Three Plus Two

This Week

A cicada emerges from its exoskeleton.  Photo by Katydid.

This week we had a few "cool" days (in the 80's) so we spent more time outside.  The twins and Chipmunk fought ants and caught caterpillars.  One of the caterpillars they caught may have been a cabbage white caterpillar, and they spent an entire morning counting and pooling their money so they could buy cabbage to feed it.  Alas, the poor creature was "wounded" (or so I was told) and did not survive the day.  Katydid surreptitiously dumped it outside.  The boys were again focused on their ongoing battle with the billions of ants that populate our yard anyway.

 

Farmerboy tamed chickens.  I think the one he's holding may be named Domino.  She's a Dominque, a breed we remain partial to because they're like cats, only more useful. The chicken heading into the hole in the stall door is a Salmon Falverole affectionately known as "Runt".  As a chick she developed a lot later than the other birds, so much so that we thought there was something wrong with her and that we might have to cull her.  Instead we fed her vitamins.  She survived a dog attack and is now one of the chickens with the most interesting personality. 

(If you don't have chickens, you might not realize that they can have interesting personalities.  But some of them do.

Also, did you remember that our barn used to be a weird sort of mauve and tan color? Probably not, considering how little I've posted in the past year.  If you don't remember the weird mauve color it used to be, you won't know how much improved the green is.  Just trust me.)

FB also spent a considerable amount of time working on a Lego coral reef.  We finished reading Pagoo last week and this week we moved on to One Small Square: Coral Reef, mostly because it came in the mail finally and because when I looked inside, the word LEGO jumped out at me.  I'd ordered it from Winterpromise a long time ago, along with some other books, including Atlas of World History.  The other books came, but the Atlas and the One Small Square book did not.  For over a month.  (I was reading a blog post the other day in which the writer and various commenters led me to believe that this situation was not uncommon with Winterpromise.)  Anyway, at least it was a nice surprise to open a box with interesting books in it that I wasn't really expecting.  Coral Reef suggests using Legos to build corals, and of course that was all the encouragement FB needed.  Here you see staghorn coral being feasted upon by a Crown of Thorns Starfish, while a giant clam resides nearby, hiding a pearl.  Katydid told him clams didn't make pearls, but that didn't really seem to deter him.  I think he's claiming artistic license on this one.

Another interesting coral reef book from this week:  

It's all about the Great Barrier Reef.  And he watched this National Geographic Great Barrier Reef video.  And a bunch of the other videos on the same page, too.  And now I have heard that he wants to be a diver.  Which means he'll be wanting more swimming lessons, I guess.

It was a marine biology week for Katydid (age 12/7th-ish grade now) as well.  She seems to naturally concentrate on one subject for a while, then move on to the next one.  Over the course of a year, if left largely to her own devices, she usually acquires a pretty well-rounded education.  But if you looked at it on the level of the week, you might not see that.  This week was one of those weeks.  It seemed like every time I saw her working, she was working on marine biology.  She and FB played some of these BBC Sea Life games in addition to the work she did using Seaside Naturalist: A Guide to Study at the Seashore.  She told me she "accidentally" wrote a report while she was trying to take notes. 

Gareth works in a similar fashion, except intensified by several degrees.  This week was all about geography for him, considering that we got that new atlas and he's reading Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies , and writing and science fiction.  He and Katydid are working on the Other Worlds curriculum together.  He's also moving at a good pace through Jacobs Geometry with the aid of the Ask. Dr. Callahan DVDs and syllabus.  I must say that this is a relief to both of us after all the wrestling with algebra. This week was a further focus on deductive proof.

The younger boys had a "math morning" this week... I think it was Thursday, when it stormed all morning.  It wasn't planned; math was just what they wanted to work on. I do try to work on math daily with the K-3 set, but a) that's not usually a problem with Pop, who will tell you that he has a "math brain" and b) Thursday morning they just wanted to keep going with various mathematical activities.

