Homeschool | 1000 Fields of Roses

Legs Ahoy!

It has been brought to my attention that it is illegal to move frog spawn or tadpoles from their original location…. which means that I am – *gasp* – a frog smuggler!!!

I considered not posting the tadpoles anymore, but then I thought…. why not? We already have them… if we’re arrested, so be it…

So, moving on… the tadpoles now have back legs! yayy!! They look cute :D. Here’s some photos….

Here’s more of a close-up…

Nice, clean container again….

Thought I’d post some photos of some of my plants, as they’re sort of projects, and the tepee “update” as well…

Still growing. The rocket is not “rocketing” much, though..

The coriander is getting it’s proper leaves.

Nope – nothing happening here.

My rosemary has flowered! I don’t think it’s ever done that before. There’s only two flowers..

The pumpkin vine appears to be happy. I made a lovely soup from the last one we got from it.

Baby pumpkin! With a cute little hat! 😀

Tune in next time, for the continuing saga – “A pumpkin grows in Ipswich” …

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on March 26, 2011 at 7:41 pm Comments (1)

A Tepee and Beans….

…and marigolds.

Today we put together a project that I’ve been wanting to do for a while…. we built a tepee, and planted beans around the sticks, so they can climb up…

Pretty! 😀

These are the beans – they eventually become “blue climbing” beans… just right for a healthy snack after a hard day’s play!

The cleared ground.

The tepee – should be big enough for both of them (if they don’t move around too much 😀 )

Little boy planting beans..

Big boy planting marigolds (companion plant – good for pest control)

A family project…

Little boy watering 😀

The last photos make it look as if we were planting in the dead of night… it’s just that it was getting closer to dusk (5.30ish), and the light wasn’t good enough; I had to use the flash…

They’re supposed to start sprouting in a few days, and will hopefully be edible sometime at the start of winter…

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on March 23, 2011 at 9:53 pm Leave a Comment

The tadpoles are on their 14th day since we got them home. They’re pretty big now, and very wiggly, and HUNGRY!!!. You can see where their legs are going to erupt soon, and it’s funny to watch them eat – they have big mouths, compared to their bodies!

These photos were taken yesterday… in between then and now, we seem to have sprouted mosquito larvae as well. The froglets love it 😀

The water is still quite grubby, even though it’s been cleaned out recently – it was wall-to-wall algae, and smelled disgusting…

Clustered in the corner – they love the corners…

Hopefully, we will have little jumping things soon…

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Homeschool

on March 22, 2011 at 1:19 pm Comments (2)

Oil/Water and Fairy Looms

Today we did some simple experiments to check out the properties of water and surface tension –

1. Floating a piece of paper with a needle on top – when the paper sinks, the needle still floats…

2. Oil on water, food colouring through the oil layer into the water….

The boys pronounced it “Cool!” 😀

We went out on a mini nature walk this morning to collect leaves/feathers/bark etc, for fairy looms – I saw them on a blog that I’ve been checking out….(It’s on the March 14th entry – I’m thinking of trying out the geode eggs as well 😀 ) –

magicalchildhood.wordpress.com/

Here are the fairy looms we came up with – Littlest boy had trouble figuring out the weaving at first, but they both ended up with a lovely end product….

Showing off the creations…

Littlest boy’s – close up

Biggest boy’s – close up

…and this is mine 😀

We decided to display them so we could all enjoy them 😀

I thought this photo looked ethereal….

…and we’ve been keeping an eye on the tadpoles… they’re still growing… they’re very lively (and hungry) now. You can see where their legs will sprout….

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on March 16, 2011 at 10:49 pm Comments (1)

Wanderlust

We found a dvd in the library to watch at lunch times, which uses the premise “If Marco Polo were alive today, where in the world would he go?”…. there are a few dvds; we watched the one about Niger.

I feel it’s important for the boys to learn they’re part of a larger world… but I always feel like jumping on a plane when I watch these things 😀 I don’t really like plane travel… it’s just a means to an end. Travelling through the desert on the back of a camel seems much more my style 😀

Here’s the first part….

YouTube – Journeys to the Ends of the Earth – Niger 1/4.

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on March 14, 2011 at 7:12 pm Leave a Comment

Frankenchicken!

Today’s science experiment started out full of promise….

The aim was to reconstruct a chicken carcass, using the boiled/defleshed bones from the roast we had on Tuesday. It started off well… the boys laid out the bones into (almost) identical halves, with the spine and breastbone in the middle…

almost professional….

Part of the aim was to show the difficulties in reconstructing bones from dinosaur finds, where there is no record of the original creature. We had enough trouble with a chicken – something we’ve all seen many times!

