quilt

Looky what I've got! My incredibly talented, outrageously generous friend S made me this AMAZING quilt!!











Doesn't it look absolutely fabulous on our bed?! (Our bedroom is too small to really get the whole thing in the photo, I just can't step back far enough.)










The cats approve. (That's Kismet in the foreground, Candy Corn in the background.)












Candy Corn shows off the reverse side, which is very pretty in it's own right!

this week in pictures

The boys had a busy week while I was off at herding clinics. Follow along with the photos for a peek at some of the fun!











Climbing in the hay loft after doing farm chores.


















J gave Mimi the birthday present he made her -- a crocheted bookmark. (Happy Birthday, Mimi, you look pretty good for an old woman!)
















The Map Man took the boys miniature golfing for the first time, at a new course that just opened nearby.












J had a blast crocheting wrist bands and sweat bands for himself and Zoo Boy, and this juggling ball (here he is sewing the end to keep the beans he stuffed it with inside).

















Letterboxing adventures in the state forest.













Bowling. Kids bowl free all summer at participating alleys -- go here for more information!











J shows off the start of his new crochet project, a striped lap throw. More photos to come, no doubt!

Now, back to "school" for one final wrap-up week, then on to summer adventures!! Hooray!!

alphabet wrap-up, and where we go from here

This past week we wrapped up our final block for the year by discussing/writing the letter "Z" (oops, I forgot to take photos....), and creating a chart of all of the letters of the alphabet, both upper and lower case. This is J's work. We are on vacation for the coming week (I'm at 4 days of clinics this week, so the kids are "on vacation" with The Map Man), then we'll work on binding our good books (putting together all of our school work from the year in one book) during our last week of "school" for the year next week, ending with a celebration of the Summer Solstice.

Zoo Boy's chart. Even though we'll be on "Summer Break", we'll stick with a strong daily rhythm that will continue to include time for chores, movement, and therapy work. We'll also work on handwriting sheets to try to keep Zoo Boy motivated to working on his handwriting. I'll use this work this summer to evaluate whether or not I need to specifically address handwriting as an issue with him, or if I can just continue to let it develop while keeping a watchful eye on it. I do plan on quite a bit of woodworking for the fall to help strengthen the muscles and coordination needed for handwriting.

Our final bulletin board for the year. I'm going to keep the board as is for the summer so the kids can refer to the letters if they want to, and the four-processes verses which are also posted there. There is also a number chart to 100, but I'll probably take that down, my kids have a really good feel for working with 2 digit numbers at this point.

I've had a few questions recently about the slow pace with which I've taken our 1st grade year. I strongly believe that the extra time we've taken with introducing the consonants, despite the fact that J's been reading for years, has provided him a base for comprehension, and a holistic foundation for his more advanced reading skills. I feel like the more foundation I can build under the skills he accumulates on his own, the better balance he has as he progresses with his own drive to accumulate knowledge. I find that's the tricky balance when dealing with an Autistic brain, or at least J's Autistic brain (I'd be the last one to characterize all kids' experiences as the same!) -- allowing him to follow his strengths while keeping them in check enough so it doesn't become stifling to the rest of his development.

The above photo is a fine example of this drive to accumulate knowledge -- he asked me to bring up the Zoob building set, which is put away in the basement, so that he could construct a DNA model. He's been reading about DNA and it's role in living organisms lately. This is typical of the sorts of things he likes to do during his free time. So I see no reason to actively bring him this sort of hard-on science, he's seeking it out on his own -- my time is better spent making sure he feels connected to his continuously expanding wealth of knowledge, understands how these sorts of processes are a real part of life in this universe, and how art, poetry, and music fits into the overall picture as well.

Zoo Boy, not to be outdone, creates his own Zoob model.

In the meantime, what we're working on is also exactly where Zoo Boy is developmentally, at a very typical age for this type of learning. Rushing further ahead would only put pressure on him to keep up. He needs to be where we are, and since it's nourishing his brother as well, I'm happy to continue at a pace that meets both of their needs. We'll wrap up the other typical 1st grade work in the fall, with some more challenging aspects mixed in to meet some of J's needs, including more mature story content for him, more challenging extra curricular classes, and more advanced writing skills (and the language skills needed to go along with that).

as the pony eats...

One of the pure joys of homeschooling for me is allowing my children the time and space to stop and smell the flowers along this path we traverse. Or, in Zoo Boy's case, time to stop and observe how a pony eats....

Can you think of a better way for a boy to spend an hour on a cloudy spring morning?

all about ice cream

Earlier this week we attended a tour of the University of Connecticut's Dairy Bar, organized by another homeschooling mom. Wow, did we ever get an education about the manufacturing of our favorite summer treat! And we wanted to share our new-found knowledge with you.


Our tour guide, pointing out the steps that go into the ice-cream making process. It actually was less of a tour, more of a "here's how it's done" lecture, and then we were set loose to explore on our own via glass walls surrounding the work spaces. The boys loved the freedom to tour the plant at their own pace, and as a result they came away with a real understanding of how the ice cream gets from the cow to our cones!