I put out some pattern squares on the table.  I made a flower.  Nobody could guess what it was.  (Pop: "A satellite? Radar?") FB sat down and immediately put all the squares in a battle array and then informed his brothers of the rules to the game, if they should wish to play.  Of course they did, and of course they immediately protested that it wasn't fair because FB had all the soldiers. So... we spent some time figuring out how many soldiers FB actually had (beginning multiplication, multi-digit addition, regrouping, then division when he split them up).  I only had to break up a few fist fights before we were finished.

Boys.

We are doing lots of schooly stuff every day, but it is still summer time.  My garden this summer has become an abysmal failure -- well, "abysmal" may be a little strong, but it's a tempting word to use when squash bugs destroy half of everything you planted and even your green beans don't really bear.  Anyway, there are several Bartlett pear trees in our neighborhood, and they're getting ripe this time of year, and today one of our neighbors was cutting grass for another neighbor, who has a tree loaded with pears but doesn't use them, and he said we could have the pears if the kids would come get them.  So I sent the three oldest over with the cooler on wheels, and even though one cooler full was probably enough, our neighbor said the kids should dump their load and come back for more.  I'm not sure how much this is -- a bushel and a half? Two bushels? Or what I'm going to do with them either, considering that Bartlett pears tend to be hard as rocks.  But I figure they might be good for preserves or pear butter.

 

Linking up!

Weekly Wrap Up at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Learning with Lego

I've been having a hard time getting enthused about homeschooling lately, so I decided it was time to not worry so much about "making progress" and to do something fun instead.

It's the flag of Denmark!

Cue: this Lego unit/lapbook, which I first learned about on the Aussie Pumpkin Patch blog last fall.  I'd tucked the idea away in the back of my mind, and these dreary, sick January days seemed like a good time to present it to my Lego-obsessed 7 year old.  Farmerboy is not an independent reader so he really couldn't do this unit independently, and he didn't have much interest in making a lapbook, but we had fun watching all the videos and doing the "building challenges".  Gareth and Katydid joined in on occasion, too.

We've only gone through the first 3 days because Pip had to make an unscheduled visit to minor medical on Thursday with an infected finger.  Farmerboy is looking forward to doing more learning with Lego this week... so much so that I'm afraid I'm going to have to come up with my own building challenges for many more days!

Farmerboy's taxi-truck from Day One... we couldn't find the taxi instructions, so Farmerboy made up his own.

The ship from Day 2... It's a speedboat.  His finger is hiding the prop he added to the back.

 
Katydid's mosaic from Day 3... a treasure chest.

We also used the nice spread on Lego manufacture in the book See How It's Made and found a good article about the science of how Lego works (among other things), which I read aloud to everyone.

Farmerboy has now added "Professional Lego Builder" to "Paleontologist" when asked what he wants to be when he grows up.  Next I think he will probably answer, "Nathan Sawaya".

 

 

Create your own continent

If you have followed this blog for any length of time, you've probably noticed that my kids like earth science.  This year Gareth has decided to make high school level earth science his focus, and as is often the case when one child becomes interested in a thing, the interest spills over into the rest of the family.  A couple of weeks ago, his reading about plate tectonics (the theory of continental drift) sort of collided with the boys' love of shovels and their collective invented universe (I'm sure I have pictures on the blog of the "cities" they built in New York, but I can't find it now) and Minn of the Mississippi, and this is what happened:

 

The kids found a good place to dig in the backyard and dug a river system.  Then they added mountains, mesas, and plateaus.  They discussed and defined all the terms.  Gareth explained continental uplift to the 7 and 5 year olds.  The 3 year old was identified as the primary cause of erosion; one of the twins earned the nickname "Earthquake".   Of course, forts were constructed, too, for empires that rose and fell.

In the midst of all the digging, Katydid decided to also dig a model Mississippi, using the maps in Minn of the Mississippi  as a guide.  It's still under construction.

My role in all of this?

I let Gareth read a book he wanted to read instead of one I planned for him to read.

I chose Minn of the Mississippi as a school book for the little boys and I read it to anyone who would listen.

I provided access to shovels and dirt.

But most importantly, I let them dig.

