Jackson Homestead Meeting

Today we visited the Jackson Homestead. Sara Goldberg, the curator of manuscripts and photographs, helped us find information and resources for our Civil War Project. She also taught us what primary and secondary resources are. We used some VERY old books, documents and read some sad letters written by the soldiers. We learned a lot!!

Pictures at the Jackson Homestead

Winter Forum 2014

We went to Tewksbury today to participate in the Winter Forum. We went to lots of workshops, including:

• Bread Baking
• Woodworking
• Scrapbooking
• Magazine Making
• Tile Art
• Dog Biscuit Making
• Clay
• Food for Your Face
• Cupcake Decorating
• Creative Writing
• Origami
• Felting
• Face Painting
• Cheese Making

We all entered the raffle and most of us had some luck. Daisy won a music playing, heated, massager!!! Lunch included chili, hot dogs, grilled cheese and meatball subs. Overall we had an awesome day and we can't wait until next year!

Click here to see some photos of our day

Trip to the Cemetery

Plant A Smile took a trip to the Newton Cemetery last Sunday. We had a lot of fun reading maps and figuring out if/where the solders were buried at the cemetery. We also came up with a couple of questions to ask at the Jackson Homestead in two weeks. 

Copying down soldiers names from monument.

Marking longitude and latitude on Garmin

Finding our first buried solider-Lt Eben White

Arnold Arboretum

We visited the Arnold Arboretum and Donna Tremonte, an applications programer, showed us how the arboretum uses GIS to map over 15,000 plants! Donna explained to us what GIS is, how you use GIS, how to use the arboretum's interactive map and how she got involved with plants and GIS. When she finished, we went to the visitors center and then walked around the arboretum. Is was REALLY cold out but we hunted and found the arboretum's tree of the month - a Dawn Redwood. We had lots of fun and learned a lot. THANKS DONNA!

Credit to everyone for the awesome pictures!

Click here to view Arnold Arboretum Photos

Sophia's and Gabriel's

Helping out at Sophia's house and seeing Gabriel's garden for the first time.

BIG E!

 Plant A Smile had a lot of fun at the Big E! We did lots of fun things, like stay in the dorm, see galaxy girl, go on elephant rides, and a lot more. We ran out of Alka Seltzer at the end because we had so many visitors! Did you know... The Big E, also known as The Eastern States Exposition had over  1 million visitors this year. It is the sixth largest fair in the whole nation! Hopefully we get the opportunity  to go back next year!

Exited to leave!

Sophia and Katharine pouring oil into bottles.

Explaining to people about Lamps of Lava.

Getting lot's of visitors!

Sophia and Katherine seeing what it's like to milk a cow.

Having fun.

Nice job Sophia!

PIG RACING!

Getting very busy.

Enjoying food in the dining hall.

Marching in parade!

Preparing For Big E

Getting ready to present "lamps of lava" at the Big E!