Play of the Day

Happy Easter, everybody!

For you sports fans, here is an action sequence of the first goal Daniel's team scored in their game yesterday...





(Yes, Daniel is green #2.)

I Like Ike

Daniel recently did a presentation on President Eisenhower. Here are some photos.

After doing all the research and putting together the materials, they had a presentation where everybody dressed up as the person they researched, and then the parents went around and asked questions and tried to guess who they were. Daniel had an easy costume... :)



Here are all the various materials he put together for the presentation.



Here are close-ups of the brochure he made on Eisenhower.




Finally, here are some of the key events from Ike's life.

National History Day

National History Day is an event designed to promote the learning and understanding of history.  There are actually a bunch of programs (see www.nationalhistoryday.org), but in practical terms, what it comes down to is kids choose a topic that relates to a particular theme (this year: "The Individual In History"), and then do some sort of presentation on that theme.  It can be a paper, a Web site, a performance, etc., but most often the kids chose to do displays.

At our middle school, the kids in the 6th and 7th grade Challenge classes participate.  This year Lisa decided to get together with a friend and do a group project on Scott Joplin.  These projects involve a lot of research, and they have to search out and identify the difference between primary and secondary sources, draw connections, put the topic in historical context, demonstrate how it relates to the yearly theme, explain why it was important in history, etc.  In addition to library and Internet research, Lisa and her friend contacted museums back East for information, etc.  And that's all before they start the display.  In addition, they also had to produce a variety of collateral material, and answer questions from judges about their project. It's a good solid three months of a lot of hard work.

The kids were judged in "flights", groups of 8-9 projects.  Lisa and her friend took third in their flight of eight, which is pretty good, except that the top two get to go on to state competition, so they just missed that.  But they had one of the more impressive displays there (most kids just do posters), and got a lot of attention for it.

Here are some photos of their display.







(Oh yeah, and they had a CD player inside the piano playing Joplin rags. It was pretty cool.)

Happy Birthday, Andrew! (part 2)

More of Andrew's birthday celebration...

Continuing with the skiing theme, here is Andrew's cake:




And the obligatory "blowing out the candles" shots:




And a few random cousin pictures, just because they're so darned cute.

Happy Birthday, Andrew! (part 1)

For Andrew's birthday we went skiing.  The snow was great (they'd had 21" of fresh snow that week), the weather was great, the scenery was beautiful, and we had a lot of fun. Here are a few random photos...

Let It Snow...

Following up on the last post... one more sign of spring in Boise: snow. We had a regular blizzard this afternoon, with about an inch of snow. Then it stopped, the sun came out, and much of it melted. That's a Boise spring for you.

Signs of Spring

The rain last night melted the last vestiges of snow from our yard. That makes it over two months of continuous snow presence in our yard, which is pretty darned good for Boise. (Or bad, I guess, if you don't like winter so much.)

I've also seen robins in the yard for the last two days, and some bulbs are sprouting in the warmest flower beds.

Looks like spring might be on its way.

But hopefully skiing isn't quite over yet!