Beach Schooling!

Perks of homeschooling in Hawaii: when it's a nice day with no planned outings, we can pack a bag of books and do lessons at the beach! We went back to Dog Beach and spread a blanket under a tree for lessons (yes, shady trees on the beach; it's a game changer). After completing Bible, history, reading, and writing, we declared the last couple hours of the morning science lesson: we went exploring further out into the water, waded to a small island, and walked down the beach for a bit. Along the way, we spotted several schools of fish, a bonded snake eel, a couple sea urchin shells, a sea cucumber, several ghost crabs, a pair of cloudless sulphur butterflies, many bits of coral, and a submarine!

Makerspace

Our local library recently started a monthly Makerspace for elementary-aged kids! Makerspace is a gathering for hands-on STEM learning.) This month's event featured Squishy Circuits. The girls got to learn about electricity and circuits by completing a series of projects using LEDs, a battery pack, insulating dough, and conducting dough. The librarian walked them through the outlined steps, but let them do a lot of experimenting off-script. They were thrilled! In honor of Veteran's Day weekend, their final project was a dough American flag lit up with LEDs.

Long weekends mean epic board game battles! Daddy and the girls took over the kitchen table with a massive Magic: The Gathering board game, and pulled out some new pieces they hadn't played with yet. So much fun!

Neighborhood Luau
Our neighborhood hosted a luau recently that involved food vendors, free leis, bounce houses, a local band, hula dancers, and a fire dancer. We met up with two other families to enjoy a few hours of good food and good entertainment. The girls even got to go up and participate in a short hula lesson!

Stuffing their happy little faces with classic Hawaiian fare from the food truck:
garlic shrimp, korean barbecue, mac salad, and a tuna poke bowl. 

Dog Beach
Some neighbors introduced us to an awesome new beach! It's a little unmarked beach in Mamala Bay with limited access, and we practically had it to ourselves. It's a nice stretch of beach with picnic tables under trees, no waves, and so shallow the girls could walk out into the water a hundred yards and still only be in water up to their knees. Just perfect for a picnic dinner and a little sand and water play

while watching the sunset. The girls declared this a must-visit location when little cousins decide to come visit!

Those little specks are my kids!

Zoo Day
We finally made it to the local zoo! It's a great little zoo--a fun place to spend a morning seeing animals from all over the world, admiring local plants, playing on an awesome climbing structure, and topping it all off with a stop at the cafe for Dole Whip (pineapple soft serve, an amazingly good local favorite). Good times!

Bug was an especially big fan of the petting zoo.

No zoo visit is complete without a statue to climb on!

We found a VERY friendly peacock.

This playground was probably the favorite stop. It's hard to tell
but there are bridges, swings, and hammocks inside all that.

Check out this tree! We decided those are roots growing out of the branches.

Halloween
Halloween is a major event in our neighborhood.

Kids come from all over the island! In addition to most people passing out candy, a lot of houses go all out with decorations and one even had a (very mild) haunted circus tent for the kids to walk through. We met up with half a dozen of the girls' friends and spent an hour walking through maybe half of the neighborhood until their buckets were full.

There were some great costumes out there! The girls were very excited about theirs. Lion's Jack 'o Lantern was a costume we put together in a previous year, and Monkey's (the woodland elf) and Bug's (Rey) costumes were created by raiding our closets and visiting the craft store. My favorite costume sighting was probably the van full of neighborhood maintenance workers dressed as minions that we spotted while hanging out at the pool with friends earlier in the day. (Yes, October in Hawaii is still outdoor swimming weather--it's usually in the mid-80s here.)