Alligators on a snowed in week.

Snow, Snow Snow....

There has been a lot of snow since Jan. 1st when it all started coming down. I think total accumulation is now at 22 inches  which really isn't a lot especially spread out over 6 days but since we have had pretty mild winters the last few years people have become spoiled.

The city got all panicky and went to the grocery store Saturday before we had the last 8 inches dumped on us. I heard from my facebook friends posting pictures that this is what the stores looked like. We stayed home and had a house full of food ( I could have used a few more fresh fruits and veggies) but I stayed home and did not go out into the sea of panic stricken crazy people.


To start our school week with my littles ( 4 and 6 year old) we are learning about Alligators. It was Duck's idea since he needed to to learn about a reptile for his zoo class this month I just made a week of it.

We watched

and this one for fun, I just love the Charlie and Lola but it just figures that the ONE EPISODE that was about alligators was scratched and would only play for 7 minutes, dang library!

We read a handful or fiction and non fiction alligator books

A favorite was 

We did a  Alligator themed color by number page 

and an Alligator  handwriting page 

We added those to  this Alligator shape book. 

 This is the front of Duck's and the back of Owl's

 Inside of Duck's

A picture of Owl's Alligator  inside his book because I thought the pink and yellow polka dot's were just too cute not to share!

After a week long study on Alligators these are questions I asked the littles at the dinner table to show off what they learned in front of Papabird.

1.Are Alligators mammals or reptiles? Mammals  WRONG

2. What do they eat? Fish  RIGHT

3.So what are meat eaters called? Cannibals  WRONG, close but not quite

4. What are the differences in Crocodiles and Alligators? I don't know

5.How big is a baby Alligator? 10cm WRONG 10 in. close though.

Sigh, they knew all these answers all week but not when quizzed at the end of the week at the table. Papabird just gave me this look like (what DID you do all week?) 

You win some you lose some!

Starting Fresh Monday

Starting fresh Monday

I have been in a schooling stand still lately not loving what I am doing and feeling unmotivated to do anything school like. I am guessing it is has something to do with the fact that I am  31 weeks pregnant but maybe something is in the air. Some of my other homeschooling moms have been feeling the same way and they are not  pregnant.

After over a month off of school we jumped back on the schooling train. Japan style on a Bullet train!

Speaking of Bullet trains here is favorite song of mine. Don't judge!!! This song is peppy, fun and is just fun.... I am totally a mom and rock this song out in my sweet van full of kids at full blast. As I type this Falcon is singing the song right next to me while on his computer playing Skyrim.

We started our morning  with our favorite yogurt 

Whole fat plain organic yogurt

Chia seeds

Flax seeds

Cinnamon

Coco powder

Raw honey

Then we headed to the library to get some books. We were also meeting a local astronomer there that Falcon has been in contact with to look at my telescope and figure out why it has not been magnifying well. He gave us plenty of answers and now my telescope is functional and no longer a $600 dust magnet.

As a fun treat  (I had BOGO coupons) we all went to a local coffee shop and got super yummy decaf lattes. It was the best one I have had since getting pregnant I am seriously;y going back tomorrow. I have to go back to the library anyway to pick up my books on hold that I forgot all about and it just so happens the coffee shop is just across the street

Back home at 12:00 for lunch, yummy leftovers from the Olive Garden then onto school work.

 I got the little  boys back on learning to read.

Robin  got back to her regular school work, I realized today we need to work on nouns again she seems think everything is an "idea". Robin also worked quite a bit on her Girl Scout badge work since she only has 6 ish more months left to finish out all her badges. We are working on a fun shape book all about Oranges right now for her "snacks" badge. We had fun finding Orange farms in the US and figuring out how many miles away they are from us. Oranges travel a LONG way to get to us.

Robin is also reading the American Girl Rebecca books for our homeschool book club. I invited over a friend of hers who is in that club and they worked on an art project that goes along with the books.Here is the art lesson we used.

They also wrote facts that I looked up about lady liberty on the backs of the art projects.

Falcon has been playing with power point and getting a presentation ready due next week on a founding father. He is also just finishing up Algebra 1, Oceanography and American history.

Hoping for a great productive day tomorrow, as for now this mama is going to snuggle in bed with her daughter and read Rebecca with her.

Engineering for Girls- The Marshmallow Spaghetti Experiment

So have you heard of the marshmallow spaghetti experiment?

You must watch this 7 min Ted Talks video then.

