Field Trip!

I have to start this post by saying that I LOVE that my sister now lives only an hour away from me. Last year, when she lived in southern Oregon, it was so hard! Now we get to see each other a lot and can plan fun field trips!

 

It's also so wonderful that we are both homeschooling our children using the same program (Classical Conversations). This years' program focus was American History, so a visit to the End of the Oregon Trail Museum in Oregon City was a must! The museum overall was ok, but the time with family was priceless!

Dressed up like pioneers (Sam, Seth, Clara, Aidah, Miriam, and Edmund)

Watching a very long-worded slideshow on the first Oregon settlers

The Oregon Trail!

A real covered wagon

Edmund teaching Josh to go down the stairs forward

A pretend school session, with teacher Miriam

The babies spent the day in power struggles with one another over various items. This is Edmund sharing the school bell string with Josh. Good sharing buddy!

Making their own candles was definitely a highlight of the day!

Miriam and Aidah

Sammy

 

Here is my brief opinion of the museum: the check-in process was very slow, and it seemed that they were more used to school groups checking in than individual families. It was only after wandering around for a bit that we acquired a "guide" that took us to the various sections of the museum. She was very nice and informative. She also worked with us to avoid the school field trip groups, which was nice (tip if you did want to avoid school groups all together: go in the afternoon around 2 o'clock, when all the groups have gone--the entire museum was empty except us and one other family). The museum was geared towards kids probably 7-12...a lot of reading, and not much for the really young ones. There were some fun hands on things such as providing pioneer dress-up clothes, loading a wagon base with pretend sacks, making their own candles, and the mock school room. A couple hours is plenty to tour the whole museum.