These are the pasteurizing vats. The milk comes directly from the dairy on campus in large totes, and is poured into these vats along with the other ingredients (heavy cream, sugar, corn syrup solids, non-fat dry milk, and a stabilizer/emulsifier, in addition to cocoa powder when they are making a chocolate mix). This is where the ingredients are blended, and the mix is heated to 160 deg F. This takes place over a much longer period of time than what is done is typical ice-cream plants, which is why UCONN ice cream has a richer, smoother texture and consistency.

The mixture then heads into the homogenizer, where it is exposed to 2,500 psi of pressure, which causes the fat globules to burst apart and disperse evenly through the mixture. Then the mix is cooled rapidly by a plate heat exchanger, which drops the temperature 40 deg F in about 15 seconds. (This is the equipment that most commercial plants use to pasteurize their ice cream mix as well as cool it, because it is more time efficient than the method UCONN employs.)

Then the mix goes into the 600 gallon storage tank (on the right here) to sit for one day to one week. Resting the mix allows the fat to recrystallize and the stabilizer to hydrate, producing the correct viscosity to the mix.

Next to the storage tank is the flavor tank, and this is where liquid flavors, bases, and coloring is added, 150 gallons at at time, after the resting period.

From the flavor tank, the mix is pumped into the continuous freezer, which chills the mix to 23 to 26 deg F, which is the consistency of soft-serve. It also whips air into the mix, without which the ice cream would freeze so hard that you could break a tooth in it!

This is the stage where ripples (fudge, peanut butter, caramel, etc), candy, cookies, fruit and nuts are added. If they were added before the ice cream was this consistency, they would all just sink to the bottom!

The ice cream is then packed into containers (at UCONN they use 3-gallon and 1/2 gallon containers) and then put in the hardening room, which is a freezer that is constantly -20 deg F (there is no freeze/thaw cycle as there is with a traditional freezer). The ice cream stays there for at least 24 hours before it is ready to move to a tempering cabinet, which is a freezer set at 0 degrees F to help bring the ice cream up to "dipping temperature" (the temperature at which it can be scooped out and served), which is about 8 deg F.

The boys checking out all the equipment. We were actually there on a maintenance day, so we didn't get to see any ice cream being made. They do post a schedule, however, and any visitor to the diary bar can observe the plant in action, so we plan another visit this summer when there is more action going on.

Of course, no Dairy Bar tour is going to be complete without tasting some of the product! Our group of homeschoolers filled the place, and everyone enjoyed the rich, creamy UCONN ice cream!

My boys were no exception. Then again, neither was I. This was my kind of field trip!

We drove around the campus a bit afterwards, and J says he's going to go to this college when he's a teenager. I wonder how much the ice cream had to do with that....

around the farm today

Just a few random shots from around our farm today:

The Map Man squaring up a fence post on a new line of fencing.












Our latest addition, a ewe lamb I've named Esme. (Yes, she IS the cutest thing on the planet!) I traded one of my ewes for her, because I just had to have her. All those spots!!






Annie, hiding in her stall from the swarms of biting black flies.











Above Annie's head, the barn swallows returned this past week and built their nest. They are now busy laying their eggs (and catching and eating the aforementioned flies).



Zoo Boy working on some sort of sand project.














J just hangin' around.

mischief in Alpha-Beta

This week we worked with the Enki Education 1st Grade Language Arts story "Mischief Comes to Alpha-Beta". I already posted about the little hiccup we ran into when we tried to recall the story the day after I read it initially, and what I did to remedy that problem. Here's the rest of the story!

The tale is about odd-consonants and how they use trickery and magic to steal letter sounds so they can reside in the city of Alpha-Beta. After recalling (and summarizing) the story (the day after the 2nd telling of it), we drew pictures of the main characters in the story. And the following day (today) we located the letters within the pictures ("C" in the two upper left-hand drawings, Q in the upper right, X -- the spaces between the faces -- in the lower left, and J in the lower right), then wrote in some words using the "stolen" sounds (one word suggested by each of us).


That first drawing was J's. This is Zoo Boy's. He again did all of his own drawing and writing, even though he chose only to write his own suggestions. But still, that's fairly huge progress for him. I've noticed over the past several weeks that he is reversing some of his letters (N and S being two of them), and he's forming a lot of his letters from the bottom up. I blame that mostly on my having been lazy about working handwriting practice into our rhythms this year. So for that reason, and given that J still occasionally draws a letter from the bottom up, I've decided to have the boys work on handwriting sheets during our summer break to hopefully at least keep their handwriting skills from slipping over the summer. And I'll make continued handwriting practice more of a priority as we start up again in the fall.

My drawing, for comparison.

You'll note the simple "Y" and "Z" at the bottom of the drawings. This is because these two letters slipped in before the Giant closed the gate to the city. We didn't talk about them (although we already discussed "Y" as a consonant last week) in the context of this story, I just put them out there to consider. Next week, the final week of our last Language Arts block, we will talk about Z and wrap up the entire year by writing out a chart of all the letters, and begin organizing our Language Arts Good Book pages for binding during our final week of schoolwork for the year.

This particular story was not a required part of the curriculum, but I wanted to use it (despite the kids' initial difficulty with understanding it) because there is a feeling of coming full circle. In the very first story we read this year, "Little Falcon", the child passed through the golden oak gates. And here, in our final story of the year, the Giant closes the gates to the city where the alphabet resides, just as we complete our work with the individual letters. I'm a big fan of symmetry, and working with this story at this time brought about a really nice feeling of completion to it.