After  hearing about this from a friend of mine who had tried it during his last year as an engineering student I knew I had to try it out with some Homeschoolers to see how they did. 

Finally a perfect opportunity came up and I tried this with our Homeschooled Girl Scout Troop.

12 girls broke into 3 teams of 4.

1 team of 5 moms (I wanted to see how they sized up against the kids)

 I broke them up into ages, as I read that the youngest  kids actually always do better at this. Most moms were confused at this point why I wasn't mixing up the ages so the older kids could help the younger ones. 

Here is how they did:

There was no parental help allowed at all!

Group one 5-6 year olds:     6 inches

After a lot of sitting and talking and all the moms thinking that there was noway anything productive was going to happen at this table. They Triumphed!!

                                        

                                       

Group two: 6-8 year olds:       0 inches

There as a lot of talking going on here, and a lot of ideas but no clear way to make it happen. They had some very unique ideas that they tried at first without much success. I think the problem in this group was there was no clear leader established and not much got done. They did try to make a teepee type structure but were unable to get it to stand up. Given more time I feel this team would have gotten a structure up with a marshmallow on top. There were some very unhappy girls at this table when I said time was up.

Group 8-9 year olds       0 inches

These girls had a slow start but were full of ideas just as time was up they had a pretty tall structure but it would not stand up.

Group Moms:                 20 inches

I have no idea what their thought process was but none had done this before and this is what they had in the end. Maybe it was the extra person that made all the difference.

This was a fun experiment and I enjoyed hearing all the thought processes going on, I am hoping to bring more team skill building activities into our monthly meetings to get these girls to think outside the box more.

Thank you Ray for telling me about this.

If you are interested in Engineering for girls I just came across this company and it  is now  on my daughters wish list for Christmas. 

Looking for more? Click link below.

      100 Awesome Engineering Projects for Kids

I am hoping to do more of these with my kids possibly our Girls Scouts as well.

Happy Homeschooling!

Playing catch up.

Schooling? What is that? Oh that's the thing I said I would do this year. I am a bit of an over achiever and when I say we haven't really done schooling we have just very light lately. I am 28 weeks pregnant ,I think. It's baby #5 so until labor starts I really don't think to much of what week I am and what the baby is doing like I did with #1. I seem to have a harder time schooling when preggo than when baby is a new born. I am just so tired when I am pregnant and big and uncomfortable so as soon as baby pops out ( I wish) I throw him/her in my moby wrap and am ready to seize the day.

So what have we done?
Well we started the little house in the Woods series all the kids are enjoying that. We got some venison from our neighbors so we can eat that just like they did in the books. We also met up with some friends for a playdate and visited a little cabin just like the one we are reading about. ( Sorry no pics)

We chopped down our Christmas tree, okay we used a saw but chopping sounds so much better!

Then we went to our favorite sub place to eat with our tree strapped to our handy dandy minivan. We were having fun with Papabird while we waited.

Our Elf of a Shelf brought us some fun things to do, she brought us a set of 10 puzzles that we need to finish before Christmas eve. So we have been enjoying a lot of family time putting those together.

We went to a homeschool Christmas party that was wheat free, so that was fun that my kids were allowed to eat everything they saw.

Falcon and I just finished reading Divergent  here is the trailer. I need to go get the next book in the series from the library today, but feeling unmotivated.
We saw Catching Fire at the theater, it was AMAZING!

Speaking of Falcon  he left this morning for Chicago with his Boyscout troop. I am feeling quite uneasy about him being so far away from home and hoping he doesn't starve while he is there. I did send him with lots of wheat free snacks but who knows if he will eat them and will want to eat junk like the rest of the kids. I just hope he doesn't eat too much wheat and make himself sick.

Short and Sweet.

I have really been  having a hard  time sitting and composing blog posts since discovering I am pregnant. I compose them all day in my head they just never make it to my blog.

So the hens finally started laying, we are only getting 1-2 eggs a day right now and no Easter egger eggs yet.

Care to guess which 3 eggs came from our chickens and which 3 came from our farmers chickens? I am overly excited to say that our chickens are laying the healthier dark orange yolk eggs.

Speaking of chickens one of our lovely dogs got  a hold of one of our barred Rocks and ate the comb off the top of her head, good thing it wasn't the poor hens head. She is healing well.

I am loving this cooler weather we are having ( some might call it downright cold) but not I! 

So we hung out in the arctic exhibit at a nearby zoo, these animals agree with me and how nice it is.

Terrible 2's? More like terrible twosome.

