Weekly Wrap-up ~ Vacation But Still Logging Hours

We were on vacation this past week in Pensacola, Florida. We have the pleasure of going there a couple of times a year. Thought it's intended to be a time of rest and relaxation, and a whole lot of fun, there is just too much going on that can be counted as educational hours. So we did. How? Take a look ...

We spent an hour touring the Pensacola Lighthouse. It has an excellent museum that depicts life of the early Keepers of the Light. In fact, the museum is actually the Keeper's cottage. Just off the home is the water well and oil shack. There is a legend that the 23 year old daughter of one of the Keepers, who died in childbirth, still haunts the lighthouse. The kids and I watched a Ghost Hunters video about the lighthouse and climbed the 177 steps to the top. There was one hour logged of history and P.E. combined.

On Sunday we spent a full day out and about. First we drove past Pensacola Beach to Navarre Beach on the scenic highway. It was beautiful! We stopped off at a beach between the two and the kids rode boogie boards in the waves for two hours straight. That was two hours of P.E. Believe me, they got a workout!

Then we went to Fort Pickens and toured it and the museum for another two hours. It was a very interesting tour! Although it was built to defend the Navy Yard from the British, primarily, it was not actually fired upon until the Civil War! Additionally, the bricks were all laid by black slaves! Pretty ironic that the Fort was being built because of a war to enforce American freedom, but it was actually built by slaves.

Another interesting fact about the Fort is that Geronimo was once a prisoner there! Might this have been the prison where he was held?

We stopped by the Fort Pickens Museum while we were there. The kids love hands-on museums! We logged two hours of history.

Good thing we toured Fort Pickens when we did with the government shut-down. We would have missed out on the opportunity to see it. We DID miss out on our yearly trip to the National Museum of Naval Aviation at the Naval Aviation Station in Pensacola. It is our absolute favorite place to visit, and it has now been closed because of Obama's socialist movement the government's inability to agree on the budget. Sad. So sad. I have some opinions, but I'll spare you. We were very disappointed to miss out on more learning opportunities. We always learn something new at the "airplane museum". Hopefully we'll get to go back in the Spring.

In place of the aviation museum, we found a cool hands-on STEM museum called Pensacola Mess Hall. It was very, very fun and the kids learned TONS while they were there! Not only do they have their regular exhibits of circuits, a marble wall, a river, air, and building blocks, but they have "mess kits" that you can check out.

Brynne did the "balancing pencil"

made a compass

made thermatroupes, a dancing cup with a motor, paper helicopters and more.

Eli spent most of his time making 3-D shapes and playing with the circuits.

At the Mess Hall we logged 3 hours of science.

My mom and I found a fabulous used book store down the street from their house. I bought a pile of books for myself and got Eli and Brynne a couple of new books. They spent some time reading a few days of our vacation. One more hour of schooling logged.

We ended our trip with several more hours of wave jumping and riding. Again, more P.E. .. two hours, to be exact.

We also played several games of Rummikub. The way we played had us doing lots of math, as the kids  kept score so had to add up the points on all of our runs. They also played chess. And there was one hour of logic/math.

All total I can confidently say that we logged 12 legitimate hours of schooling while on our vacation.

We drove all day Friday and got home about 9:00 p.m. Brynne had a volleyball tournament yesterday morning and we had to be there at 7:30 a.m., in a neighboring town. She played four full games of volleyball and her team got 4th place. We came home and I cleaned house most of the day. Today we went to church and then came home for more laundry and some much-needed hours logged of resting before we start back to our regular school schedule tomorrow.