Around our City ~ Farm Tour #2

Terry's Berries organic farm.

First stop is the chickens. We get to feed them the scraps from the farm...

And perhaps get to see a few eggs being collected.

Next stop, hay ride to the apple orchard. This took much longer than we could have walked it, but it was super fun for the kids to get pulled by a real working tractor!

At the apple orchard we picked enough for two gallons of cider to take home. One to freeze and one for right now.

And of course, what is cider, without a toddler bitten apple or two between the tree and the press?

We carried the apples back to the farm house to be cleaned, pressed and bottled.

Terry's Berries is a wonderful farm and only 7 miles from our house. This is where I go when my shares at the CSA stop coming in the winter. They have a little farm store open on Tuesdays and Wednesdays year round that provides food from local vendors as well as some imports that are organic. Their staff are friendly, their products are AMAZING, and they have lots of things to see and do during the Autumn months.

Gotta love the Muppets! Tis the Season!

Grains of the World ~ Corn

You can very clearly see which direction the wind was blowing in my garden. On one hand, we have a nice full corn cob... on the other, we have a nearly completely unpollinated corn cob that was just on the other side of the stalk from the nice full cob.

Corn, I will not be growing again. It is very clear to me (and the kids) why corn is grown in huge fields. The wind can carry the pollen of one plant to many of the other plants at one time. And because they are in such large groups, they all drop pollen on each other. With only 4 corn plants in one small spot, we got these two ears that didn't rot the entire season. And one of those was very underpollinated.

In other GOTW news... the rest of the grains have rotted completely while curing in the carport. This was more frustrating for me than it was for the kids. They really enjoyed the project even though I consider it only 'mostly done' without my loaf of bread to show for it. But Alex did point out that we could get all of the grains again from the same places we got our starter seed from and make bread from those. They don't HAVE to be the ones from the garden for us to have the experience of grinding them for bread.

I am raising a problem solver. :)

The rest of our experiment with the Grains Of The World.

Around Our City ~ Farm Tour

Over the last few years of me being in the 'beyond organic' marketplace, I have discovered tons of local farms that deserve recognition. It is hard to take kids to places like this most of the time... except during harvest season. So this month, we are visiting at least 4 farms (have feelers out for more).

The topic of food is so amazingly important to me that it is very hard to move my homeschooling away from it. Buying local, organic, cruelty free food has led me on a path of understanding of our food systems that I never even thought possible. The egg industry alone has opened up hundreds of opportunities for learning for my children as I debate organic vs local vs pasture fed. I can not help but teach my children about my passions and hope that they develop some good questioning thoughts about the food they eat for themselves when they get older. I know that I have livestock animal cruelty conversations with my daughter often, and my oldest is very interested in baking (and also quite good at it!).

Our first farm: Lattin's Cider Mill

What a wonderful little spot! It is about 40 miles from me now, but we still find ourselves there this time of year. They specialize in cider (of course) and get all of their apples in season (being right now) and from just the other side of the mountains (100 mile or so away).

This time of year they have many products that come from their own gardens around the mill and they sell those in a barn set up to be a market place. They make their own doughnuts and you can feed the chickens (and buy their eggs) while you share a cup of hot cider and a freshly made apple fritter with your tots. It is the most magical spot for children to go. They nearly always have baby something... currently it is pheasants and bunnies... and you are allowed to feed, pet, and play with the goats, walk the pumpkin patch, and pet the cows.

I miss being closer to such a wonderful resource for education as well as food, but as you will see... the Farm Tour goes on (and to much closer locations!).

Creative Writing and Poetry Class

(My class. Two of the kids are missing in this picture, but I thought it was super cute!)

We had poetry class #3 today. It was amazing! I am so thrilled to be sharing this program with my homeschool kid friends!

So far, what we have learned has been back-boned by the ideas of Small World's Wordsmithery, with a nice healthy dose of my own ideas.

Wordsmithery; if you haven't already, please check it out (link here). The lessons she writes are easy to understand and complete all on their own. Anything you bring is a bonus that will bring more understanding of the material, but if you do nothing extra, you can consider Wordsmithery a group of lessons that your children will reference back to every time they write until they are in college.

