Last Sunday, Jason, the girls and I headed over to my alma mater, Rutgers College, to go to a children's art program at the Zimmerli. Although I spent several years there, I had never been to the art museum and I was quite impressed. I've been to the Princeton University Art Museum many times and I have to say that when you are there, you know you are at Princeton. Likewise with the Zimmerli, it has a very unobtrusive intellectual understatedness that I recognize as purely Rutgers. It felt a little like coming home. I was awed by the Non-Conformist art and look forward to going back there and spending more time in that gallery. We discussed how art does not have to be beautiful; paying attention to the emotion it invokes in you is perhaps more important than the 'beauty' of a piece; we added the word 'visceral' to our vocabulary. They also had a special exhibition entitled Water with a wonderful display of art, the most visceral for me were photographs from Haiti of people bathing in a sacred waterfall while "Amazing Grace" was subtly piped into the room. The girls and I discussed the job of a curator and how the decision of where to place art, what to place it near, how to display it, has an effect on how it is viewed and seen. We thought about how, if a certain painting was near something else, we may feel entirely different about it.
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| P working on her art project at the Zimmerli. |
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| A creating a masterpiece at the Zimmerli. |
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| This is what P draws when a table is covered in paper. |
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| My contribution. |
While we were on the Rutgers College Ave. campus, I realized that I was blind in my late teens and early twenties, because there was seriously so much of the campus that I walked past and never paid attention to in my rush to get to class or to a friend's dorm. I knew there was a modern building that was completely out of character at the bottom of the quad, but never bothered to realize it was the Theological Seminary. I never noticed the married student housing with the toys scattered all over the lawns. I never noticed the statues, monuments and memorials.
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| This robot gathered data in the ocean as it crossed the Atlantic. |
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| It is the first robot to cross the Atlantic. |
We wanted to give the girls' the "full-on" Rutgers experience...
the "full-on Rutgers experience" would not be complete without Fat Sandwiches from the Grease Trucks.
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| We gave the girls the 'complete' RU experience: |
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| Fat sandwiches from the Rutgers Grease Trucks. |
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| P insists that this is now her favorite place to eat! |
Monday was a great day at co-op and a great visit with my grandmother :)
Tuesday we really hit our stride. I realized/remembered how when I taught pre-school, I would always take time to prepare a lesson plan and then get in there and start and basically completely disregard my lesson plan as the conversation and activities took a new, different, better turn. I have opened myself up to that again and things just flowed, for the girls and I.
Wednesday our homeschool time went very well again, but we came up against a new challenge: between working at the library 8-14 hours a week, spending 7 hours at co-op, 20 or so hours schooling and another few hours preparing, grocery shopping and cooking...I just can't do it all. But everyone is used to me DOING IT ALL. My family is not used to preparing dinner on nights that I work or doing dishes or emptying the dishwasher and it caused some tension in our house that we have to figure out either how I can accomplish more with the time I have or what others are willing to help with.
Today, Thursday, the girls began working on their lapbooks about our state. They had both worked on descriptive paragraphs about themselves this week. A published hers to her blog and P published hers to her blog.
We have been tracking P's Teaching Textbooks all week and they are due to arrive tomorrow...she is very excited to check them out, but has been using Multiplication.com for her math this week.
Tomorrow we are headed to Jockey Hollow. Saturday my brother and sister-in-law and niece are coming over and Sunday we are looking forward to meeting Jessica from Teachable Moments and her family in the city!!
Hope you all have a great weekend!
