Three Plus Two

Nature for Little People

Our "nature" area... Tomatoes saved from frost on the windowsill, Snack-Jack pumpkins from the garden, baskets of nature finds, a dried ear of Gareth's Black Aztec corn, a basket of tree-related books, and a sumac tree Gareth found in the yard and transplanted into a pot. 

The weather this week has been mostly gorgeous and leading up to what looks like peak weekend for fall color, and we have been trying to make the most of it.  On Wednesday, I took the little boys for a nature walk around the yard.  I gave them a basket and told them that we would collect leaves and pine cones and rocks and whatever else they wanted to put in it.  This suggestion was met with enthusiam, and the five of us (Chipmunk was on my back) set off for a tour of the yard. 

 

Our haul... The big yellow leaves are pignut hickory (I think), then maple leaves (of course)... and I really do think we've got sugar maples, not red maples... birch bark, asters...

 

(You can see that we brought along a few knights as a bodyguard.  The colors on this picture are a little funny because the camera was on the wrong setting.)

The boys wanted to stay in the yard for our walk.  They did not want to venture into the field.  Granted that our yard is much bigger and wilder than most, experience with other little people (Gareth and Katydid) in small suburban yards makes me think that at this age, you don't need a lot of complicated field trips anyway.  Gareth and Katydid had their love of nature kindled by picking up stone landscaping blocks to observe the roly-polies (pill bugs or wood lice) eating the mulch, by observing the butterflies that fluttered through our flower beds, by collecting acorns that fell from a big oak tree that stood on the hill behind us.  Every once in a while, we would head off to a park with a playground and a nature trail, where I would let them play until they wanted to be done playing, and then we would set off down the trail through the woods. 

In this house, we still do the play and walk routine:

Pop needed to take a break on the tire swing.

  And, of course, we had to run around with the chickens a bit.  (Pip volunteered to carry the basket and did a very good job.)  Then we were off on our walk again.

Farmerboy discovered some sap on this spruce tree and several rows of holes probably tapped by sapsuckers.  He touched the sap to prove it was sticky. 

After we collected pine cones from beneath the spruce trees (spruce cones??), Farmerboy remembered how the water collects in that corner of the yard every spring to form a shallow pond.  He hypothesized about how the water came down the hill, so we studied the lay of the land a bit, and I pointed out that we should have been able to tell that this part of the land was wet when we moved in because of the big weeping willow that grows there.  I love weeping willows, but this is the only place we've ever lived that we've actually had one.  The limbs are too weak for climbing unfortunately, but they still make a good "secret place" which the kids use sometimes when they play their "Civilization" game (which involves a lot of trading between different "cities".)   

The underside of a roll of birch bark which made its way beneath the willow tree through "trade"... 

There was also a big thistle beneath the willow tree that the boys wanted to examine.  Farmerboy wondered if it was possible to pull all the thistle's spines off in an attempt to neutralize it.  The answer is no.

After we poked around under the willow tree, Farmerboy wanted to show us the other spots in the yard that have become "cities". 

Katydid's city is located in the ferns.  I'm not sure what kind of ferns we have, but could they possibly be New York ferns?  You can also see that our chickens think that we are part of the flock.  They followed us on our walk around the yard and are now foraging for bugs among the leaf litter and rotting stumps.

Farmerboy investigates the soft, crumbly pile of completely rotted wood at the base of one of the stumps. 

The stump itself is hollow and used as a "storage area", Farmerboy informs me.  Pip immediately decides to store some rocks.

After investigating the ferns, we head around the side yard to the remains of the huge tree that came down last year.  The wind blows maple leaves from the trees in the front yard back this way, and we examine and collect a few pretty ones. 

Katydid and Gareth have joined us by this point.  One of the choices up on the white board this particular morning was to take a nature walk and journal the finds.  I knew that Katydid would enjoy this choice, and I hoped to encourage Gareth to document what he found, if he chose that option.  He did, and it surprised me.  But, he informed me, nature journaling is kind of "boring."  Alas. 

Katydid took a picture of a wooly bear caterpillar for us... 

 

... but by that time, the little boys had done enough nature walking and were ready to play!

