We're a homeschooling family. That means we turn anything into a learning opportunity. Ever since we discovered geocaching last summer, we've made it part of our school day. The hobby encompasses geography, history, science, math - even P.E. Making our signature items has become a major art project. And since we keep a flexible school schedule, it makes it easy to be the first to find. (Just ask the local cachers.)

Most recently, I made geocaching the topic of a writing assignment. Since both girls wanted to do a science fair project with the G.P.S., they decided to work together. Carmen wrote about their experiences in her article, "G.P.S. and the Science Fair."

A question people often ask me about homeschooling is, "What about socialization?" To answer the question, read what Monica wrote in her article, "Geocaching with Friends."

Not to be undone, Teacher Mom wrote a song, dedicated to all families addicted to geocaching. See the next article and MP3 link for, "We are the Very Model of a Geocaching Family." Performed by the Claesson family.

G.P.S. and the Science Fair

This year my sister and I enjoyed a science fair project using our G.P.S. We thought about it for a while and decided to try to find out how much our G.P.S. varies from day to day. We went outside almost every day to three locations and marked down the date, day of the week, time, weather conditions, G.P.S. warm up seconds, G.P.S. accuracy and the latitude and longitude. We did this for 15 days.

Our G.P.S. varied about .022 minutes (120 feet) in both latitude and longitude. My sister and I were also interested in find that cloud cover doesn't affect our G.P.S. but precipitation does.

When we gave our talk to the judges, we explained geocaching to them. They were very interested in geocaching, and they wanted to check out www.geocaching.com. We also had the chance to show our experiment at a geocaching meeting.

Our G.P.S. may not be as accurate as others, so if you want to find out how much your G.P.S. varies, you can do an experiment of your own. Through our project we learned more about our G.P.S., and we had a lot of fun doing it.

Geocaching with Friends

Geocaching is a fun hobby to do with friends. Many of our friends enjoy geocaching and think it's a really fun way to spend time together.

The very first time we went caching, we took our friend Michelle. She already knew about geocaching after accidentally finding one while looking for wood for their woodburning stove. Michelle was really good at finding the caches. She found almost all the caches we looked for, and she really enjoyed it.

Our other friends, Melisa and Alison, also like geocaching a lot. Sometimes when we're driving to a cache, we yell, "Geocaching!" out the window. When we find one, Alison usually wants to take something.

Sometimes we take Ky and John with us. John always wants to find a cache, but he hasn't yet. Maybe he will next time we go geocaching with them.

On a nice day some of our friends set out to find a hard cache called Ancient Civilization. We decoded as much as we could of the clue, which was written in an ancient language. The moms sat in the car trying to figure out the number system. They got some numbers, but nothing that resembled coordinates. That night my mom played around with the numbers and got coordinates. Finally after three tries we found it. Our friends found it after that with their own G.P.S., and they have now started the hobby.

Geocaching is a fun way to spend time with your friends. Many people enjoy it.