Laboratories of Innovation

Yesterday, a new bill was signed by the Governor of South Carolina. Now, South Carolinians have never been known for their education. In fact, we are constantly falling into the bottom five states in the nation. It's quite sad. This is one of the myriad of reasons we opted for virtual school. Anyways, thanks to our State Superintendent of Education, Mick Zais, and our Governor, Nikki Haley, charter schools are receiving more recognition. They just passed house bill 3241 which will allow all charter school students the opportunity to participate in sports and clubs at their local brick and mortar public school.
This is exciting to a lot of virtual school students, however, the brick and mortar public school students are not quite as happy. They are worried of the competition and they feel that they will lose money to the virtual school students. They shouldn't b/c my son is zoned for "Blank Blank" Elementary School. Our taxes go to support that school and if he went to that school then those funds would be spend on him. Instead, I keep him home with the virtual school. Less money is spent on him. He has a few teachers, he has an IEP but none of these teachers or therapists have to drive anywhere. They all help teach my son from the comfort of their own home. They are all paid less. No lunch ladies or janitors have to be paid because there is no school to clean and no students to cook for. There are minimal utilities to pay because they have one little office of administrative people in Columbia. Less money goes towards this charter school and for my son so to keep it all even, yeah, he should be able to participate in the local school. My son probably won't unless it's the science club or martial arts or something but he has that option. =o) I think it's pretty awesome!
So, time for the speeches. The first two speakers I pretty much spaced out for. Not really sure if they were interesting or not. Once Dr. Zais started speaking, I couldn't draw my ears away. He spoke about many of the reasons we chose this path for our children's education. I loved it! So, here is a youtube video of it and enjoy. Dr. Zais doesn't start speaking until about 3 1/2 minutes into it and then Governor Haley is after him -- her speech is good too. :) YAY!!

Tadpoles anyone?

So, a wonderful woman at church invited us to go and see her pond. She also said it would be fine if we took some tadpoles for Collin's tadpole habitat that he earned as a reward. They were soooo excited!!

Can you guess which one was hot and cranky and ready to go? LOL! The jar in Collin's hands is holding 7 little tadpoles in it. I didn't mean to get so many but there were lots of little tadpoles. I stuck the jar in and ba-boom! Seven little tadpoles were swimming around in it. :) The pond was awesome! We saw toads from eggs all the way up to full grow and the tadpoles in all stages in between. The tiny frogs were so cute, too!!

Here's a glimpse of the habitat from the side after we were home and transferred the tadpoles from the jar to the habitat.

Here they are the next day (today). I don't know if you can tell in this picture but the tadpole second from the left is the one who sprouted two little legs. Can you see them? Aren't they cute? I swear they weren't there yesterday!

They eat boiled lettuce right now. It's fun watching them eat and they really don't eat very much at all. I think I prepared too much for them. I boiled it and store it in the freezer. I gave them a little this morning and they've been eating it all day. When they get a little bigger I'll have to start giving them grub worms.... ew!! At least for now it's just boiled lettuce. =o)

Earth Day

I know that Earth Day was in April and we celebrated it in April but.... I haven't posted it until today. This year, Earth Day actually landed on a Sunday but Collin's teacher had an Earth Day party on the following Wednesday so that's when we celebrated it. :)

We read a book called "10 Things I Can Do to Help My World" by Melanie Walsh.

This lead to several conversations of things we can do at home to help the environment. We also went out and picked up trash in our neighborhood. And... what's a celebration without food, right?

Dirt cake, with gummy worms of course! :)

An earth cheesecake. Okay, I tried. Do you have any idea how hard it is to control where the cheesecake mix lands? Not easy at all!! haha! So, it doesn't quite look like earth but pretend that it does. ;)

What did you do for Earth Day?