Taking Advantage of Local Exhibitsby Andrea Hermitt | More from this Blogger 05 Jan 2007 09:26 AM I am envious of Valorie Delp, my homeschooling co-blogger here are families.com. She lives in a Major City that has lots of access to many museums and other cultural and educational venues. I do live near Atlanta though, and have some access, after a 30-minute drive. I got an email this morning that says I can get tickets to the Titanic Artifact Exhibition at the Civic Center for 50% off with a special code for homeschoolers. The email also gave me a link to lesson plans on the subject of the titanic. This means I can take a "day off" while still putting a full day of homeschooling under our belts. We are going to take advantage of this local exhibit. This next week we are going to absorb as much information about the titanic as we can. Then next Friday, we are going to see the exhibit. We are inviting some other homeschoolers to go with us. After it leaves Atlanta, the Titanic Exhibit will pass through San Francisco and Lubbock Texas. If you cannot make it to an exhibit, you can purchase educational material and gifts online at rmsgifts.com I get emails like this often that tells me of local exhibits and events. If you are homeschooling, or considering it, make sure you get on an email list that supplies you with local cultural, scientific, and historical exhibits so that you can take advantage of it. What better way is there to learn more about a subject than to see touch and feel the artifacts. We were recently able to see the Bodies exhibit , which gave us more information about the skeletal, muscular, and nervous system than we would have been able to absorb in 1 year from a textbook. If this exhibit is coming near you, I strongly recommend you go see it... on an empty stomach. To keep abreast of what is going on in your area; search Yahoo and Google email lists and online groups for your locality and join a few homeschool email groups... and pass the information you find on to others. Learn more about Andrea Hermitt  Andrea Hermitt is a native New Yorker currently residing in GA. She has been married for over 16 years and has two teenage children. Relevanthomeschooling tags User Comments  LEC23 (216) 05 Jan 2007 10:43 PMHi Andrea Once again a superb informative, article, that I always enjoy reading and I am glad to see that a local exhibition of such maritime and UK historical importance is coming to a locality within easy travelling distance of you. When I homeschooled my son, then, as I do now, lived in a large UK city, yes there was the museums, exhibitions etc. which we visited and exhausted. We then started looking further afield. However, many of the tasks within the home, that are taken for granted and not given a second thought, I used as educational opportunities for homeschooling my son. For example, even something as basic as going to the toilet and taking the trash out, turning the light on and having a portion of blackberry and apple crumble, evolved into an extensive environmental studies project. As part of this project we visited a bog (similar to a marsh), a Power Plant, a Sewage Farm, an organic mixed farm (which ground their own flour) and had their own apple orchard - where we picked our own apples; we went on a visit to some public woodland and picked wild Blackberries and did many more things as well. When we visited my Australian friend, who also homeschooled and lived 200 miles from the nearest school, even going for a walk to visit friends (in this case a village solely popluated by aboriginies) became an educational opportunity and a project on identifying the tracks of different species of animals (which our aboriginal friends taught him), which evolved into the identification of those animals, what category of animals they were (reptiles, mammals, marsupials etc), what their dietary requirements were, their habitats, their feeding habits etc. Just to prove that even the most mundane tasks can evolve into excellent teaching and learning opportunities for homeschoolers. Nola Redd (7081) 06 Jan 2007 01:55 PMI lived in Atlanta (Tucker) for a long while, and even living inside the city, everything was 30 minutes away! I am planning to settle in the country in a few years, but I will miss some things, like Fernbank and the kids' museum. Discuss this article
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