nomadic tent, week 1

Last week I wrote about the start of our big Adobe Oven cultural project. Our other big cultural project for this semester is making a Nomadic Tent, from the goat up. Today we had our project co-op friends out to our farm to shear our Angora goats. First we talked about how our goats' lives are different from the goats of the ancient Israelis. (They are more sedentary and live in the same place year-round, as opposed to goats in the desert who must move from water hole to water hole.)


Then the kids picked up scissors and got to work. As we sheared, we talked about the tools the ancient Israelis actually had to shear their goats (sharp rocks and sharpened goat bones) and how much harder that must have been than using scissors. (Which made a pretty big impression, because all of the kids thought it was too hard as it was.)

The kids all lost interest before the first goat was done, but the lesson was learned -- it's not easy to shear a goat, imagine if you had an entire flock of them and depended on them for all of your clothing and shelter needs!

Afterwards the kids had fun collecting chicken eggs, herding ducks, snuggling with the pony, and climbing all over hay bales.

It was a chilly late-October afternoon, but a nice day to be out enjoying the cooler weather and visiting with friends.

We'll be getting back to working on the oven this coming week, the weather was rainy last week preventing us from working on it. Now that we have the goat fleece, we can work on that project on rainy days, so we'll have a bit more flexibility with our projects.