Fall Term, Week 2: Feast Days and Birthdays

We seem to be doing a lot of coloring pages lately, don't we?  This is a sampling of the paper work from last week, which included the feast days of the Archangels, St. Therese, and the Guardian Angels.  We also noted that Rosh Hashanah fell on Monday and Tuesday as well.  (The archangel coloring pages are from Charlotte at Waltzing Matilda, who has created in my children a steady demand for saints coloring pages.  So, Charlotte, if you're reading, please keep drawing more pages!!! )

For Choice Time this week, there was baking, and some epic writing (Katydid's start on her epic is pictured above), and reading and copying of prayers.  Pip and Pop worked with some dry pouring activities and sorted seashells, and Farmerboy spent a long time trying to float clay boats with seashell cargo before testing a bunch of stuff (toys, wood, pennies, etc.) to see if it would float.  (All of this was apparently inspired by watching Curious George on PBS.)

I should have pictures, but I was too busy making sure Pop treated his own basin of water responsibly at the time.

We're keeping up with Latin, math, language, and spelling, although Katydid's math is not going as well as I'd hoped and I'm probably going to end up going my own way there again, for the final time.

More notable this week...

Our first fire in the wood stove, and...

Pip and Pop turned three!  I have to admit that I wondered if we would make it this long.  The other day Katydid sighed and said, "And next year, they'll be four."  To which I replied, "Let's not get ahead of ourselves here."

One day at a time, right? 

Time to play UPS Guy...

and knights.

Still, it's hard to believe... three years ago, as I was sitting in a hospital bed trying to tandem nurse two screaming babies, I had no idea what the next three years would hold.  When I look back at who I was pre-twins, it's like I was a completely different person.  There's no denying that the last three years have been tough, but there's also no denying that I wouldn't trade them.  For anything.

Winterizing Chickens

I promised Theresa I would post what I found out about winterizing chicken coops.  Today Andy and I were looking at our coop and scratching our heads (again) about what to do.  So I came in and googled winter, chickens, and upstate New York.  This video answered many of our questions.  (Who knew a plastic shower curtain could be so useful?)  There's also a thread here on coop prep for northern climates, posted by an individual in Maine.

When I looked for information in chickens in Alaska, I found this farm and this page of photos, which includes pictures of a coop under construction.  So it can be done!

Baking Bread with Children

Well, weekdays are rocketing by with no chance to blog at all.  I have any number of posts I'd like to write, but I'm afraid I'm just going to have to jam what I can into the weekends.  I spent most of today getting all my hair cut off (donated to Locks of Love) and Internet shopping for winter clothes for Katydid, now that I can't ignore the fact that summer is over -- it was a damp 50 degrees today and we had our fist fire in the woodstove.  But I wanted to get this post out before it was old news.  I think I started it on Tuesday or Wednesday.

Way back when we began thinking about homeschooling, I started out by reading the Colfaxes' books (as I'm sure many others did): Homeschooling for Excellenceand Hard Times in Paradise.  I think it was in Hard Times (my favorite of the two) that they use the phrase "practical bookishness" to describe their method of homeschooling.  As our vision of homeschooling (and homesteading) has grown, that phrase has stuck with me as something to be aspired to.  I, too, would like our homeschooling to be characterized by a "practical bookishness", and to the "practical" end this year, I thought we might learn a bit about baking bread. 

Considering the fact that I do not live in an unelectrified homestead in the California mountains, I'm doing this a little less as a necessity and more as an intentional teaching of skills.  (Actually, I don't know a whole lot about baking bread myself, so it's really a family affair.)  In case anyone else is in need of them, I thought I would share some of the resources I've found: 

Making Bread Set, a free download from Montessori For Everyone.  Lori's "Simple Yeast Bread" recipe that comes with the cards is aboslutely fantastic.  Gareth used it to make "dragon bread" for the Feast of the Archangels on Monday, and the boys completely devoured it.  I shouldn't have even made dinner; all they wanted to eat was bread.  After watching Gareth make the bread (independently), Farmerboy wanted to make bread, too, so today I used this recipe, plus the cards, with the little boys.  First we laid out the cards in order and I read them.  Then we gathered our ingredients (each of them taking a particular item to the table) and mixed the dough (each doing a particular job).  I can't say it was relaxing, but it went very well.  In fact, I imagine that we may be eating quite a lot of what is becoming known around here as "dragon bread" in the near future.

***"Dragon Bread" happens to be dough formed in the shape of a dragon and baked on a cookie sheet instead of in a loaf pan.  We let the dough rise, made the shapes on a cookie sheet (using raisins for eyes, etc.), covered the dough and let it rise again.  It rose too much on the second rise, though, and the shapes kind of all melted together.  I think that next time we make this we'll experiment with only one rise, and maybe ten minutes of "resting" before baking.  The kids are already talking about making "Turkey Bread" for Thanksgiving.