The boys got the spine together in a recognisable shape…. and then it all went downhill from there…

I had thought that a liberal application of blu tack would hold things together enough to get an approximate shape. It turns out that blu tack doesn’t stick well to bone….

Added to that was the time factor… we started a little late in the morning, so had to finish before the afternoon’s activities. We ended up with a strange, half-bird nightmarish creature. With a very long neck.

Behold the Frankenchicken!

Some days are just weirder than others…..

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Homeschool

on March 11, 2011 at 10:52 pm Comments (2)

The Not-So-Good Bits…

Yesterday’s musing about the boys doing their work before we get up has been answered… while the work is being “done”, the standard could be better, and would benefit from me being there to oversee… at least for the time being! One small(ish) boy will not be too happy with that… 😀

On the other hand, I bought him an old, second hand dictionary today – endless fun! (cue rolled eyes from long-suffering son.. 😉 ) I’ve found that the new dictionaries don’t include phonetics or etymology – both needed this year for biggest boy’s studies.

Littlest bean had a long, tiring and upsetting tantrum today…. all played out on Ellenborough Street, with concerned (or possibly just plain annoyed) citizens looking on. We’d just had a lovely time at the cafe… and then he took exception to something… ran off outside. We left him for a bit, but I became concerned with traffic outside… went out to get him…. and then spent the next unknown number of minutes (but felt like hours) trying to hold a squirming, kicking, yelling littlest boy. Thankfully he doesn’t do that much anymore… but today was, well, today 😀 . All turned out well in the end (the end being dinner time) but he and I were both exhausted by then.

Time was, I would have been horribly embarrassed knowing everyone was watching today… but, today at least, that didn’t matter…. what was most important today was one small boy’s spirit, and the opportunity to teach and strengthen that little spirit, to look at consequences and behaviour… to take the opportunity to build a Godly heart. That might not seem to make much sense… I can’t find the words to explain more fully… but I believe that was happening today….

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on March 10, 2011 at 9:57 pm Leave a Comment

What We Did Next…

Today we finished off the fruit of our labours from yesterday (butter on toast), and sailed on into the morning….

The boys have (again) started doing their work before I get up in the morning. I’m not sure how I feel about that… the work gets done… I just feel a vague sense of “wrongness” – like they’re not keeping the proper hours… will have to think on that.

We picked up some tadpoles after lunch (from a friend who had some spare ones lying around 😀 ) We shall keep an eye on their progress. At the moment they are tiny and cute…

Another friend gave us a book on tying knots, and today was our first foray into the knot-tying world. It’s only when you try to teach some things that you realise how hard it can be to verbalise the process, even though we only did the basic knots today. The boys did well, and then amused themselves with tying each other up…

…and.. some time last week (ish?) I found some seeds I’d saved from last year’s crop (rocket and coriander), so I made up some more newspaper seedling pots and did two pots for each of them. This is the result so far – the rocket’s on the left, coriander on the right… it took longer to sprout.

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Homeschool

on March 9, 2011 at 11:14 pm Leave a Comment

What We Did (Yesterday)…

I’ve only just uploaded photos, so this is a belated post for yesterday…

We did some science experiments, based around cooking… looking at air bubbles in foods…

First we made meringues. My oven still isn’t working, so I had to google a microwave recipe –

1 egg white, lightly beaten, mixed with 10 oz icing sugar.

Microwave on high – the recipe said 1.5 minutes, I found that ours were done in 50 seconds. They did not hold their shape…. 😀

Still tasted lovely, though!

Then we made cream/butter (I didn’t think Littlest boy could shake the cream for the required 15 minutes to make butter).

We put thickened cream in a sealed container, with sugar (for whipped cream) or a pinch of salt (for butter), each with a clean, silver coin. Much shaking later, and we had delicious afternoon tea… and sore arms…

The butter was a little “curdy” (we drank the buttermilk), but… yum!! It seems to go a bit harder in the fridge than ordinary butter, but it’s worth it. 😀

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on March 9, 2011 at 10:46 pm Leave a Comment

Today….

has been a library day….

Got the school work done early, then walked down to the library. We haven’t walked a lot lately, so we all felt it… had a very grumpy smallest boy this afternoon. On the way we found a (largeish) handful of macadamia nuts that had fallen from a tree onto the footpath….

The boys did a bit of extra work once we got to the library (newspaper headlines for biggest boy, how to use the computer to find books for littlest boy) I got stacks more books to look through… both massive crafty/arty tomes and racy little mystery books (in size, if not in content!)

It is now evening – the boys are in bed, and the dishes are staring reproachfully at me from the kitchen. I shall ignore them, but not for long…..

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on March 7, 2011 at 7:51 pm Leave a Comment