Southern California Homeschool Day Field Trips - 2014/15

There's been a lot of talk lately in the larger homeschool groups for my area about what type of homeschool days are coming up in our area.  I'm actually surprised no one has made a comprehensive list of all the incredible opportunities we have in our area so I thought I would collect a few here so that there's at least a start of a list going on!  I'm sure there's many I missed and I will try and update this list if I find anymore.  Leave a comment if I forget any!


I've organized it by month, but if you read through it there are other ideas I've listed that are free year round!

August -
Pretend City - Once a month Pretend city has a themed homeschool day where children (and adults) can get in for a discounted price and there are workshops for the children based off of a theme.  While the entire year isn't out yet, the next few months are up on their website.  Reservations are required and the cost is $9/adult and children.  August 15th is Partners in Play: Dragons are not allowed!


September -

Discovery Science Center - For the entire month of September on Wednesdays - Fridays, admission is only $10. For an additional $9.50 students can register for great workshops every Wednesday and they have two different classes, one for 5-6 year olds and the other for 7-12 year olds! Reservations required!

L.A. County Fair -  Free Admission and parking to the L.A. county fair.  This one isn't specifically homeschoolers and public school kids come as well.  But it's still not nearly as crowded as the normal fair and they have some great educational booths and presentations set up. Field trips take place Wednesdays – Fridays, Sept. 4 – 26.  Reservations are required! Just click the enroll now button on the right side of the web page!

Peterson Automobile Museum - September 10th is Homeschool day at The Peterson.  This one isn't free and costs are adults/$13, students with ID/$8, children 3-12/$3, and kids under 3 are free. Reservations are required!  "Join us for a special day of fun and learning at the Petersen for homeschool families! Take a guided tour of the Museum with our trained docents; participate in fun, hands-on, car-related educational activities; meet students and families from other homeschool communities; and learn about the history of the automobile and its influence on Los Angeles!"


Not-Back-To-School-Day @ Disneyland - This one is every September and this year is September 10th.  While there are no official discounts for getting into Disneyland, there are a lot of homeschoolers around.  You can spot other homeschoolers easily by all the tie-dye as well!  And if you do want to add some real school into your day instead of just fun, Celebration Education offers classes at Disneyland including one on Not Back To School Day.

Aquarium of the Pacific - September 17th and 18th.  Tickets are only $6/person (must be purchased in advance).  They open up the classrooms for the homeschoolers to wander in and out as they please, as well as the rest of the aquarium to explore.  You still have to pay for parking, but it's a great deal for an incredible aquarium!  

Pretend City - September 19th: Play your way. Reservations are required, cost is $9/adult and $9/child. 

October

San Diego - Kids are free in October at museums and zoos in San Diego!  There's a lot to list so just follow the link!  You can download the coupon here.

Pretend City -  Oct 17th: Play your way.  Reservations are required, cost is $9/adult and $9/child.

Page Museum - The 22nd.  Admission is free, just pay parking.  Make an entire day of it and visit the Los Angeles County Museum of Art right next door, walking distance even for my littles!  The art museum always offers free admission to children and one adult per child as well!  The theme for the Page Museum this day is L.A. Underground.  "Discover the incredible secrets hidden right underneath your feet! This Homeschool Day, we’re joining up with our Mobile Museums team to explore how archeology and paleontology can help us uncover the mysteries of the past right here in LA’s backyard! Learn about the people of the past by excavating aboard the Mobile Museum, our archaeological digsite on wheels before touring the La Brea Tar Pits: the largest active urban paleontological excavation in the world."

 

November
 Six Flags Magic Mountain - November 7th. "Be a part of Home School Family Day and enjoy all day park access to the most thrilling rides and attractions in Southern California. The park will be open exclusively from 11:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m. and is completely closed to the general public."  Cost is $29.99 for admission or $41.99 if you want to include a catered lunch!

Los Angeles Natural History Museum - November 12th is  Excavating Our Past.  Have a budding archeologist or paleontologist?  I love homeschool days at the Natural History Museum and we always go at least once every year.  Admittance is free on this day but you still need to pay parking.  Get there early to see all the great touch tables and see all the shows and events they having going on.  The homeschool events end at noon but you are free to spend the rest of the day exploring the museum.  We like to make it an extra long day and walk over to the California Science Center near by as well.  It's free as well, unless you want to see the space shuttle.  The kids always love this outing! There's also the rose gardens in between which makes a great place to bring littles to run around and get the wiggles out. 

Pretend City - Nov 21st - Play your way. Reservations are required, cost is $9/adult and $9/child.

December
Aquarium of the Pacific - While the dates are not released yet, I don't believe, the aquarium does another homeschool day in December right around the holidays!

