boot camp and backyard learning

Today, I will be enjoying a day away at Baltimore Bloggy Boot Camp, learning a bit about SEO, PR, and Social Media while meeting some new local bloggers and hanging with some of my old pals.

I'm very much looking forward to it, but I know I will be missing one of our first warm and sunny weekend days here. So I'm hoping (and crossing my fingers!) that while I'm in a conference room with other cool-cat bloggers, that my husband and kids spend some quality time outside, having fun cleaning up after our nutty squirrels.

I'm thinking bike riding, scooting, soccer, and baseball, with a little learning on the side.

Here's a re-post from last March that I'm envisioning for today, this time with Owen and Cora as the big-word builders. . .

We have crazy squirrels in our backyard, ones who have tried repeatedly and failed repeatedly to make a nest in our now-infamous swing tree. Each time their nest fails, a million tiny sticks are left in our yard. Today, as we've done many times, we had to clean up their mess. This time, however, we worked hard and played hard--with the squirrel sticks, that is.

• Squirrel Sticks: I set Maddy, Owen, and Cora to work gathering the sticks in the yard so that no one would fall on them--honestly, there's that many some days. Today Maddy and Owen were determined to try out their new soccer cleats and kick around the ball, so we had to have a clean "field" first.

We put them in a pile by the sandbox, and Maddy held up a funny-looking stick and said, Hey, here's a 'y'!! And so the fun began. . .

I said, Let's use the sandbox lid as our paper and make our names with sticks. Maddy already has the 'y'. Let's use the squirrel sticks to build the rest of the letters to Maddy's name.

So that's what we did. While Owen ran back and forth dribbling the soccer ball in his new cleats, Maddy and I spelled her name and Cora's name--not perfectly, of course--but the best we could. And we spelled 'Mom' and 'Dad', since we had the letters already.

Just a little bit of letter practice on this fantastically sunny day (woo-hoo!), using the sticks already spread around our yard by the not-so-smart squirrels. It was a Wikki stix-meets-Building Letters-meets-the Great Outdoors-kind of learning.