I should have known today was not going to be a great day when a black bird flew into my windshield on the express way causing my heart to stop and almost an accident as well. How is the bird you ask? Well probably pretty dead I was going 70mph.

My 2 boys Duck (age 5) and Owl (age 4) have been terrors lately doing things my other 2 kids never did.After dinner today I sent them outside to play while I folded laundry in the living room.

There was a lot of giggling outside and screaming too which is never a good combo. I thought about getting up to look but I was just too tired from a day of yelling at these boys, at least they are outside I thought.  They are probably throwing dirt at one another. ( I wish) Duck came to the door teary eyed  with human feces all over his hands and said,
" I am sorry mom I had an accident"
I am mad but feeling bad for him at this moment because he has diarrhea. So I reply kind of calmly,
"How did the poop get on your hands then? Did you get it on them on purpose and chase your brother?
" Uh.......Yes"

So I take him is the house and get him and his clothes all clean, while I am doing this my 2 older kids come in and give me more pieces of this poop puzzle that I was not aware of. Evidently Duck had reached into his pants and threw poop all over his younger brother.

 So now Owl is covered in  human feces.

AM I RAISING MONKEYS?

Luckily Falcon cleaned him up for me as best he could with hose water outside while I was cleaning up his brother inside.

There was poop all over the door knobs, poop on toys, poop on the garage. At least this is all outside not on my curtains, on my couch, on my carpet etc... ( silver lining).


I am so very thankful that I did not know right away what  Duck did or I may have just lost it right then and there in the doorway of my house. Hearing about what happened  in stages was much easier to deal with I stayed  pretty calm (more so than I did last week when the boys had a war with the white school glue and covered each other and the dining room in it!)


Who ever said having  2 kids close is age of the same sex is great ....they were WRONG.  Must have been the one that said childbirth doesn't hurt! Instead of 1 kid getting into trouble I have 2 always conspiring together and causing such havoc.

In the last 2 weeks my boys have:

1. Got into the chicken run and romped around in the coop in all the chicken poop covered straw.

2.Let the chickens free when the dogs were out ( our 2 large dogs want to eat the chickens) feathers were everywhere but no one was killed!

3. Had a war with white glue and squirted each other and the dining room in.

4. Pulled up all my gardening stones and threw them all over the yard.

5. Ripped up all Robin's milkweed that we had planted to help save the monarch's.

6. Made mud in the outside dog water and threw it at the house.

I know that I will look back at these times and laugh and miss them dearly. My boys are now all clean and tucked snugly into their beds ( maybe). They may actually be wandering about the house causing more boy trouble. As I kissed Duck and hugged him I said to him ,"you know mama still loves you even when you make me mad and do bad things" his eyes got wide and  he replied " You do?" "Yes dear one I do!"

I am planning on making some clean mud with the boys in the next week maybe doing this will curb their need to creates  other messes. Hopefully my neighbor will let me use her microwave for this since our tree-hugging family does not own one.

I also need to make a batch of this fall playdoh 

Back on track and chugging along.......

 School and stuff...

Falcon

Is working on his highschool courses but this week he did not get very far. He got poison ivy all over his face doing work at Papabirds office. It was so bad his face was super swollen and his eyes were almost swollen shut. He still looks bad but its getting a bit better his eyes are halfway open now.

Robin

Is working on the 3 types of rock, today we made an edible Igneous rock.

The littles 

Are both working on Kindergarten this year and they have been loving reading eggs so far,

We were working on letter sounds in the driveway, they had to hop to the correct letter sound. They were also working on the words am, at, and I. Farther down in the driveway they working on grouping things in the number I had written down.

Our Travels this week...

Geocaching

Have you tried it? Well I have known about it for awhile but never gave it a go until this week. So armed with my GPS we headed out to 3 locations, the first 2 were a bust and we could not find them. We did however find lots of litter, dog poop and poison ivy, ICK! Third time is the charm through we finally found one at our 3rd location. After dinner Falcon was chomping at the bit to head back out so Papabird watched the littles and we headed out on our bikes to two locations about a mile away.

We found both 

 This was a nano, the log book was in the green canister and the was hidden in a street lamp.

Hidden in a tree.

The Orchard

We  headed to the orchard to pick peaches, apples and went through a corn maze

took us about 25 min. to find our way out.

In my life...

Still feeling pretty sick but almost  at my 2nd trimester so hopefully relief is in sight. 

I went to a friends house and learned how to make my own yogurt and lacto fermented cabbage. I am so excited to start these on my own next week.