January

Page Museum -  Jan 5th, Bugs and Botony. Just like before, free admission! "What do insect fossils teach us about the Ice Age environment? How does pollen get preserved in asphalt for thousands of years? Spend this Homeschool Day with two often under-appreciated groups of organisms --insects and plants. By the end of the day, we think you’ll find these resilient Ice Age survivors surprisingly captivating and incredibly significant to the study of Pleistocene Los Angeles."

Annual Homeschool Day @ Disneyland - January 23rd is another fun homeschool day at Disneyland!  Just like the one back in September, this one is not Disney sponsored so you won't be seeing any special discounts or Disney run classes.  But it's still a lot of fun to break out that tie-dye!

February
Los Angeles Natural History Museum - Feb 5th is Fossil Fanatics.  Just like in November, free entrance until noon but you need to pay for parking.
 
March

Page Museum - March 20th, L.A. Carnivores.  "From the saber-toothed cats and dire wolves of the past to the mountain lions and coyotes of today, Los Angeles has always been home to charismatic carnivores. This Homeschool Day, you’ll learn how we use fossils to study the predators of the past and how our research can inform carnivore conservation into the future."

April
Los Angeles Natural History Museum - April 20th is Bugs and Botany. Free to attend, pay for parking!

May

June

Page Museum -  June 5th, Astounding Adaptations.  Free admission.  "Spend a day exploring the diversity of life in Pleistocene Los Angeles and discover how our scientists use fossil evidence to learn how Ice Age animals survived. If you’ve ever wondered how a saber-toothed cat used its impressive canines to hunt, or why a Harlan’s ground sloth had pebble-sized bones growing in its skin, don’t miss out on this day!"

Los Angeles Natural History Museum - June 17th is Art and Nature. Free to attend, pay for parking!

A Peek Inside: Our Homeschool Room

It's the beginning of a new school year and I don't know about you, but I'm always curious about what other people are doing.  What curriculum are they using, what a day typically looks like, and even what their school spaces look like.  I know this varies from the dining room table, the living room couch, or a beautiful, dedicated space. 

While my space might not be beautiful, we do have a dedicated room for school.  I've found that if we don't have a space to go to, it is impossible to keep Green Bubbles attention on me.  Although, since our school room is also our playroom for the littles, it's still sometimes impossible to keep his attention and we end up at the dining room table!

Below is a picture of our space!  There's a baby gate at the top with a few steps down into the room.  The baby gate serves to purposes.  It keeps littles in so I can keep on eye on them, or out when I'm not ready to deal with cleaning up a toddler tornado mess.  It also serves to keep our dogs OUT of this room and to be totally honest, the latter reason is far more important to me.  For some reason, we have one dog who just likes to do her outside stuff in the kids spaces.  It drives me nuts so the baby gate stays up at all times and the kids bedroom doors stayed closed all the time.

On the left of the room we have my chair for cuddles and read alouds.  There's a small table near by where I'm able to stack Little Miss' themed books for the week so they are easy to grab during quieter moments, or when I'm in need of a quiet moment.  Along the wall is a timeline we used last year for Green Bubbles (American History).  He enjoyed putting things up on the timeline but I don't think he really learned anything from it. It has been re-purposed into an art line!  We also have our ABC poster from All About Reading up at eye level for the littles so they can point to the letters and interact with it.  We were able to get a circle time chart as well so that is up beside it.  We got this for free through our charter since another family ordered it and then dropped out and our Education Specialist thought we would like it.  There's a lot on here we don't use but I'm going to try to make some of it part of our day.  It includes the date, days of the week, letter of the day, and the number of the day.  Things we probably won't use are the colors, shapes, weather, and rhyming words. 

The middle of the room is our school 'table'.  Since my kids are younger we got a small table from IKEA.  It is covered in paint, dried glue and play dough, and stickers.  But it totally works for us.  I put disposable mats (the kind that go under baby high chairs) under the table to prevent most of the play dough and paint from hitting the carpet.  There's also even more toys, and in the back is where we keep all our games, puzzles, arts and crafts, paints, paper, and anything else we might need for school.

On the right of the room is the fire place that we never use.  I put a small bookcase infront of it that you can see is spilling over with books.  Above it is our white board which I sometimes use, and sometimes forget about.  I also have our House Rules right next to it and to the right of the board is our nature area.  Currently there's some feathers, a section of a large tree branch, and our bug identification sheet.

And a little further down on the right side of the room are our maps.  Last year we only had the US map out and went over different states that family lived in before talking about the areas we were learning about while studying US history.  This year I moved the state map up and added the World map since we are going to be covering ancient history all over the world.

And here's a picture of Green Bubbles wanting to show off his brand new to us ABC puzzle mat.  It's missing the letter U, but what more do you want for as cheap as we got it.   He's having a lot of fun exploring the letters on it and we use it when we sing the ABC song.  We also play different ABC games with it (e.g., go stand on the letter R!).

