Latitude and Longtidue . . . and French

Awhile back I asked Evie what she wanted to focus on this fall. In the past she has had concrete projects (making a quilt, baking more cakes, building a wishing well etc.). This time she said, without hesitation, "Well, I want to work on my swimming strokes once a week, latitude, longitude and french."

Right then.

I speak french, we are having lunch in french these days, we have french books galore, no problem.

Latitude and Longitude, eh? Evie has always been interested in this "map code system". Recently I blogged about reading Dava Sobel's book. We have played map games and globe games and now we have entered the world of geocaching.

Oh my goodness! It is addictively fun! We borrowed a GPS unit from a friend and found a multi-cache and an earth cache just yesterday! It is a treasure hunt using coordinates. Our understanding of the value of lat. and long. has been exponentially increased in just a day! We will be navigating via topo map on a backpacking trip today and participating in an Orienteering race next weekend. Not only are these all extremely practical skills for a family who loves adventure and the outdoors, it is amazing practice in calculation, estimation and understanding of a larger 3D world.

Yikes we have a fun life!

Oh, and we are going swimming once a week too.