 

 

Week in Review: October 25-31

It's been a long time since I've done a real week in review.  I keep meaning to do a summary of our whole term (quarter, whatever you want to call it) along with my somewhat nebulous plans for the future, but weeks pass and there is no giant review posted on my blog.  So I am just going to try to jump in with one week.  This in itself may be difficult, as at this very moment one of my five year olds and my three year old are running in and out of the house filling up containers (and a squirt gun) with water to pour on our multitude of swarming, stinging ant nests.  I cannot think that this is a good idea, but we have had the "stay away from ants" discussion ad nauseum and they have even been stung before, but they are boys.  'Nuff said.

So... what did we do this week?

Well, the weather made a bit of a statement.  We had our first trial run tornado warning on Tuesday morning.  The historic Midwestern storm arrived at our house just as I was leaving to bring the baby to the doctor for a well-child visit.

Katydid took a picture of the approaching front, about twenty minutes before the storm arrived and the sirens went off.

I'm not sure if there was ever a tornado actually spotted, but the rotation passed several miles south of us.  Andy worked from home in the morning so I wouldn't have to haul all 7 kids to the doctor's office (which turned out to be a blessing, since I waited for an hour and a half in a small, windowless waiting room much like a tornado shelter), and he and the kids dragged all of the stuff out of the wide but narrow hall closet in preparation for riding out the storm.  Katydid and Gareth remember tornado warnings from living in St. Louis, but we had a basement there.  One of the first things I did after we moved in here was to think about where we would go in case of tornado.  (I have a "thing" about tornadoes.  Really, I'm much better now.)  Due to the quirky nature of our floor plan, we have no interior rooms in this house.  We have two places to go: a long, skinny cedar closet in the hallway, and Katydid's walk-in-ish closet (which is piled high with craft stuff... etc., etc.)  So I am just praying that we have no actual tornadoes!

On the same day, we received via UPS the highlight of Farmerboy's week...

A couple of rock collections!

The Deluxe Introductory Earth Science Collection at Home Science Tools is about $25 off right now.  Their Stratigraphic Fossil Collection is about $20 off.  I don't know why we haven't collected any formal rock collections until now, considering the high levels of interest I and all the kids have had in the subject.  What pushed me over the edge this time were the discussions Gareth and I have had recently about high school earth science.  Because Gareth was more interested in history than science last spring and summer, I had planned for him to do a survey course based on A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson.  I had planned for this to be roughly equivalent this year to a course in physical science.  But when we were unpacking, Gareth discovered The Eternal Frontier by Tim Flannery and started reading it.  The Eternal Frontier is a history of the North American continent beginning with the meteor strike 65 million years ago.  He left off that book around 1492 and picked up The Future Eaters, which takes the same approach to Australia and its surrounding lands.  (He's reading The Future Eaters right now.)  So we started talking about paleontology again, and upshot of that is we are now planning to cover the four traditional areas of high school earth science: Geology (including paleontology, unless we get SO much paleo by the end of high school that it can be broken out as its own course); Oceanography; Astronomy; and Atmospheric Science.  More details to follow (hopefully). 

I read the boys a Let's Read and Find Out science book, Let's Go Rock Collecting!  and we found more rock and fossil and dinosaur books when we went to the library.  Farmerboy and Katydid also set up an experiment to grow salt crystals up a string.

Halloween/Fall picture books read this week:

 

Other Picture Books:

 

School Books for K-2:

• Reading lessons from Phonics Pathways
• Narrations from Aesop's Fables (Farmerboy, grade 2)
• Read aloud from One Small Square: Backyard

Little Boys:

I bought a whole bunch of Kumon books for the boys to use independently.  The Mazes and Cutting books were big hits. Farmerboy then asked me to order a Mazes book for him, too, so I got him the Around the World mazes book.  Some of those are really hard!  

I'm actually quite happy to see them working with these mazes so much, given our past history with vision and occupational therapy.

