Laid-back

Today seemed pretty laid back. There's no spelling, handwriting, or memory work due since we only have three days of school because it's Holy Week. Still, some students got a head start on next week's spelling/handwriting.  They do have science labs and a social studies project/report due Wednesday, but not a boatload of assignments.  Since the workload is light, I let them work on Mystery Class for a round (answers to the 10 locations are due next Friday).  Not a lot of time!  The 7th and 8th graders are doing better on finding the locations. Of course, they've also been doing it for 3-4 years, so they know how it goes.  Each year I'm finding easier ways of teaching Mystery Class, which is good since kids at the beginning of my teaching career complained it was too hard.  It's still challenging, but much easier to complete (at least I think so).

This weekend my farmer and I went to the SPAM museum in Austin, MN.  Originally, we were going to ride horse, but since it looked like rain we thought we'd go the safer route and find something to do inside.  All the stuff we found on Explore MN was outside stuff, not open until May, or was far away.  He likes SPAM a lot, I like museums a lot, so we figured, why not?

It was really neat! They had samples of SPAM, Tocino and Portuguese Sausage. Fun facts: Tocino is only sold in the Philippines while Portuguese Sausage is only sold in Hawaii.  Tocino has so much sugar in it that when you fry it, the sugar leeches out and caramelizes into a coating over the meat.  On average, each person in Guam eats 25 cans of SPAM per year.  Outside the US, the following countries are huge eaters of SPAM: South Korea, Great Britain, and the Philippines.

The gift shop had all 15 flavors of SPAM for sale; 12 were in a variety pack! So my farmer bought his breakfast for the next couple months... we showed his parents after we got back and they suggested having a 'SPAM tasting' so everyone could try all the kinds.  That would be interesting!