Baking Bread with Children.  This is a very Waldorf-y book which not only contains recipes but tips, stories, songs, etc., that have to do with baking bread.  We haven't used any of the recipes yet, and of course it makes the baking-with-children process sound very homey and peaceful, which is often NOT the case in my experience (homey, yes, peaceful, no).  But the recipes do look yummy.

The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book: A Guide to Whole Grain Bread-Making.  This one's on order from Amazon.  It looks like there's lots and lots of information here.

I haven't looked for picture books yet -- Farmerboy went directly from clamoring to bake bread to clamoring to do sink/float experiments with clay boats (something else we did this week) -- but I would like to read a few to the little boys.  If you have any favorite bread books, leave a comment and let me know!

Week in Review: Back to School? (Take 2)

Let's try this again.

Basically, the gist of this week can be summed up as: "Life is not perfect, so we're just going to have to do it anyway."  We all got sick last week, which meant that starting school this week did not go the way I had envisioned.  On the other hand, we just did it anyway, and though accompanied by some chaos, an ear infection or two, and a two year old braining his brother on the head with a log from the stack of firewood, it went well enough.  (Or at least as well as anyone could expect!)

This is a picture of chaos waiting to happen. And yes, he is actually standing inside the cabinet.  But, hey!  There's only one of him!

You can find detailed notes at Show Your Work, but here's the overview:

Faith

Our focus this week happened to be faith.  (Before you think too much of me, this was not what I had planned either.  As I was cooking dinner tonight, my husband asked me what I was making.  "A winter squash pie," I said, "with the leftover squash.  It's kind of an experiment."  To which my husband replied, "If you had said that you knew exactly what you were doing and everything was proceeding exactly according to plan, then I would have been nervous.")

Anyway, I read The Way of the Cross: A Story of Padre Pio to the kids in little bits throughout the week.  St. Pio's feast day was September 23, but the book was too long to read in one day, and too good not to read.  It even kept my five year old interested, and apparently made him think enough that he connected Padre Pio's story of suffering to way back in the spring, when we read St. George and the Dragon and talked about how everyone has a dragon of his or her own to slay.  "Padre Pio had a hard life," he said, thoughtfully, before he wandered away.

We also attempted an observation of the Ember Days of autumn, thanks to my friend Jennifer at Wildflowers and Marbles.  Last spring I'd discovered the Rogation Days too late to make an observance of them, but tucked the information away in my file crate for this year.  This year I found the Church's seasonal days of fasting and thanksgiving particularly meaningful, considering where we live (a poor, rural area of upstate New York) and how we are trying to live (raising more of our own food, eating locally, etc.).  It seemed appropriate to give thanks for our bounty and to contemplate the upcoming season -- that is, winter, particularly this winter, when rising fuel and food prices will increase the hardship of many. 

Preschool and Kindergarten

Considering that Farmerboy is five this year and that the twins need to learn to use their powers for good and not evil, I wrote a more formal preschool/kindergarten time into our schedule.  I didn't get a great start with the little boys this week but we did start.  Predictably, Farmerboy is having a little trouble with the idea of "this time is required", but I expected that.  Because I wasn't able to get our environment set up in time, our indoor activities were kind of cobbled together.  They sorted and counted plastic fish and transportation counters, did some matching activities with the alphabet matching cards from Montessori for Everyone and MCP Phonics K, and Farmerboy helped me put together our new teen bead hanger.

Required work?

Well, we do use some.  This year I'm experimenting with writing out assignment sheets for Gareth and Katydid.  Gareth's is weekly, but Katydid has requested a daily sheet.  This is also the first year I am making actual reading assignments... although even here I'm giving the kids a few choices to pick from.  Our "theme" this year is mythology and ancient history, so the reading choices I offered the kids reflect that.  Gareth chose to start out with The Children's Homer and Katydid chose D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths.  I also put in some science reading, because the kids enjoy it: I gave Gareth The Story of Science: Aristotle Leads the Way and Katydid was excited to start Apologia's Flying Creatures of the Fifth Day.  (The bird chapters aren't telling her anything she doesn't know when it comes to indentification, but I think it would be a good idea if she learned about classification and the mechanics of flight.)

The kids also started back on the old standard subjects: math, language, spelling, and Latin.  Gareth and Katydid are both using Saxon books (7/6 for Gareth and 5/4 for Katydid) this year, although I'm going to supplement Katydid's with a good dose of Montessori-inspired work whenever warranted, and possibly a dollop of Waldorf-inspired math, too.  (Mainly I just want her to realize that the numbers in her book actually do connect with reality.)  For Latin this year, Gareth is going back to Lively Latin and Katydid is starting Latina Christiana I, which she is excited about.   

Choice Time?