First lesson:

(poems Keep a Poem in Your Pocket by Beatrice Schenk de Regniers and Jabberwocky by Lewis Carol)

What is creative writing? Fiction and nonfiction. What writing is made of (words). The kids favorite words. Making up your own nonsense words. The poem "The Jabberwocky" by Lewis Carol (which has a lot of nonsense words).

This class spawned some interesting discussions. When we were making up and defining our own words, for example, one little girl made up the word 'beautifulicious' and defined it in her own way. It was wonderful to see their creative minds come alive with the freedom of being able to use language so openly.

Second lesson:

(poem September by John Updike)

Parts of speech review. Nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs. Define these terms. Then use them to make sentences.

This was a little harder. Most of these kids could say what nouns and verbs were... but adverbs and adjectives are a little harder to pin down. Especially due to the changing nature of the words themselves. If you change the ending of many of the words, it changes the entire meaning of the word and thus which part of language it is. For example; take the sentences the quick fox and the fox ran quickly. In the quick fox the word 'quick' is a adjective used to describe the noun (fox), but in the fox ran quickly the word 'quickly' is an adverb, used to describe the verb 'ran'. This concept caught the kids out a few times... and that is on top of just the new ideas of parts of speech being so important in the first place. It was an AMAZING lesson, that was tons of fun... but the kids spent more time getting to know the definitions of the parts of speech, than the actual words that those definitions represented and I allowed them to run with that portion of the lesson because they seemed to be getting SO much out of it.

In the end, we made a table on the board in different colors, then I asked the kids to pick a color and a letter and I would add that letter to a column ("noun, the letter k!" and I would put a K in the Noun column). After we had all our letters in the columns, I had them choose words for each of those letters, and then we put them together in silly sentences: "The crazy lion ran carefully." and "The horse carefully skipped the gross noodles at dinner." and so on. You could imagine that this could go on for quite some time. ;)

Third lesson:

(poem Blood-Curdling Story by Shel Silverstein)

This was today. And what an amazing lesson it was! We were still reviewing parts of speech, but we also moved on to create more interesting sentences with the addition of synonyms, antonyms, and more interesting adjectives. I decided to take iPhone pictures of the board because the words the kids were coming up with were just brilliant!

First, I made up a simple sentence. "The girl read a book." and then I asked the children to help me make the sentence more interesting by adding adjectives and adverbs to the sentence. We ended up with two totally different sentences (above). We chose one, and continued to work with it, using synonyms of the nouns and verbs we had chosen (below):

I continued the color coding (although it is hard to tell here, but there are 5 different colors on the board) to help them identify the parts of speech visually. This really helped when I would pop little review questions on them from the last lesson. And they thought it was great fun to watch me use every pen on the white board. lol!

Finally, we took a simple sentence from a Wordsmithery example and we expanded on that. After this, I wrote down 5 examples on the board of simple sentences, and had each child pick one and expand on it on their own in their journals.

We talked a little bit about a thesaurus and how you can find synonyms and antonyms for your favorite words there, but considering I didn't have one in hand, that is something that has to be reviewed again next week.

I can't say enough great things about this class. Really. The backbone is strong, the children are enthusiastic and curious, not to mention excited about writing. It is just such a perfect way to start my week each week!

Something for Halloween

Carve a Virtual Pumpkin

Big Cats and Pumpkins... Who will win?

A bit of African fun (SOTW Chapter 29)

In Story of the World we slowly travel around the globe and each event that marked the turning point of a society we follow for a little while and become invested in. Sometimes we focus on the culture, sometimes we focus on the events, and sometimes the animals.

This story was a favorite of mine and I was lucky to have inherited my mother's copy for my own kids. They love it! It is about Anase the Spiderman (Logan calls it "the real Spiderman story") and about how he brought stories to the people of the world. Wonderful symbolism, fun illustrations, and lots of great cultural tidbits.

We have passed the African Kingdoms chapter some time ago (now on 32 and that was 29) but it is always nice to review with a little bit of culture and fun.

And just to get your wiggles out, check out this great video:



How fun is that??

In the Handwork corner

We are all learning to knit!

