...is another man's treasure!
Last week Mirek brought two huge black garbage bags full of ... well ... garbage! He had started finishing a basement for the client, and the place was full of stuff that was not needed by the previous owner anymore. And as Mirek has gotten my "schooling" about being recourseful and giving things a second chance in life, he just couldn't put those things into a dumpster!
And now we have a globe! In great condition, probably barely used. Mirek's passion is geography and we've been thinking about getting one. He was so eager to show the girls all the places they'd talked about before. Now Ivana remembers the places on the globe where her grandmas and grandpas live.
And we also have a microscope! Our curious four year old was sooo thrilled and ready to look at the germs and bacteria. Well... it's not that type of a microscope, but we had so much fun with it on the weekend! There were a couple of ready samples like a feather, a tiny piece of nylon, seeds from some kind of plant. But we didn't stop on the ready samples. We took a thin coating from the onion (both of us remembered doing that in school). We compared a human's hair with a dog's hair. We scraped some orange peel. Mirek shook off a couple of dandruff flakes (yes, we are that crazy!). I wanted to see if we could find the dustmites on the fibers of the carperting. No luck there... Then Ivana found a dried out bee. We tore it's wings and put under the microscope. We got so excited! Mirek checked all the windows and found a lot of potential material to examine: a moth, a mosquito, a lady bug, a fly. What we liked the most were the legs of the lady bug. Hairy! I guess we'll never look at this cute bug the same way!
Well.. sounds like we are one untidy family, right? Wrong! We were in our house in the Poconos, and the used to be alive insects got stuck between the windows and the screens and dried out.
It was the firts science class at our "school at home"...
3 comments:
I love treasures like that!! I am one of those weird women who gets more excited at a great find at a rummage sale than shopping all day at a mall. My kid's favorite plaything as children was a REAL doctors bag, with stethescope and other tools, and I filled with ace bandages. We got it for a whopping $1 at a yard sale!
This is a great story, Julia! Maybe you want to use it for the Carnival of Homeschooling? Let me know by next Monday!
Wow you are lucky! A globe and a microscope are still on my 'wish list' of things we want!
You should also investigate Freecycle.org as a good way to find stuff that you are looking for or to take what others are giving away or to also get rid of your own stuff, to recycle it to others.
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