Friday, June 30, 2006

Sewer lines?

Jack attends a University Model Classical Christian School, which means he goes to school three days a week and we homeschool the other two days. We absolutely love it. Over the summer, we are trying to keep up with the "school routine" by doing a little bit of work during Mitchell's naptime most weekdays. We're reviewing math facts and other math concepts with Jack and, since Holly Grace wanted to "do schoolwork" too, we're working on number recognition and writing numbers with her. As a side note, Wal-Mart has some really great little "workbooks" by SchoolZone that the kids really enjoy.

So to make things a bit more fun, I picked up a "Travel the 50 States" workbook and some maps with stickers for the kids. We read about and study a state each day and geography is their favorite "subject". For each state, there's a map with major cities and landforms and we talk about them each day. We started with Alabama and are working our way through the states alphabetically.

Today we were on Connecticut, and we were looking at the map. We were talking about the symbols on the map (as we do every day) for highways, rivers, lakes, cities, etc. Jack turned to me and said, "When are we going to have another sewer line?"

"Excuse me?" I say, thinking something has gone horribly wrong with the installation of the backyard sprinkler system that is John's current project.

"When are we going to have another sewer line?" he repeats.

"I'm sorry, Jack, but I really don't know what you're talking about."

"Here, I'll show you," he says patiently, and flips through our book till he gets to the Alaska page. "See, like this one," he says and points to a red line cutting a swath from North to South in Alaska.

"Ah, yes," I say, suppressing my laughter, "You mean pipeline. That's the Alaska pipeline." Whew.

By the way, I think that Alaska is the only state with a pipeline on its map. I'll let you know when we've finished all 50 states.

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