My goal was to start having Choice Time again this week, but with everyone recovering from their colds, I thought sleep was more important.  I did put some choices on the board, though, and Gareth and Katydid made a few choices this week: Gareth checked out some websites on the equinox and read the book About Time: A First Look at Time and Clocks.  Katydid started the "Birds of the World" project we talked about over the summer, in which she is to learn geography by studying the birds of each continent.  African birds were her first pick.

Art, of course

Because there's always art.  See if you can pick out Katydid's picture.  I thought so.  You'll also note what happens when a five year old boy decides to draw a rainbow picture.  And, yes, that is a scorpion beside the knight.  Farmerboy put that in when I asked him if he was going to color the sky or the grass.  ("No, but how about a scorpion?")

FarmSchooling, Nature Study, and Other Seasonal Stuff

We did feel good enough to get outside for a few days this week.  The twins and I collected leaves and crabapples and talked about why trees don't have legs.  We all examined the remains of the tree that fell last year and were all delighted to rip the bark off discover the little mushrooms growing there.  We spent a lot of time watching chickens.  And Chipmunk has developed a keen interest in the pumpkins and tomatoes currently in residence in the dining/learning room.

A few photos, to make a long post even longer:

"The Animal Rescue Society".  The kids found a HUGE dragonfly trapped in the bird netting on the blackberry bush.  They managed to free it, and Gareth was able to hold it perched on his finger while it gathered its strength.  Unfortunately, we didn't have the camera at that point... It was really quite an experience, being able to hold a dragonfly.

I can't begin to tell you how many times I have found tomatoes on the floor with little finger holes in them.  We're past our first frost, so everything but the kale and Gareth's Black Aztec field corn is in the house.

Caterpillar on the blackberry bush...

Pop covered in the blackberries we'd just picked...

Farmerboy holding one of our Dominique hens...

Farmerboy also helped Andy create corn shocks, which we're planning to use to provide some warmth for the chickens this winter.

Now that I do the overview, I can tell we were actually pretty busy.  I'm glad we just jumped in, because the kids were obviously ready!

In an ironic twist of fate...

I have been working on two new posts this week: a week in review post and one about how nothing ever goes as planned at our house, and how I am trying to learn to accept that fact and be patient and move on without worrying.  Actually the two posts were once one post, but I decided to split them up.  I don't really have much time to write, etc. during the week now that we've started school again, but today is Saturday and so I've been putting the week in review post together in between clearing the huge mess from the dining room table, washing sheets, making lunch and dinner, and making sure that the twins don't injure themselves and each other. 

Then I sat down at a different computer with an old window still open and I accidentally deleted it.

So no.  Nothing ever goes as planned around here.  And now I am attempting to move on and be patient.

Wish me luck.

Fort Ticonderoga

At the risk of becoming the kind of person who bores her audience with never-ending slides of her vacation... we all agree that Grandpa Bob would like to see pictures of the fort, and -- sorry, dear readers -- Grandpa trumps everybody else. (Don't worry, Grandma, there are pictures for you here, too.)

Unfortunately, I don't have many pictures of the fort, mainly because I was clinging to the twins for dear life.  They really, really, really liked the cannons, but they also wanted to scale the walls.  (I'm being literal here.  Pip didn't understand why I wouldn't let him climb on top of the two story walls.  Really.  He threw a Pip-style fit about it, too.)  If any of you ever end up in this part of the country, one thing you might keep in mind is that Fort Ticonderoga does not allow baby backpacks inside the fort.  The reason they give for this is "all the glass cases".  Personally, I thought there was plenty of room to maneuver in between glass cases without hitting them, and strollers were absolutely useless on the gravel of the interior fort.  (They did have umbrella strollers available to borrow at the admission counter.)   Plus, there are a lot of stairs in the fort.  Anyway, we managed, but we never did get upstairs.

Some of the pictures came out weird, too.  (This is not making you want to carry on with this post, I know.)  But if you have persevered thus far, here's a brief glimpse of Fort Ticonderoga:

Looking out over Lake Champlain... (These are period cannons, by the way.  Not original to the fort, but not reproductions either.)

Here's a close up of one of the cannons.  What I found most interesting was the attention to detail given to an object like a cannon.  Obviously, people didn't used to think that function precluded beauty. 

This plaque listing famous historical personages who have entered the fort, including George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Ethan Allen, was located underneath one of the buildings.  (The building was built atop a bridge, basically.)

Inside the fort...

Another view of the fort (the gravel and the stairs, too) ...

