Field Trip--Dairy Museum and Castle Park

We currently have our home school scheduled into four days a week. We usually work Monday through Thursday, with Friday being either "Fun Friday" or "Field Trip Friday" depending on what we have planned. The beauty of homeschooling is that we can be flexible. This week, for example, we planned a big field trip with friends. It fell on a Tuesday, so we just rearranged the school work to suit us. Love it! :)Last week's field trip was a dual--Field trip/Fun Friday. We have been studying early American pioneers and also reading the Little House series and both had been focusing on dairy cows that week. One of our school activities was even making butter...so fun! Anyway, I remembered that a small town up the road from us has a dairy museum and I thought it would perfectly complement our studies. This small town also has the coolest park around (at least according to my kids), but since it's an hour away we don't go often.

We had a great time! Since it was a weekday, we had the entire museum to ourselves. The lady running the desk started a short film for us (about the importance of cows and how they are milked) and then left us to explore on our own. The kids enjoyed the displays and especially liked the dairy trivia game.

Outside the museum is a little culvert full of water. My little nature detective Henry found a duck's nest with some egg shells in it. He was pretty excited and tried to entice the ducks to come back to their nest, but they weren't interested. ;)
Adventure-man Jonah reached into a hole and came out with this carcass of some kind of creature. There are certainly some parts of living in East Texas that I am still not used to yet! I don't even know to what animal that belonged!
Bridget's favorite part of the morning was feeding the ducks. She used to get a piece of bread and throw the whole thing out. This time she was so consumed by tearing it up into teeny, tiny little pieces that her one piece lasted longer than the boys' two pieces did!
We had to snap a group shot before we left, since they had put up such an adorable fall display. :) I just LOVE the self-timer feature on my camera. It makes me happy.
After the Dairy Museum, we headed to the castle park. Oddly enough, I didn't take a single picture there. It was a beautiful, sunny, fall day...we had a picnic lunch and played for hours. There were a few parents and toddlers walking around and a couple of older adults walking the paths around the park, but we mostly had that place to ourselves too.

After we had spent the afternoon at the park, we headed to Sonic for mini-sundaes. Actually, Jonah and Bridget had mini-sundaes, but Henry enjoyed a plain vanilla cone. On the way home, the kids all fell asleep and I got to relax to some of my favorite music.

It was an absolutely perfect day!