So here's our school/play room!  This is about as clean as it ever gets and there are definitely things I want to change about it but for now we're making it work for us.   Do you have a designated space for school in your house?



Linked up to ihomeschoolnetwork.

Preschool - Eye Theme

Little Miss' preschool theme last week was eyes.  I followed the theme plan from letteroftheweek.com and I have to say, Eye would not be my first choice for preschool themes.  Most of the books listed weren't avaiable in my library and I couldn't really find much to fit the theme.

Sooo.. The books we did read included various I Spy books, animal camouflage, I See the Moon and the Moon Sees me and a Dr. Seuss book called You Can't Read With Your Eyes Shut. 

For our games and activies we also played I Spy using colors.  For example, I spy something blue.  Brother's shirt!  I also had her color in a picture of a large eye ball I drew.  Honestly though, the eye ball kind of creeped me out!  But Little Miss enjoyed coloring it so I guess that's all that matters.

Going forward, I don't know how often we're going to use themes with her.  I have Little Miss coloring in the ABC crafts from All About Reading Pre-level with Green Bubbles and she loves doing that. Each letter has different directions for how to 'craft' with it.  The B below suggested dipping the back of a pencil (the eraser) into blue paint and painting blueberries on the letter B.  It also had the kids cutting green construction paper and gluing it down to make grass for our blueberry bush!  She also sits in on a lot of hte rhyming games with Green Bubbles.  In fact, she's doing really well with the rhyming games and is flourishing with them.  I think Little Miss will be getting her own school time with AAR (All About Reading) now, separate from her brother so he doesn't feel like she's taking over his school time.  Also hoping to avoid competition and resentment.  I'll let you know how it goes next week!

And don't worry... we still do plenty of reading time.  It just probably won't be around a theme.

Wrap Up - First week of Kindergarten

Time for another weekly wrap up!  This week we eased back into school by starting just a few things.  We'll be adding more each week until we work back up to a full load.  Green Bubbles was desperate to start science so we opened up our Real Science Odyssey Life!  I wanted to also get him started on All About Reading Pre-reading in the hopes we might be able to work through the letters he already knows quickly to get to the ones he's struggling with.  Little Miss sat in on a lot of this as well and totally blew me away with her awesome rhyming ability.  She was picking out rhyming cards like a pro, passing up Green Bubbles.  I'm going to start sending her to another room while working with Green Bubbles.  His confidence level is already pretty shaky with language skills and having his little sister do it so easily isn't good for that. 

On Monday we started with discussing what is life and comparing things that were alive and not alive.  We took a break with science after this until Friday.

Tuesday we went to a park day.  We've been missing these a lot lately and the kids really love them.  I'm glad we made the effort to go!  Getting outside is so important for little kids but it's hard for me to make the effort to do it more than a few days a week.  3 kids, one being an infant, is a lot more work to get everything together to get out!

Wednesday is normally our nature study but instead we met a friend at the beach for a bonfire.  The kids had a blast playing in the sand and roasting our hotdogs and marshmellows.  I try to go to a bonfire once every summer for them.  It's a great experience and I know it will be something they will remember when they are older.  Green Bubbles also read his first Dick and Jane story!  We've been working on sight words for him to help build up his confidence with words and letters.   He was so proud of himself when

Thursday we made it to another park day!  I can't tell you how excited I am that we made it outside three days in a row.  This park day was a new one for us with brand new friends to make so my kids were a little shyer but they still had a lot of fun.  I know they will make friends quickly.  There were a lot of boys Green Bubbles age here and even a little girl just one month younger than Little Miss.

Today was our fun day, as if park days and bonfires weren't fun!  We made it to the letter E in All About Reading, but science is where the fun comes in.  We did a plot study in our garden identifying things that were alive and dead.  Green Bubbles even found traces of animals such as the eatten leaves on the tomato plants from the cabbage loppers (we caught one last month and put it in our bug house to watch it make it's cocoon).  Since we were in our garden, Green Bubbles wanted to water the plants and Little Miss helped.  Whenever the hose comes out, it always turns into a water fight as well! 

We are off to the library later this afternoon to get some books for next week's school.  We'll be adding in history and handwriting! 

When you go back to school do you start it all up at once, or ease back into it?  Leave me a comment and let me know!

Linking up with Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers!

20 Mintues of Reading Excitement - Reading Logs

Summer library reading programs have ended now, but my kids wanted to keep coloring everytime they read.  I wanted to keep that excitment, especially since Green Bubbles doesn't really enjoy reading very much, so I decided to make them their own reading sheets.   Keeping to the same rules, they can only color one piece for every 20 minutes of reading, but I adjusted Little Miss' reading goals to be shorter, just under 3 hours of reading total for her reward, while Green Bubbles kept to the 5 hour reading reward. 

