Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo

We really enjoyed our visit to the Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo when we were passing through on a layover from Finland to the U.S. There are dozens of outdoor sculptures around the museum, and a guide to them made for children to find them--it was quite a game to find them all, especially the Gormley sculpture attached to the side of the building. We learned about sculptures of Louise Bourgeois, Udo Rondinone, Paul Kelly, and even Damien Hirst, whose sliced up cows were not particularly appreciated by the art lover pictured here. We talked about all the art we saw--we spent hours there--and what they could mean, what the artist could be trying to tell us, what we saw in them ourselves. A perfect day of art.As

Big Tables

I love big tables, much needed for homeschooling. In this picture you can see our workbooks, handwriting practice, my Roberto Bolaño and I Ching, storyboards for a proposed vampire movie starring child vampires, drawings inspired by our latest reading about London evacuees from WWII, and a diagram of the parts of a mushroom.

If you can have a table that doesn't need to be cleared off, and projects can go on for days, even better! Right now we have a painting project that has gone on daily for five days in a row. That was one of the things I immediately appreciated about homeschooling: if you got into something you could keep working on it for days without having to clean up in between!