Family Science Night

There are many things that impress us about the boys' school. Our school does a great job of the "extras" and by "extras" I'm referring to the many things that the school does that goes over and beyond the expected. When you choose to send your kids to a private school and start writing a big fat tuition check every month there are a lot of expectations, so for the school to go over and beyond those expectations is pretty impressive.

You are probably thinking, "Sure there are impressive extras. It's a private school." There's no arguing with that. Private schools definitely have resources that public schools currently do not (i.e., money.)  But our old public school had extras too. The difference? At our public school, the PTA coordinated and paid for the extras, and since I was on the PTA Executive Board it was hard to really ever be impressed with or fully enjoy our own work.

At our private school, the teachers and staff handle all of the extras. (Unless it's a party, then I have to be a 5th grade Party Mom, my latest school volunteering gig. You can take the mom out of the PTA, but will never completely take the PTA out of the mom.) But this particular extra, Family Science Night, was all about participating, no planning or partying required. I was able to just enjoy being there with my boys.

We learned about Optical Illusions. 

We experimented with creating a boat our of aluminum foil to see how many pennies you could float without sinking your craft.

Tried to build the tallest Marshmallow Tower out of toothpicks.

Found out what kind of fingerprints we had (lots of loops and swirls in our family.)

And even though they bickered about how to exactly create a suspension bridge out of masking tape and straws and didn't have a lot of patience when trying to get a paper clip to float, we had fun.

When it comes to impressive extras shared together as a family, that's really all that matters.

:: photo credit Palmer Freeman::