Apple Taste Test Graph

Fall around here means pumpkins... but it also means Apples! (We do live in Washington, after all.) So we decided to do our own little taste test of all the different apples we could find. Some came from our CSA box, some came from the market, and the rest came from the grocery store. As much as I would love to say we were able to take an apple from our own trees... the only tree that produced any apples this year is not ready for harvest yet. The Florina Apple tree still has green on her apples (they are a dark blush apple with white dots when ripe) and so we will have to add this to the taste test another day.

I made a graph so Cyan could write down our like of each variety in a number between 1-10. I let Logan just do faces as the number system was a bit beyond him.

Our favorites seem to be Fujis, Galas, and one I hadn't heard of before called "Jazz".

After we were done with the taste test, I allowed a little bit of taste bud redirection with a tiny yummy cup of caramel sauce to dip the leftover pieces in.

I think I may have ruined dinner! Eeeek!

Reading Basket for Autumn

In our reading basket this week, we have a bunch of wonderful books for the Autumn season. I have been having Cyan read them to Logan after naptime and they both look forward to those moments.

Grandfather Twilight

More than anything, this book is stunning! There are very few words, making it a favorite for beginning readers and the pictures are beautiful and magical, making it a favorite for non-readers. I included it in the Autumn book basket because it seems to show the earth going to sleep... and this time of year, it can feel as though the days get shorter very quickly.

Too Many Pumpkins

At first, we got it from the library, but within the week I knew we had to own it and add it to our Autumn book box. The kids just LOVE the story! Rebecca Estelle, an old maid, hates pumpkins. But when a pumpkin truck accidentally drops a pumpkin in her front yard circumstances make her adjust her opinion of pumpkins... and create a connection with her community as well. A charming story and a good laugh (and plenty of moments to tear up too).

And just in case that isn't enough reason to go out and see if you can find this book, here is a whole Natural Kids unit study based on this book and pumpkins! Perfect for this time of year. :)

Inspired Sprouts; Pumpkin Corner

Autumn Story

Another adorable addition to the Brambly Hedge series by Jill Barklem, Autumn Story does not disappoint! The harvest time is very busy for the creatures of Brambly Hedge. One day, when out gathering, Primrose gets lost and has a wonderful little adventure. The story includes a lot of harvest activities that we do around here in the fall; gathering for winter, preserving foods, and enjoying hot tea being among them. And just like the other books in the series, the illustrations are amazingly detailed and make me remember fondly the days of laying in the grass, making tiny houses for fairies and mice alike.

The Legend of Spookly, the Square Pumpkin

This is the story that Cyan read yesterday. It is an adorable book about a pumpkin that feels like an outsider because he has a different shape than the rest of the pumpkins in his patch. In the end, he gets to save the day with his difference and enjoys being the hero for his pumpkin patch.

I didn't realise that this book had become a franchise until I searched for this image on Google. There is apparently a Spookly movie, a Spookly website and everything! I look forward to looking for those at my library, but for now, we are very happy just to read the book over and over.

Quotes from Facebook

I have found recently that some of the things I would normally post on here have ended up on Facebook instead. So I decided to move them over. Enjoy the funnies from the past week!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Husband: Who left the flag up on the mailbox?

3 yr old: I did!

Husband: You can't do that buddy. That means something.

3 yr old: Yeah. It means I can reach it!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I ask the daughter to bring all of the stuff from around the yard, onto the patio so we can get rid of the garbage and go through the outdoor toys before Winter... what is the first thing she brings? ROCKS. Big fat rocks from all over the yard. When asked what she is doing she says: "But... you said *everything*."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Dear moonbrained teenage son,

For future reference, axes, hatchets, and hedge trimmers are not lawn ornaments. Weed whackers do not belong on the front porch, and extension cords are not part of our curb appeal. You bike does not get flipped over and left in center the walkway, nor do you get to get angry at your three year old brother for picking up/touching said bike, hatchet, or ax.

Also, wearing socks and flipflops through wet grass is dumb. As is complaining about it afterwards.

Love (your very irritated) Mom (who is now leaving and getting a cup of coffee.)

(God, please help us both live through this year. Amen.)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~