think I am really going to enjoy my French poetry class and my grammar and composition class is going to be great for me to really practice on my writing in French. Corrective phonics is going to be a really easy class, we sit in the language lab on the computers and practice saying phrases to improve our pronunciation. The Adolescent will be interesting despite the teacher, she is a grad student who is probably younger than I am, not much past adolescence herself. Now I am not against grad students teaching classes, I really enjoyed my Latin teacher last semester who was a grad student and I hope to be such a teacher in a year or so. But teaching languages is much different than teaching the development of adolescents and how to work with them in a classroom. And this teacher teaches straight from the handouts of notes she gives us, boring, give me additional information, I can read the notes myself!

We have had some beautiful weather this week also. I have thoroughly enjoyed finding a bench on campus and sitting in the sun, watching the people walk by, I enjoy people watching, it can be quite amusing at times.

Today we took Maisey to the park with us and she found a pug friend to play with. She was such a good puppy. Maisey is about 40 pounds now and still growing, being German Shephard/Huskey mix I imagine she will gain at least 20 more pounds. But she was great with this little pug which was about the size of our cats. We had a great day.

Monday is a day off of school for me. I will enjoy the time off, but I'm ready to get these classes well underway.

Anyway, enjoy the rest of your weekend! I will :)