from here to there

Without precise plans of how to spend the school day, sometimes we float from here to there. Yesterday, a dinosaur led us to making snowfall total predictions. How did we get here from there?

The dinosaur book led us to discuss archeology...

...which Hmmmschooler Iggy takes great interest in. But when I mentioned something called marine archeology, Iggy said that sounded too scary.

"Marine archeology...you mean, like shipwrecks?" Ooky spoke up. "I love shipwrecks!"

And suddenly we were looking at this book:

Which, of course, led us to discuss the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Which meant we had to listen to The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

"Wait a second...where did that other ship...the Titanic, sink?"

We looked on one map...

...and then tried to put together another one.

We then found a map of all the shipwrecks on Lake Superior which listed the reason the ships had sank - a common reason being foundering.

Which, of course, we had to define because none of us had ever heard that word before...which led to playing a vocabulary game on Free Rice.

At some point, the boys started to think all the vocabulary words were funny, and got really hyper. I mentioned to them that before they were born, I taught preschool and could always tell when it was going to storm because my classroom of children would turn insane.

And we were supposedly in for quite a snow storm later that day.

The Hmmmschoolers wondered what a storm had to do with kids being hyper...so we discussed that some people might be more sensitive to changes in the barometric pressure, in various ways.

Which meant we had to discuss weather. And look at the radar. And the forecast...and come up with our own prediction for the snow totals.

And that, dear Hmmmschooling friends, is how a dinosaur leads you to snowfall total predictions. :)