observations on week #2

(Kids heading out on our daily morning bike ride.)
I figured I'd post a few thoughts about this past week's homeschooling activities. I already posted individually about our rainy day activities on Tuesday, our apple picking on Friday, and our visit to the fair on Saturday, so I won't bother revisiting old news. But I did make a few observations as the week progressed that I think are worthy of note, and took a few pictures yesterday that I thought were worth posting.

(The kids playing football with The Map Man in the yard yesterday morning.)
I made a mistake this week. A typical week for us will involve us reading the curriculum story for 3 or 4 mornings a week(depending on whether our Friday Excursion is a half-day or all-day event), but since J's Monday classes at the children's museum hadn't started yet, and since we were planning to do our Movement Circle and Curriculum Story on Saturday as well (to show The Map Man what we're doing), I decided to split the week and use two stories. So I read our first story on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, then started a new story on Thursday which I also told on Friday and Saturday. This was obviously too much for one week for my kids, though. They didn't sink as well into the stories, and their play this week didn't reflect either story. Given that they had really started getting into the first story, I think I totally disrupted things by changing gears mid-week. From now on, regardless of how many days we read our story, I'll stick to the one-story-a-week plan for our curriculum stories.

In lieu of a nature walk this week, we did a "pasture wander" instead to see what we could find right in our own pasture, and honestly, I almost think it worked better, as it allowed the kids to take more time exploring the details of their environment, and they really came up with some great discoveries, as you can see below. Another realization I had this week is that there's no need to use planned "themes" for our activities -- the seasons themselves naturally offer enough activities and experiences that any planning is really unnecessary.

Here the kids check out a snake skin we discovered in some tall weeds. They had fun identifying the tail and the head of the snake. What I found most fascinating is that they have seen and handled snake skins before (some brought in off our own property), we've read books about kids finding snake skins in bushes, and they know that we have snakes on our property (in fact, we watched a large snake slither across our driveway earlier in the week with a big lump in it's belly: obviously it had recently eaten some rodent or large toad). Yet, they couldn't quite put these bits of information together to identify the snake skin when they first found it. It was only after providing a few more clues for them (those look like scales, I wonder what is long and has a tail that looks like that, etc) for them to realize what it was.

They also found quite a few woolly bear caterpillars. They compared them to our monarch caterpillars (I think that's what we're growing in our aquarium -- I could be wrong!). [NOTE: We have since discovered that our caterpillars were really Milkweed Moth caterpillars.] They watched them curl up when we touched them. They asked if we could bring some inside to live with the monarchs, so we talked about how they are getting ready to hibernate and wouldn't spin cocoons and become moths until next spring. In the end, they decided to leave them to go about their business of finding a good place to hibernate. It was also interesting to note that the chickens didn't want to eat them (unusual, since our chickens will eat anything that moves usually, but they would walk right past them). We speculated as to whether they are too fuzzy, an unappealing color, or maybe they just taste bad.

Books we read during Family Story Time this week: Night in the Country, by Cynthia Rylant, illustrated by Mary Szilagyi; The Seasons of Arnold's Apple Tree, by Gail Gibbons (GREAT book! and good info about using a cider press, as well as an apple pie recipe); and Apples, Apples, Apples by Nancy Elizabeth Wallace (which, while possessing overly simple illustrations, provides a lot of information about Apples in a story format, and is one of my kids' very favorite books of all time -- there are also lots of ideas for apple crafts, activities, songs, sayings, and their recipe for Apple Sauce is out of this world!).