March Kids' Book Club

We had our Kids' Book Club today. We read one of our favorite books so far; Carry On, Mr. Bowditch. It is a fantastic book, especially for boys and I highly recommend it. It's a true story about Nathaniel Bowditch, an American Navigator and mathematician. He is out at sea for much of the story so for our snack the kids tried hardtack, also known as sea biscuits. The kids had a fun time trying to bite it without breaking any teeth. That's what they are all doing in this picture. Then we had soft biscuits for a real snack.


We played a game very similar to the game Coda. We divided into three teams-- France, America and England. Each team had a random code of five numbers between one and twenty. Each country is trying to break the other codes based on what they know of their own code and the other countries. It got very competitive and in the end the French (shown here) had their code broken first.






England was the next to fall.

















The Americans were victorious!
The young people were put in teams by yours truly. This is a club of kids ages 8-11 and if you remember, at that age, boys and girls are poisonous to each other. There is much tormenting of the opposite gender. For our book discussion the boys sit on one couch and the girls sit as far away as possible on the other. For snack time the girls are at one end of the table and boys at the other. I should enjoy this now, because I figure in about 5 years I'll be wishing I could keep them apart!

This picture is for Abe's mom, Grandma Fox. She gave us this great Duplo Pirate Ship a couple of years back. In our book the author refers to the different parts of the ship- most of which I didn't know. So we labeled all the parts of our very realistic looking ships! Now I know where the poopdeck is! (It's the high deck at the rear of the ship).
Sorry these aren't very good pictures. They were taken with my cell phone because the camera needed recharging.

Final things to note:
Today was Bethany's official birthday and she and Abe and Clark and Elinor went to a Jon Schmidt concert in a friend's home. He took requests and Abe requested a birthday song for Bethany. Pretty cool to be serenaded by Jon Schmidt for your birthday!
One last picture of Clark's Lego team. Utah had a small (compared to Idaho's) First Lego League competition this weekend. They won the grand prize. Hooray! And now it is all over for the year. We'll see about next year.

WELL! I am feeling rather worn out after the last few days. All wonderful, great activities, but I think we need to enjoy the virtues of boredom for a little while.