Down the hill from the fort are the King's Gardens.  This land originally supplied the fort with all its food.  Personally, I wondered why it couldn't supply the restaurant with all its food today, but I guess it's hard to grow Lay's Potato Chips.  Anyway, I enjoyed the gardens more than the fort probably because I could finally let go of the twins and let them run around!!  (Usually I enjoy visiting historical sites, but this one was a little nervewracking.)

(Andy took this picture.)

Pip in the Children's Garden (taken by Katydid, as were all the garden pictures, I think, and about fifty million pictures of individual flowers)...

Like this one!

Pop (in blue) and Pip (in red) in the sunflower house... See that band-aid on Pop's forehead, hiding his stitches?

The outside of the sunflower house...

I think this is supposed to be a pig.  There were many of these topiaries in the Children's Garden. 

After we went to the fort and drove halfway to Lake George so that certain people would take naps, we ended up at a local park in the Village of Ticonderoga.  As it happened, the park was on the site where Ticonderoga pencils used to be made.  The Ticonderoga Pulp and Paper Company became International Paper, which is now headquartered in Memphis -- Andy's hometown.

All of a sudden it felt a little like we were playing a game of "Six degrees". :-)

Wild Center: Inspiration for the Learning Room

So this is where I admit that I am a geek.  Because I'm going to start off this post not by talking about the thousands of acres curated by the Wild Center in Tupper Lake -- which are by far the most important part of the museum.  Instead I have to tell you first about their discovery room (which I think they call "The Naturalist's Cabinet").

When Andy and I walked into this room, we both turned to each other and said, "This is what a homeschool room should be like!"  So I took lots of pictures, in the event that we eventually become independently wealthy and can design a house with a room like this one... well, scaled down ever so slightly, as I don't think we will need quite that many microscopes.

It was a dark, rainy day, so unfortunately the pictures don't really do the room justice.  But maybe you can fill in the details.

Here's Pip, playing with their puppet collection.  The windows in this room were huge.  And the view right outside the window...

The museum is built on the site of an old sand pit.  The building is sunk below the level of the pond behind it so that the water comes up to the windowsills.  I've decided that what I really want is my own nature preserve.

Here's a long view of the room.  The lighted shelves in the back are full of collections, many of which can be pulled off the shelves to observe by anyone (including little people).  There were a couple of computers along this wall with nifty software.

This piece of furniture had shelves on two sides and drawers on two sides.

A big project table in the middle of the room... (Farmerboy is building with tree blocks.)

Glass-faced cabinets with more collections... A little too tall for me, but in a house the ceiling probably wouldn't be so high!

More low shelves with activity boxes...

The contents of one box (I took photos of some of the boxes I thought I might reproduce at home)...

And oh, yeah -- there were also some exhibits!  This is the glacier wall, showing the history of the Adirondack region.

The fungi exhibit (a hit with Gareth)...

And fish! (Trout, to be exact.)  All the boys seem to be interested in fish lately.  I think I see some fish studies in our future...

Katydid took all the outside photos. (We didn't get many because the break in the rain was quite short, limiting us to the trail immediately behind the building.)  This is a view of the back of the museum. 

The bridge across the pond...

One of the many waterlilies, dotted with rain...

A hawthorne tree, covered in berries... (This trail was also a bird trail.  The hawthorne berries are an important food for birds.)

Cardinal flower, food source for bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds...

Katydid had to take a picture of this poster.  For months she has been telling us about a story she read in one of her birdwatching magazines written by a woman in the Adirondacks, who said she couldn't put out her bird feeders in the summer because of bears.  This, incidentally, forms the entire reason why Katydid says she would never want to live in the Adirondacks.

 

Solar panels on the back of the museum...

Gareth and Farmerboy looking at one of the "green walls".  (You can't see it in the previous picture, but the entire front roof of that building is "green" -- covered in earth and plants.)  The green wall is an interesting concept.  Depending on how wide the wall is, imagine how much food you could grow in such a small space.  A narrower wall would be perfect for greens, with their shallow root systems.  You could build one of your own -- basically a raised bed tipped on its side.

Going to the museum in September was interesting for another reason, and that was people watching.  90% of the people in that museum the day we went (a Friday) were age 60 and older.  Most of them were women.  This mirrored everywhere else we went, too.  It was kind of bizarre, actually, because even when kids are in school, you do expect to see some families with little kids out and about, or younger adults.  As we were leaving the museum, we saw a mom and two kids, ages around 5-8.  And so we knew -- they were homeschoolers!  And what a great resource the Wild Center would be if you were in driving distance.

September Monarch

Photographed at Adirondack Museum by Katydid

Adirondack Museum at Blue Lake:Wordless Version