Watch, Travel, and Learn

This weekend, I began putting on paper some of my ideas for homeschooling this year. I will be attempting to balance a little bit of structure with a little bit of freedom. We shall see how this goes. I vacillate between being quite hopeful and googling "boarding schools in remote mountainous villages with no internet connection."

I am planning to make two things happen each week: watch a great movie together and take a day trip somewhere together. So today I sat down with my pen and paper and started coming up with lists, of movies and destinations. Anyone else out there interested in helping build these lists? Let's get started.

Movies

Some of these I will have to review before deciding whether to show my kids and which kids to include; I'm really looking for great movies everyone can watch together. I think I am a teensy bit more permissive than the norm when it comes to what I let my kids watch. Any and all suggestions welcome!

• The Miracle Worker
• To Kill a Mockingbird
• Born Free
• Free Willy
• Chariots of Fire
• Breaking Away
• Yankee Doodle Dandy
• Gandhi
• Grapes of Wrath
• Judgment at Nuremberg
• All the President's Men
• Much Ado About Nothing
• Roots I-VI
• West Side Story
• The Yearling
• Winged Migration
• My Fair Lady
• Michael Collins
• Oklahoma!
• Gorillas in the Mist

• What else should we see?

Destinations (Local-ish)

• Monterey Bay Aquarium
• Gold Rush Country
• California Missions
• The Capitol (Sacramento)
• Google
• A movie production studio
• The Redwood Forest
• The San Jose Tech Museum
• Stanford University (just to see the Rodin garden!)
• Find the painted alphabet letters in San Francisco

• Where else should we go?

So my silly Netflix instant set up is not working, and I need to fix that before school starts, to make the movie part of my plan more efficient. I can't figure it out, and I'm unwilling to pay someone to fix it...although I'm getting closer to forking it over.

There are lists out there -- I'm just looking to make a couple of my own. Once I have nice long ones for both movies and trips, I will make them permanent links on one of my side bars; maybe other homeschooling families, or other people who like movies and going places, can use them too.

Let the listing begin!

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