Read-Alouds (Chapter Books):

• The Book of Saints and Heroes
  
• Mattimeo and The Bellmaker, Redwall books by Brian Jacques (Farmerboy and the twins)
• Finding the First T. Rex (ch. 1, Farmerboy)

Katydid:

• Finished Sun Faster, Sun Slower and Greek Myths
• Started A Wonderbook for Boys and Girls (Nathaniel Hawthorne) and Outlaws of Ravenhurst
• Made a walking stick and sewed a fabric bag
• Continued work on her tropical birds notebook
• Started dictation and copywork with Spelling Wisdom

Gareth:

• Read and narrated from Glory Of Christendom: History Of Christendom Vol 3 (History of Christendom Series ; Vol. III) , The Future Eaters, and The Golden Thread: A Novel About St. Ignatius Loyola 
• Started dictation and copywork with Spelling Wisdom
• About halfway through the One Year Adventure Novel curriculum

(I'm not saying anything about the dailies here: math, Latin, grammar, copywork for Farmerboy. I do hope to make some general "curriculum" posts, though.)

And, of course, there was Halloween and the All Saints Day party.

 

 

 

 

Botanical Gardens

A flower bed at the botanical gardens

Last week we chucked our chores and headed to the local botanical gardens on a beautiful, warm fall day.   I haven't visited these particular gardens in about five years, and they've made many interesting additions.  We spent an afternoon at the gardens and only saw two exhibits... but with membership in hand and only thirty minutes away, we can come back whenever we want!

The first area we saw was called My Big Backyard -- the children's garden.  That's where the "flower beds" were.

Living room couch...

Monster hut...

Chipmunk and Pip sitting in the "chrysalis swing", clutching the beloved maps...

Note that the hat has cars on it!!! BOY hat!!!

The kids found it enormously funny that the tree/playhouse was actually a bird house...

... complete with giant nest.

Chipmunk, playing on the giant worms in "Wormville"...

... and riding a dinosaur on the Prehistoric Plant Walk. 

The Prehistoric Plant Walk was a big hit with my prehistorically minded kids.  Magnolias, conifers, horsetails, and ferns grew in this garden.  Granted, the horsetails and ferns were less spectacular than the horsetails and ferns we could see in our backyard in New York, where most of the rocks we turned over were fossils.  But we did not have a big pit where replica Triceratops horns are buried.

We also saw petrified wood uncovered in a Mississippi site not from us.

And there was a big rock to climb on.

And, oh yeah, we saw some flowers.

And a good time was had by all!

 

 

Thinking about Unschooling

I mentioned recently that the last week in May was "officially" our last week of school, and that what "school" means for us is that there is some required work to do and work that "counts".  For instance, during one of our "work" periods (from 2-4 PM, say), you can't read a Warriors book but you can read The Secret Garden or Beowulf or The Fellowship of the Ring or Critter Chronicles.  You can decide that you want to write a book telling people how to watch and feed backyard birds or a poem that you illustrate with oil pastels, or you can sew a few pillows or work on crocheting a scarf, or you could build a stone wall, or you could use One Year Adventure Novel to work on the fantasy novel you're writing, or you could listen to a Redwall book on audio, or you could try to draw a Celtic-style whale, or maybe learn the Greek alphabet.  But you can't watch TV or play video games or go outside and swing a stick at dandelions for forty-five minutes.  And you'll have to do math and Latin.  And grammar (not every day).  And maybe spelling.  And possibly you'll have to write something on a topic of your mother's choosing, if she thinks you haven't been writing enough.  And if you spend a lot of time not finishing books or projects, she will probably also have a talk with you.  Because she has a book list.  It's sort of informal and it changes over the year, but it's a goal in her mind, see.  It's often based on the interests you listed for her at the beginning of the year, and sometimes it's even enshrined in writing.  And if it's enshrined in writing -- meaning that she spent time actually writing something down for you to follow -- she expects you to follow it... I mean, well, maybe not to the letter, but couldn't you use it as a guide like other homeschoolers seem to do?  What about all these lesson plans?  Wouldn't it be easier if we were all more organized?

And then... school's out.  180 days have been logged as "school" days for the state, some of them more structured than others.  Your mother is in a tizzy to accomplish 4000 things in 15 days before she gives birth to another little brother for the family, but since she is also quite hugely pregnant at this point, she also must sit around in a lawn chair quite a bit.  All this busyness and sitting on her part (not to mention a persistent stomach virus making its way through the ranks) means that you really are left to your own devices much of the time, when you don't have chores. 

