My Little Girl is Famous....

My little girl is featured in the paper yet again for something fun we have done. She has spent the afternoon's of what is most kid's Spring Break at the Lubbock Lake Landmark taking classes. We still schooled through Spring Break as Much as Possible, but these were "Spring Break Classes." Anyhow, the newspaper was out yesterday and they interviewed the kids and took pictures. It was too cute. So although they got my daughter's age wrong, I will put it up here for you all to read. (She is 8, not 7 as the article states.)

Life Lessons: Local children learn about natural world during their spring break
By Adam D. Young AVALANCHE-JOURNAL
Friday, March 19, 2010
Story
last updated at 3/19/2010 - 12:17 am

Dozens of Lubbock children spent
their spring break digging in the dirt, sounding like thunder storms and eating
worms.

Well, that dirt-digging was a lesson on planting a garden of
life-sustaining vegetables and grains. That sound of thunder was produced by
Native American rope-and-string toys the children built themselves. And the
worms ...

"I'm not sure if it's alive or if it's gummy," 7-year-old
Keller Pettit said, lifting a spoonful of "worms and dirt" dessert to his mouth.

"Of course it's gummy - real worms aren't colored. They're brown,"
8-year-old Alyson Oliver said before she grabbed her own cup of a concoction
containing Cool Whip, gummy worms, Oreo cookies and vanilla pudding.

Alyson and Keller were among dozens of children eating, learning and
playing Thursday during the weeklong Spring Break Fest afternoon program at
Lubbock Lake Landmark.

The Landmark offered children the nature-oriented
course as a way to introduce them to the outdoors, said Susan Rowe, Lubbock Lake
Landmark education program manager.

"I want them to get in touch with
nature and develop not necessarily a love, but a concern or caring for nature,"
she said. "I also want them to know they can do things for themselves - they can
grown food."

A highlight of Thursday's program had the children working
with Landmark volunteers to plant Three Sisters Native American Gardens, a
combination of bean, corns and squash planted in a specific sequence within a
circle.

The three vegetables are important in Native American culture
because each provides essential nutrients the others don't, said Kristen Vogt, a
student intern at the Landmark who coordinated lessons for the program.

Beans provide protein and fat, corn provides sugar and squash provides
carbohydrates, she said.

Vogt sat with 7-year-old Anna Lonis, a
home-schooled student from Lubbock, trying to show her the order to plant the
vegetables. She told Anna the corn seed is planted first, in the center of the
intended plot.

The bean plants are buried around the corn kernel to
assist the beans' growth, said Rowe.

"The runner beans use corn as a
pole to grow up," she said.

Squash seeds, which will produce wide green
leaves, are planted outside of the circle.

"Their leaves will keep
moisture in the soil," Rowe said.

The children hadn't finished planting
the seeds and plants in the ground before they were hyper and wanted play time.

"I'm going to talk to the armadillo," Keller said, pointing to a more
than 3-foot-long armadillo statue he wanted to climb in a nearby field.

"Guys, you need to plant the squash," Vogt told the class.

Working with the children seemed a bit hectic, especially with the noise
and excitement produced by their thunder noise makers.

"They were loud
yesterday," she said. "That's why we went outside. We even had one boy that
repeatedly kept hitting himself in the leg."

Anna said the program at
the Landmark was a fun way for her to meet new friends and spend her time during
spring break. But being home schooled, she said, gave her a different
perspective than her peers on spring break.

"You do home school at home,
so I've been on spring break for a very long while," she said.

To
comment on this story:

adam.young@lubbockonline.com l 766-8725

charles.reinken@lubbockonline.com l 766-8706

OUR KIDS/Local
children learn about natural world during their spring break

Pretty cute, huh?!! If you want to see the pictures that went with it, here is the link, but she is not in any of them. Told you it was special!! :-)

http://lubbockonline.com/stories/031910/fea_592710272.shtml