MaeLyn's Musings

Saturday was a very busy day for me. We got up around 7am, got dressed, had breakfast, tossed some pork in the crock pot for dinner, and Steven, Hannah, Josh, Peter and I drove the five miles to the church to get there by 8:00. It was our family's turn to help clean the church building. I dropped the rest of the family off, then drove to the home of John's scout leader to pick John up from a scout campout in the backyard, dropped John off at a middle school in the area for a  Mathcounts Competition at 8:30, then returned to the church (about 15 mile round trip) to help with the cleaning. We finished around 9:30 and returned home, to do chores and straighten up our house. I even had time to play a game with Peter before a little after 11:00, when I returned to the school where John was, to watch the final round of the competition and the awards ceremony. Mathcounts is a series of competitions where middle school students are given math problems to solve in a limited period of...

Today I got to accompany Peter's class on a field trip to the Wings Over the Rockies Air and Space Museum . We arrived after a standard (noisy and bumpy) school bus ride, left our coats in a small room and then enjoyed a pizza lunch. After lunch, we got to explore the museum, which is inside a giant hangar. I shepherded my four assigned boys around, first to look at the many airplanes, and play with a couple flight simulators, and then we got to explore the math midway exhibit, which had a lot of fun activities, that didn't really seem much like math to the kids. Eventually the teachers gathered us all together again to find our coats and load the buses for the return back to the school. It was a lot of fun! Peter and the other kids had a chance to see how Orvil and Wilbur Wright's plane was steered, by leaning one way or the other and pulling up or pushing up on a bar. The progress of the plane was shown on a screen in front, and I observed one boy steer the plane dire...