So what do you do?  Do you swing a stick at dandelions for hours or whine about not being able to play video games all afternoon because you're bored?

No.  This is what you do.

You set up a paleontological dig in your garden.  You even make grids for it.  Then you cart your finds back to the house and break them open with a rock hammer. 

Your brother finds a geode in this way, a real honest to goodness geode that wasn't even part of a kit.  And you find a perfect snail shell... which happens to be solid rock, hundreds of millions of years old.  You want to identify it so you come in and look through the Ward's Geology catalog to see if they have any samples that match.  (The Ward's catalog is becoming tattered from use, because almost everyone is using it to see if there are any interesting fossils cheap enough to buy with kid money.)  When they don't, you go to your mom, and she finds a very useful key online, and you discover that it really is a fossil snail.

And in the afternoon, maybe you and a sibling make dinosaur models out of newspaper and masking tape, then paint them with tempera.    

 

You practice your violin for a recital...

... where you are introduced by your music teacher in terms of your expertise as a birdwatcher, when everyone else is introduced by way of how many lessons they are taking and how they are doing in school.  Playing in public gets you excited about music again, so you actually practice more after your recital than before, and you even write a song, which your music teacher plays and compliments.

And your mother, who keeps an eye on what you're doing no matter how busy she is, thinks, hmmmm.  

A New Project

Photo by Katydid

For a while now (a long while) I have meant to put out some of the broken machinery hanging around our house for Farmerboy to dismantle.  Farmerboy likes to build things.  He likes machines.  He likes to know the way things work.  As far as the little boys go, we have been in kind of a lull between interests, and I imagine that Farmerboy has memorized a few of the Harry Potter books by now, as many times as he has listened to them on CD.  (At the very least, I believe the rest of us have memorized them.)  It was a good time to bring out something new. 

In the picture above, Farmerboy and I are taking apart a wall clock from Katydid's room that doesn't work anymore.  It runs on a battery and uses plastic gears.  From reading Magic School Bus and the Electric Field Trip a few times, Farmerboy could also identify the coil attached to the battery that ran the gears.

Of course, when one kid starts to do something interesting...

Everybody wants to join in. 

(Katydid joined in, too, with an old, unworking digital camera.  She's just not in these pictures because she took most of them -- with my working camera.)

Stuff we took apart this week:

• clock
• clock radio
• phone bases for cordless phones
• flashlights
• digital camera
• printer (that would be Gareth's project)

And this is the sort of stuff we found inside:

• circuit boards
• pulleys
• gears
• coils
• computer chips

And yes, it was all junk that was hanging around our basement.  One advantage to being the sort of people who take a long while to get rid of junk, I guess.

Anyway, a number of questions were raised about circuits and electronics in general and how gears work.  To support the investigation I dug out a few more hands-on kits we had hanging around, including a Gears! set (not exactly the one I linked to, and missing many pieces) and a couple of erector sets: a metal one for ages 8 and up and a plastic one with bigger pieces for younger kids (again, missing most of the pieces.)

The twins built war machines with it, of course.

Farmerboy and I had a hard time with the older erector set, though, which was mechanized and required a battery pack to be assembled.  But none of the bolts seemed big enough to go all the way through the pack and still have enough length to put a washer on the end.  I do have a little mechanical skill here and there, but we decided this might need a consultation with Dad.

Considering the level of interest that carried through the week... and the fact that it's just about February... I'm hoping to free up some money for some kits with all the pieces.  Here's what I'm looking at:

• The K'nex simple machine kits Jen posted about here
• A Snap-Circuits kit
• Erector Build-and-Play

This is just my wish list.  We already have a more complicated electronics kit, which we got for FREE because somebody left it at the dump and Andy picked it up.  When he brought it home, we were amazed to see that it was completely intact and looked as if it had never been used.  This was a few years ago and the kids were really too young to use it yet.  Now, however, Gareth should be able to put it to good use.

And, of course, we have our share of batteries, wires, and little light bulbs... and lots of Legos... and pen and paper for designing our own fantastic machines...

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:

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.