Rewards will be something I pick out from the dollar store except for Green Bubbles 10 hour reward which will probably end up as a minecraft mod or map.  The summer reading program was dogs so the kids were coloring dog bones.  I wanted to change it for our normal school year so I let the kids pick what they wanted to color.

Green Bubbles picked bears.

Little Miss picked owls.

How do you encourage reading in your home?

Preschool Cat Theme

We finished up our cat theme last week.  This one wasn't as big a hit as I had hoped, but the kids still had fun.

For our gross motor game, we pretended we were cats and crawled and meowed all across the carpet in our school room.  But, inventiably, the kids both ended up climbing onto me and Little Miss called me a horse again.  It happens every single time I'm on the floor with them!  Not going to lie, it's really cute and I love it.

I had Little Miss make this cat craft.  All I did was cut out two circles, one a little bigger then the other, two triangles for ears, two paw shapes, and a C shaped tail.  I let her glue everything down herself and made the face using a white crayon when she was done.  We have a history timeline in our school room that is just yarn and clothes pins.  We haven't used it as a time line in awhile though and I'm not sure how much Green Bubbles got out of it last year anyway but it has been repurposed as an art line.  Little Miss insisted her cat be put up on the line as soon as it was done.

We also did some of the printables from 1+1+1=1 's cat preschool pack.  I was able to get Green Bubbles to review some of the things we learned last year in a very informal way without sit down instruction.  School is starting back up soon and I wanted him to have a refresher before we dived back in.  We practiced numbers 1-20 and the alphabet.  I gave Little Miss things to color from the pack and let her do the patterns page which she just whized through. 

And, as always, we read a lot of books.  There are a LOT of cat books out there so I only picked our top 5 that we read to share with you.

Pete the Cat: Rocking in My School Shoes - I think I must have been living under a rock to not have heard about Pete the Cat.  He's popular, has a lot of books and it is easy to see why.  There is a lot of repetition in this book and Green Bubbles loved trying to guess what Pete was going to sing next.  Little Miss really didn't care for it at all, but it was a little older for her.  It's also a good book since we're starting back up in school soon!  Even though this book is a public school type book that talks about classrooms and libraries, it is still a cute read.

Kitten's First Full Moon - This was a perfect Little Miss book.  It's the story about a kitten who thinks the moon is a bowl of milk and his adventures trying to get to it.  This is a classic story and one I'm going to buy for our collection.

James Herriot's Treasury for Children: Warm and Joyful Tales by the Author of All Creatures Great and Small - We actually read Moses the Kitten by James Herriot but this link is for a book of a lot of his stories and I highly recommend it.  We actually own Moses the Kitten but checked it out from the library because it has run off somewhere for the time being and I wanted to make sure we read it again.  It's the story of a little kitten who is saved by a county vet and nursed back to health by the farmers and a pig.  All of his stories are very sweet.

I Must Have Bobo! - (Note: The picture above is of the sequel but I like this one much better).  The first book in the series is really sweet.  It's about a boy and his sock money, Bobo.  Bobo is his security blanket and best friend.  But watch out for Earl, the cat!  He loves to take Bobo.  Little Miss and Green Bubbles both loved looking for Earl on each page waiting to see when he'll make his move.

Cat Up a Tree - This was a great book.  Cats keep getting stuck up in a tree and no one will help get them down!  We also used this as a counting book for Green Bubbles because more and more cats end up in the tree.  (25 at one count!)

Weekly Wrap-Up - Lazy summer days

It's Friday!  Time for another weekly wrap-up.

Do you ever feel like your living in a real life ground hog's day where every day seems very much like the other?  I'll be excited when school starts back up just so we're back in a routine and our days change.  Summer always seems to be a free for all of schedules and routines.  Some weeks we are crazy busy, and others we never leave the house.  This week was the latter. Part of me is cherishing it since I know once school starts back up and summer is over we won't be having any more weeks like that. 

Green Bubbles wanted to do science so desperately that we are starting back on Monday but only adding in one subject at a time.  Our offical start date isn't until the 18th but we usually start back early, adding a little each day until we are back full time.  We missed Nature Study this week, but next week will make up for it!  

But I really do hate being couped up in the house all day and an entire week of it is getting to me.   So, we are either going to the library to turn in our summer reading logs since tomorrow is the last day or, if we can convince Daddy, we are going to hang out at Disneyland!  Maybe both...  After all, summer should always end with a bang.


So rather then bore us both with trying to remember what my week was like each day, here's my pictures that just show it all! Our end of summer fun, lazy days.

She discovered the butterfly book I bought her at the library last week.

Megatron cuteness! 

Megatron hates water, but the older two enjoyed the kiddie pool.

This is what happens when toddlers refuse to go to sleep two nights in a row.  She crashed early.

Linking this up to Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers .