Three Plus Two

Week 6, part 2: Everything Else

Aside from our trips into the woods, this week was another where we were "in recovery" (and more pertinently, I was still "in recovery", or maybe even more pertinently, the house was still "in recovery"), so I didn't have time or energy to plan a lot of interesting stuff.  Anyway, the kids mostly wanted to be outside, so that's what we did.  Unfortunately, when we were inside, the kids still watched quite a bit of TV. (Andy was out of town again, and it's my own fault that I often let them eat in front of the TV when it's just us.)  During our TV watching lulls, I usually try at least to make what they watch count somehow.  Most of the time they're just as happy to watch "educational" TV as anything else, but sometimes I have to admit it's just SpongeBob.  

We did try to get back into a groove with math, Latin, and grammar/language, but only managed three days.  Katydid had an eye appointment (not something I want to repeat, as the twins decided they needed to take over the entire office) and we take Fridays to do weekly chores and whatever we want in the afternoon.  Which happened this week to be banging on rocks with the new rock hammers from Home Science Tools.  Oh, and pulling apart an owl pellet:

Katydid took this picture when she was done.  Note all the gunk on the table.  Also, I believe that everyone has dinosaurs on the brain.

Moving right along...

Read this week:

Gareth: Mortal Engines, Philip Reeve (finished); Fellowship of the Ring; Snowball Earth, Gabrielle Walker; Peter and the Starcatchers, Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson... also caught him browsing an encyclopedia of flags and this morning he asked for Hey, Andrew! Teach Me Some Greek!

Katydid: Little Women, Warriors and Seekers books, Birds: Their Lives, Their Ways, Their World

Farmerboy: (listened to) You Wouldn't Want to Be a Roman Gladiator! , The Wright Brothers (a comic book), some Junie B. Jones books on audio, The Mouse and the Motorcycle (on audio, for the 100th time), Farmer Boy (read by Daddy)

 

 

Listened to this week:

Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (CDs 1 and 2)

Read alouds:

Life of Our Lord for Children, Marigold Hunt , The Hobbit

Watched this Week:

• Ghost in Your Genes (NOVA)
• Ken Burns: The National Parks (episode 1)
• some Military Channel documentary involving airplanes
• Padre Pio: Miracle Man
• Dinosaur Train and Magic School Bus episodes for the 6 and under crowd

(I'm not sure if I'll continue this format or not.  Is it just more work? Is it boring my readers to death?  Is it helpful in any fashion?  I suppose I'll be able to tell whether it's helpful or not when I go to write my quarterly reports in late October...)  

 

Week 6, part 1: Learning Outdoors

Good weather is at a premium these days, so this week -- as everyone was beginning to feel better -- we spent a lot of time outside. 

Fossil hunting...

Nature walks...

Katydid and Farmerboy found an interesting area in the woods nearly to the far edge of our field, full of rabbit warrens.  It's most interesting feature, though? A bee tree.  Farmerboy brought me up there to show me this morning.  I believe it's a wild honeybee hive.  Hopefully I'll be able to get a picture this week (or Katydid will take one.)  I've never seen a bee tree before, and of course with all the trouble bees are facing these days, I can't help but think that we've found something very, very special.  (And also... now I know why so many honeybees forage in our yard!)

The only problem is that The Bee Tree is one of the little boys' favorite books, and now they think we should go find some ladders and everyone we know to help us get the honey out of the tree.  Um... no.

Backyard Nature Study...

Jewelweed, also called Touch-Me-Not.  It's definitely a weed and a real nuisance in the vegetable garden, in spite of its delicate trumpet-shaped flowers (which hummingbirds love), but it's a great plant to teach kids about seed dispersal strategies.  When you touch a seed pod, the pod springs open and shoots its one, largish seed out into the air. 

And if you let a large stand of these plants grow up in your flowerbed, your kids will have a great time propagating even more.

This is what the pod looks like after it's been sprung.  The two sides curl away from the central core, releasing the seed, which looks like...

Then, of course, there are fall caterpillars:

Does anyone know what kind of caterpillar this is?  We have a lot of them, and someone has "misplaced" the guide.  Here's another view:

Country Diary Daybook: First Frost, First Day of Fall

I began this post on Monday, so I guess this is now a Days Book, isn't it?

FOR TODAY... Monday, September 20

 

Outside My Window... Crisp, sunny blue autumn sky, 42 degrees at 9 AM.  The maples are starting to really come into their color, with big patches of crimson, scarlet, and orange among the green.  We had our first frost yesterday morning.  I was awake at 4 AM and watched the temps dip: 37 to 36 to 35.  When the sun rose, the field across the street glittered yellow-under-white with a light frost.  (Wednesday morning: waking up to a light rain.)

 

 

In bloom: Goldenrod, New England aster, frost aster.  I like the pale lavender of the frost aster more than the bright purple of the New England asters, which remind me of a Crayola color.  The field is yellow and purple and while beautiful, sometimes reminds me of a high school football team.

 

(I had the camera on landscape setting, and I really don't think it does justice to the purple. Also, sorry about the smudge.)

 

(by Katydid)

 

 

In the garden: We picked ahead of the frost on Saturday: a few pounds of beans; whatever remaining tomatoes that hadn't gotten hit by blight or picked over by the bantams; some okra; a pound or so of peppers.  Now we switch to fall crops: leeks, kale, cabbage, brussel sprouts.

 

(Cilantro I need to freeze)

 

In the barnyard: We're trying to find a processor to "do" our meat chickens.  But the processor we've heard about doesn't answer the phone.

 

I am thinking... that I wish this cold would go away so we could enjoy the weather!

 

I am thankful for... antibiotics.  Chipmunk is feeling much better now.  He's slept through the night for the past 2 nights.

 

From the learning rooms... Fossils, most likely.  The little boys have already been outside this morning, pounding on rocks with hammers.  They went out in the pajamas and bare feet, because they're still expecting it to be summer.  It didn't take long for them to realize it had gotten cold.

 

 

From the kitchen...  Last night I made these toffee bars that Jen recommended. YUM.  They're awesome.  And easy. I also made pesto with a bunch of basil we picked ahead of the frost.  I'd never had pesto before.  It was yummy, too.  But very green.  The boys tried it -- and liked it -- reluctantly.  After they made all sorts of unflattering comparisons as to what they thought it looked liked.  Boys.

 

Monday: Ratatouille to use up eggplant, peppers, zuchini, tomatoes.

Tuesday: Roast chicken? (Nope, salmon patties)

Just discovered yesterday that Weds, Fri, and Sat. are Ember Days.  Not sure what we'll be eating, really...

 

I am wearing... Pajamas again. (I know, it's 9 AM, but we're still getting over this cold.)

 

I am creating... Well, I wrote down some notes for a story, but I'm not sure about getting from A (writing down notes) to B (actually writing the story).  In typical Angela fashion, a page of notes will probably turn into a novel anyway. I also managed to draw in my sketchbook a little over the weekend -- trying to figure out shading and shadows.  Not doing so well either, but taking a deep breath and reminding myself that it will probably take me longer to figure out if I'm only working 5 minutes a day.  (Still, 5 minutes a day would be a great victory!)

 

 

I am going... to really work on laundry this week.  With all the sickness of last week, we are behind.   I think I am also going to sit down with myself and get a better handle on my time. 

 

I am reading... Crow Planet, by Linda Lynn Haupt.  I'm not enjoying this as much as I had hoped.  I like it when she writes about crows, but... there's something about the rest that is not grabbing me, and I'm not sure why. (Just finished it and am still not sure what didn't grab me about the book.  Can't put my finger on it.  Now I'm on to Fruitless Fall by Rowan Jacobsen.)

 

Also, thanks to Amy, I have subscribed to a bunch of people's shared items via google reader and thereby discovered many new blogs. :-) 

 

I am hoping... this stupid cold will end soon.  

 

I am hearing... Well, it's afternoon now and what I'm hearing is John Deere Action on TV, the sound of the dryer, Katydid coughing, Chipmunk playing with cars, and the occasional snore from Farmerboy who fell asleep on the floor.  Everyone's still recovering.  (And on Wednesday morning, everyone is sleeping late and it's quiet except for the tapping of my keys. I guess all the dirt everyone covered themselves in yesterday helped them sleep?)

 

 

Around the house...  What doesn't need to be done? I have to get a handle on the laundry first. (Working on this, bit by bit.)

 

One of my favorite things...  reading picture books that unexpectedly contain one of my boys' unconventional nicknames and watching their eyes light up.  (The book is Rattletrap Car and the name is "Jakie", without giving anything away ;-)

 

 

 

A Few Plans For The Rest Of The Week... Well, seeing as how it's now the "rest of the week"... I'm still trying to get a better handle on my own time, but improving... we have a doctor's appointment to get to, the library, and Katydid and Gareth are both going to volunteer along with Andy at his company's annual 5K for charity this weekend.  This will also be the fourth of the past 5 weeks that Andy will be out of town.  Next week will make it 5 of 6. Still just trying to keep my head above water. 

 

 

Week 5: Dinosaur TV

The cold we caught at the end of week 4 turned out to be a rotten one.  Katydid and Chipmunk both ended up at the doctor for ear infections.  Andy fortunately avoided most of the cold until after he returned from Toronto.  Gareth ended up doing all the chicken and turkey chores while he was gone, since Katydid ran a fever most of that time and couldn't help.  No one did very much math or any Latin, but they did read a lot and watched a lot of science TV.

Read this week:

Gareth: The High King, Lloyd Alexander; Dealing with Dragons, Patricia Wrede; a Warriors book or two; about a quarter to a third of Perelandra, CS Lewis.

Katydid: A few Warriors books; Harriet the Spy; Her Piano Sang: A Story About Clara Schumann

Farmerboy: (listened on audio) Ramona the Pest; Ramona Forever; A Cricket in Times Square; Frog and Toad Treasury; Daddy read: Gregor Mendel: The Friar Who Grew Peas; Troodon

Read to the little boys: a bunch of Curious George books; First, the Egg; Too Many Toys (David Shannon); Mammoths on the Move

(My throat hurt and then I lost my voice, so I couldn't read out loud very much.)

Me: The Day I Became an Autodidact, Kendall Hailey

Also listened to on audio: The Best School Year Ever, Barbara Robinson

Watched this week:

• The Planets: Weird Weather (Science Channel)
• Predator X (History International)
• Prehistoric Monsters Revealed (History International)
• Arctic Dinosaurs (NOVA)
• a bunch of Dinosaur Trains (You know, even the ultra cool theme song gets old after a while, though.)

Sometimes I feel guilty for all the TV lately, but then Katydid walks into the kitchen holding a feather and says, "You know, feathers are like those fractals we saw on NOVA.  I looked at a feather under my microscope and it's like the big feather is made up of lots of little feathers that all look the same as the big one."

The theme of the week was paleontology:

As usual, the theme had little to do with me.  All the available viewing options happened to coincide with a renewed interest, and Farmerboy and the twins were happy to play paleontologists as they felt better.  They built their skeletons out of blocks and Duplos.

And tape, of course.  Farmerboy built this one. 

It was interesting because that same day I suggested a Think! challenge to him, but the challenge left him totally frustrated because he couldn't make his building fit the 12 x 12 x 12 parameters.  So he gave up and built a cardboard tent house instead, using as much tape as he wanted. 

This weekend, he decided to replicate the paleontology workroom he saw in one of our library books.

I took the pictures at night after he'd already put some of his stuff away -- most notably the digital clock that plays nature sounds -- but here you can see some of his work.  He studied some of our fossils with the magnifying lens (it used to be a real magnifying glass, but Chipmunk took care of that) and drew what he saw.  (The triangles are pictures of his fossil shark tooth.) 

He also hung up these post-it pad sheets on the bookcase to show all the things he thought were fossilized in one of our big fossils.  The area of New York where we live is famous for its Devonian era fossils.  While we have not found any trilobites or ammonites in the rocks in our yard (all theoretically possible), what we do find sometimes are fossilized slices of the sea floor.  Gareth and Farmerboy found a fantastic rock a couple of weeks ago when they were up in the woods attempting to make stone tools.  They split a rock open and found an enormous amount of small fossils, including what look to be fish bones.  Considering the interest of late, I placed an order with Home Science Tools for some rock picks (and safety goggles). 

Watching a show about the Devonian era while holding Devonian era fossils...

Katydid's watercolor dinosaurs.

 

Sick Days Daybook

For Today: September 15, 2009

Outside my window...  a cloudy morning.  The forecast calls for a mix of clouds and sun, so maybe the sun will come out later.  When I woke up this morning, the sky looked like a pastel drawing -- smudged blue, pink, and gray above the hills.  The first window I see in the morning is the one by my side of the bed.  It is one of those small, high, rectangular 50's windows, which means that I have to stand on my tippy-toes to see more than the sky.

Now there is a weird greeny-yellow light which in the Midwest or South would probably mean a thunderstorm.  Here we may get rain and we may not.

I am thinking... well, worrying would be the more appropriate term.  We "lost" a mouse trap we set out this weekend, and I think I know where it went... because of the smell this morning.  The only problem; I think it's behind the stove and I don't know if I can get to it. I am also trying not to worry about Farmerboy, who seems the sickest of the bunch.  If his fever is still around tomorrow morning, off to the doctor we will go.  I am also trying not to worry about the state of the house, although it is completely overwhelming.

I am thankful for... a decent sleep last night. And Pulmocort. It means I'm not wheezing.

From the learning rooms...  Gareth is the only one who has escaped this cold/flu/whatever it is, so he's the only one who's doing anything like math.  Yesterday he tried his new grammar book, Our Mother Tongue, by Nancy Wilson.  His initial review was positive; he liked it more than Lingua Mater, "even though it took longer to do".  Hmmm...

Aside from a little math and grammar, though, he's been in full unschooling mode, just like everybody else. Mostly this involves the older 3 reading Warriors books (Katydid reads to Farmerboy, when her throat allows) and watching science programs on TV.  Last night the kids watched a DVR'ed program about weird weather on other planets, in which we learned about a man who took a hot-air balloon up to the outermost edge of the atmosphere... and then jumped, from 50,000 feet.  He was still alive to tell the tale, but what kind of person thinks it might be fun to go to space in a hot-air balloon and then parachute back?  Sounds like Jules Verne to me.  Then we also watched a History International show entitled Predator X, about the discover of an enormous new pliosaur in the Arctic.  Watching this prompted Pip to go on his own dinosaur dig around the house, collecting "dinosaur bones" and then drawing his finds on inset paper.  Pop joined in, too. 

There has also been an explosion of "junk-monster" making (with Sculpey and... junk) from the younger boys, and yesterday I came back to Katydid's room to check on her and she was writing music.  So learning goes on, regardless.

From the kitchen... You do not want to know what we have been eating lately. Think frozen pizza and go from there.  I made pancakes on Sunday night, but last night Andy was out of town and the kids got macaroni and cheese.  I got a frozen dinner I brought home from the corner convenience store. :-/

I am wearing... Well, right now I'm wearing a T-shirt and cropped jogging pants: pajamas.  But I'm about to take a shower, and then will probably end up in long sleeves and denim gauchos.  High temp in the mid to upper 60's today.  (ETA: Now it's 11 PM and I'm back in my pajamas again. But if you're curious -- I have no idea why you would be, or even if I will be if I ever look back at this post -- what I actually wore today was a short-sleeved aqua tee, charcoal gray knit skirt, leggings, sport socks and Birkenstocks or muck shoes (depending on whether I was inside or outside.)

I am creating... Gee, not much of anything right now. Just trying to get well and keep my head above water until Andy gets home from Toronto. Although after discovering from the Dick Blick catalog that street painting or drawing with pastels on sidewalks dates back to the Renaissance, there might be something itching there for a story, who knows.

I am going... to read The Day I Became an Autodidact by Kendall Hailey and then go to bed, seeing as how a lot of time elapsed between the start and end of this post.

I am reading... See above.  I had to check the publication date on this book the same as I did with The Teenage Liberation Handbook.  Only -- Kendall Hailey's book was published two years before I graduated high school, while The Teenage Liberation Handbook was published the year after I graduated.  I would have known if Kendall Hailey's book had appeared in our small town library, though, because I was so well known at the library by then that the librarians let me check out my own books.  Not that my parents would have listened to me if I had told them I wanted to quit school (or graduate early) and teach myself, of course, even if I had managed to get hold of a copy of the book.  Although my mother briefly entertained the idea of homeschooling my youngest sister, it was only because of the gigantic problems she was having in school.  In contrast, I was a very good student -- bored out of my mind -- and my mother was very worried about me missing my prom, which is what she always used to say when I would talk about graduating early and going to college or being an exchange student or whatever.  As it turned out, my prom was a nightmare which I would have gladly paid money to miss. But what are you going to do? I find that homeschooling my kids has at least finally cured those old "I didn't know I was taking this class and now I have a final exam" dreams... in my dreams, I just stand up, put my books away, and say, "I don't have to stay here; I homeschool," and walk out.  It's wonderful :-).

I am hoping... that Andy's plane is on time tonight.

I am hearing... the dryer spinning around, the sound of the keys tapping, and otherwise... quiet.  Amazing.

Around the house... Ugh.  I tried very hard not to be completely overwhelmed today and to just focus on whatever little bits I could get done or delegate.  Farmerboy and Katydid felt better today, thankfully, so they helped pick up a bit.  And Pop surprised me by requesting (!) chores.  (I think he's trying to convince me that he's old enough to skip a nap. "Awww... why do we have to sleep???") The house looks a little better now.  At least most of the playdough is off the dining room floor.

One of my favorite things... being able to request a whole stack of library books.  Discovering that the library system actually had most of the books I wanted!

A few plans for the rest of the week: Get better and try to reintroduce a little formal work.  To maintain my patience in the face of math-induced storminess.  Oh, and not so much TV.

Here is picture for thought I am sharing...(add your picture here):

I was going to share a picture of my sketchbook, where I am doing some pencil exercises from Botanical Illustration Course: With the Eden Project, a book I am impressed with and feel hopeful about.  But that would require me to actually take the picture and then switch computers to download and then upload it. So I'm afraid the picture will have to wait.

Visit Peggy for more daybooks! 

Sitting Around Reading

We all have colds (well, except Gareth).  Farmerboy has been sniffing non-stop for the past hour or so.  The little boys have watched the only 4 episodes of Dinosaur Train currently in existence about 18 million times since it premiered on Tuesday.  Those of us who can read have mostly been sitting around reading.

Katydid has read a couple of Warriors books already and has Harriet the Spy and a Nancy Drew to keep her company now.

Gareth finished Patricia Wrede's Dealing with Dragons last night, and has been deep into Lloyd Alexander's The High King for most of yesterday and today. 

Andy is reading something about banks.

I picked up The Unschooler's Handbook and The Teenage Liberation Handbook for some re-reading, and just finished The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey.  Wow.  What a good book.  She comes down a little hard and perhaps a bit unfairly on St. Thomas More, but... excellent mystery.

Now I have Crow Planet and Fruitless Fall on the stack, and another Josephine Tey novel on request from the library.  It's nice to be able to use the library again.

I have also decided that Goodreads  is my favorite social networking site.   

Week 4: We Catch Another Cold

Week 4 was this week, Sept. 7-Sept. 13.  I feel like I am writing a continuing saga with these colds.  "And then we got sick.  And then we got better.  And then we got sick again.  And then..."

It's just one of those years where I date events by the virus we had, I guess.

Anyway, I forgot to mention in week 3 that Gareth made his first ever trip to the ER.  The kids were having bike races down the hill in our yard and onto the driveway.  (The road is too busy to ride on.) Gareth hit the top of a metal trash can and fell off his bike, cutting his leg on the way down.  I was inside putting the little ones to sleep while this was going on.  So when Gareth came to tell me in a reasonably calm but somewhat loud voice that he had fallen and cut himself but that the cut wasn't bleeding much. I told him to try and take care of it himself so he wouldn't wake the boys up. 

When I came out in a few minutes (Chipmunk woke up anyway), I took a look at the cut and felt really, really bad for shushing Gareth.  Fortunately, Andy had just (as in, he'd been home for 5 minutes) gotten home from Boston, so he took Gareth to the ER for the staples that were removed on an extremely unplanned day in week 4.

Gareth and I are trying to work out a few kinks in the way the year is going.  I have tossed Lingua Mater... not because it's bad, but because it's just not working for him.  Katydid will probably use it next year, or perhaps even sooner, as she's using  Lingua Mater 6 with the grammar supplement right now and enjoying it.  I am thinking of using Our Mother Tongue: An Introductory Guide to English Grammar, which is what Ambleside Online recommends for Year 7.  For 2 reasons: 1) I own the book already and 2) it isn't as drill intensive as something like, say, Seton.  And then I think we're going to add in Editor In Chief Beginning Book: Grammar Disasters and Punctuation Faux Pas (Editor in Chief Beginining).  Because this is where we run into some of those learning difficulties I have mentioned before.

Another area we're tweaking has to do with planning -- his planning and his time management -- and also maybe a change in style to some extent.  What I've seen is that Gareth doesn't seem to be as motivated to work through plans that I make out of his interests after I have written them down and made them into "school" as he is if I just, say, leave the book out on the couch, or write down a series of choices on the whiteboard.  So I'm wondering again about unschooling vs. structured schooling, and how best to help Gareth learn to self-initiate, follow through, and finish projects, when goal-making on a weekly basis or making lists of assignments to complete both seem to some extent unpalatable. 

We also had to change the way we were planning with Katydid this week.  She decided she didn't like giving herself even vague assignments (like "botany") for each day of the week.  Instead we decided to make out a list of what she wanted to do for the week, broken down into subject areas.  In the morning she refers to the list and decides what she wants to do that day.  Katydid is mature for her age, motivated, and interested in what she's doing, so this works pretty well.  She knows she'll do some subjects every day -- math, Latin, language -- so those aren't written down; they're just assumed.

But the big deal this week was a visit to the NY State Museum in Albany. 

Your two year old throws fits when you attempt to make him leave the "mammufs", right?

Devonian era fossils found in our county... the bottom picture is a tree stump.

Playing in the Discovery Room...

Stopping to pose for a picture.

Week 3: Feeling Better

So in Week 3 (August 31 - Sept. 6), everyone started to feel a bit better -- the kids faster than I did, actually -- and there was more work.  In some cases, a lot more work.  Work undertaken because the kids were interested in it, not because I planned to do it.  Work that leads me to contemplate that balance between "required" and "interest-led" again.

The one thing I did during Week 3 was to get out the pan watercolors to try and teach the twins (who need new nicknames!) how to keep their colors separate.  They wanted to paint rainbows initially, because of the rainbows from prisms that we had been playing with.  Somewhere along the way, however, "rainbows" turned into "robots with lasers".  Anyway, pan watercolors were new to them, they couldn't remember that you need to rinse the brush before dipping it in clean water and putting it in a new color, and they didn't understand why you couldn't just mix all the colors up in the pans.  But that was sort of the whole point of the lesson: how to mix only what you want to mix, and not everything up together so that it makes a muddy brown.  Which is what they often do.  In any case, they lost patience, got down from the table, and went outside to play dinosaur guys.

(If you're wondering where Chipmunk was this whole time, he was painting newspaper with water.)

This left a whole table full of painting materials set up with nobody using them, and a big roll of easel paper (not the best for watercolor, but we were painting big) for the taking.  When Farmerboy happened by, I asked if he would like to paint.  He said yes, sat down, and sketched out a dinosaur, then worked very hard at filling up all the available white space.

A note here: Farmerboy is left-handed.  That's why his painting set-up is reversed.

The finished picture, with a volcano in the background -- small, "because it's far away" -- and a sunset sky.

Then Katydid came through and thought she might like to paint with the watercolor pans, because we hadn't had them out in a while.   And that led to several days spent painting for hours.   We paged through some watercolor books to figure out a bit more about technique, and had a good time with the blog Let's Paint Nature.  She particularly liked the Baby Phoebe Nest, so she painted her own nest with baby birds using watercolor and ink.  She also painted many flowers and a downy woodpecker.  She also spirited all these paintings off to her room without giving me a chance to photograph them at all.  Well, I am thinking about making some photo albums on the blog to hold all the photos of artwork.  So maybe by the time I get around to doing that I'll also get the chance to take pictures of some of her paintings!

As well as painting for hours, Katydid also decided that her wee felt dolls needed some friends, so she worked on making some more of those.

... when I was trying to organize the art cabinet...

... and also before breakfast.  Actually, a lot of art work gets done before breakfast in our house.

The wee felt dolls also had another purpose, I think, and that was to populate the fairy houses that have enjoyed a resurgence lately:

And, yes, fairy houses do tie into the Victorian emphasis in the Sunflower Basket. I mean, that's what I'm saying.  And since the kids used the book Fairy Houses ... Everywhere! (The Fairy Houses Series), which is really a beautiful book showing very complicated structures the kids tried to imitate, I'm also counting it as art. Anyway, it was too nice to stay inside... a bit cooler, though, as you can tell by the long sleeves.

But -- back to dinosaurs.  Farmerboy has had his interest re-ignited and spent the day he painted the dinosaur picture doing nothing but dinosaurs.   In fact, he did dinosaur related "stuff" from the time he woke up until he went to bed, which was sometimes exhausting.  He took a break to do a little phonics and math with me, but mostly it was all about dinosaurs.  He papier-mached the make-a-saurus we started back in June, doing the papier mache about 97% on his own on the front porch while I ran around with the little boys, made dinosaur pictures using How to Draw Dinosaurs (Usborne Activities), and had me read See Inside the World of Dinosaurs.  And then there was playing dinosaur guys.  Of course.

  

Week 2: We Catch the First Cold

I'm behind on my weekly posts already, not for lack of things to include... but for a combination of lots of stuff to include (we're busy!) and being sick.  Just colds, but we seem to be getting them one after another.  This seems to be typical of this time of year for us... hay fever dragging us down and more germs circulating with all the kids going back to school.  Now let's see if I can remember all the way back into August...

Oh, and just a note about what I like to include in these weekly review posts.  I make notes about the kids' work on a daily basis in my Homeschooler's Journal, and I also keep track of Gareth's hours on Homeschool Tracker. (I have the Plus version, which I am slowly figuring out. I have had various versions of the free Tracker and the not-free Tracker Plus over the years, and I have to say that I think the version I have now is much easier to use than what I had a couple years ago.  Also, I don't know why, but I get a lot of enjoyment from playing around with all the reports.)  Therefore, when I sit down to compile a "week in review" post, what I'm mainly focusing on are the details that don't fit into a more compressed format: stories, photos, what the little guys are doing.  So if you wonder whether my kids ever do math: yes, they do.  But I don't always mention it here.

Week 2 (August 24-30)

It was still warm, so we tried to be outside as much as possible.  Katydid and Farmerboy wanted to have a picnic, but I was feeling a little frazzle that week since Andy was out of town.  I told them I would love for them to have a picnic, but they would have to do all the preparations and cleaning up.  So they did, and everyone had fun.

We moved to a chart planning format for Gareth and Katydid.  Gareth seemed to think it worked pretty well for this week, but Katydid wasn't so sure.  Katydid likes to adjust what she wants to do in the morning when she gets up, and she's usually quite motivated to work.  So the weekly planning didn't work as well for her, even when she was the one deciding what to write in each time period.

And then there was this not quite average day in week 2.

The end of Week 2 was mostly involved in everyone sitting around feeling yucky.  Oh, and the chickens somehow contracted coccidosis (or something like it).  So, really, Andy and I spent the weekend feeling yucky and researching what to do for our chickens, who also felt yucky, and oh, yeah, standing in the pouring rain staring at chicken poop.

Blackberry Picking

Last Saturday we went blackberry picking at "Scout Farm", a piece of land near us that is owned by the Boy Scouts.  The wild blackberries are free for the picking, and all Scout families can go up there whenever they like.  My kids (especially Chipmunk) tend to eat every single blackberry off our bushes as soon as they are picked, and I wanted to make a cobbler.  So we packed into the van and headed up to Scout Farm.

I have to warn you, though, the whole experience was less idyllic than those of you who live in the city or suburbs might assume.  In order to thoroughly understand this experience, you must add to these pictures the sounds of gunfire not as far away as you might hope (target practice, I am assuming); the grumbling noise of construction equipment; and the chug-chug of an old tractor cutting hay.  Mix them all together, and you have a nice "quiet" day in the country.

One of the first things we saw were these prints.  The picture doesn't do them justic, because they were big.  Bigger than dog prints.  Bear maybe??

This is a beaver pond, but we couldn't find the lodge.

Andy and Katydid did most of the picking.  I was busy keeping track of Chipmunk, and the boys decided they would rather "hunt bear" than pick blackberries, even with the promise of blackberry cobbler.

Fortunately, they did not find one. 

Katydid and I had more luck "hunting" with the camera.

Frost Aster, by Katydid.

On the way home, we saw a porcupine crossing the road, but Andy couldn't get a good picture.   Can you see him in the grass there, a big blob of white-tipped quills?

Landscapes from the way home...

And finally, blackberries for cobbler: