new life

Spring is obviously upon us, evident both from the inches (upon inches) of water that fell from the sky over the past few days, and the happy surprise waiting for us this evening in the barnyard (above), a beautiful new ewe lamb from our pretty ewe Alice, who will be named Gwenhywyfar. (We're going with a King Arthur's court theme -- Arthur has already been born on another farm and will be moving here when he's old enough.) I'll get better, less eye-glowy pictures of mom and babe tomorrow in the daylight.

And the fun won't stop there. There are more sheep to lamb, and we just set 60 duck eggs in the incubator. Stay tuned!

welcome Spring!

Ok, so we're a week late with our celebration welcoming in Spring. And it felt a whole lot more spring-like last weekend than this one. (Brrr!) But I was away last weekend, and the moon phase jibed better this weekend anyway! I'm not a Pagan (though I love many of the traditions, and The Map Man at least leans in that direction), but there's something deeply soul-satisfying about watching my children dance under the (nearly) full moon around a bonfire.

We're ready, bring on the warm weather!!

fact family games

This week we mostly just messed around with some games to support our fact family work, some via Enki Education instructions, some made up on-the-fly because it supported the kids in how they were taking in the information. As I was pulling out the Fact Family verse to post at the beginning of the week, Zoo Boy asked, "What are we doing today?" J whispered, "Subtraction, of course, we did addition with Grandfather's Family last week!" I simply read the verse aloud, and Zoo Boy exclaimed, "Oh, I see, 'going separate ways', that would be subtraction!" Love it, love it, love it....




ANYWAY! I had made up a bunch of these number cards (6 for each number) that correspond to the colors of the cuisinaire rods, as well as a few "+" "-" and "=" cards. The first day I took a 6 card, a 4 card, and a 10 card. I retold, again, the key point from the Grandfather's Family story, picking up the "10" for Grandfather, and the "6" and "4" for the grand kids as I read, laying them on the table, and then adding a "+" card between 6 and 4, and a "=" card before the 10 as above. Then I went on with my story, laying out a 10, and saying "The children stayed with Grandfather and played with him at the carnival for quite awhile. Eventually they became quite hungry. Grandfather asked his granddaughter to run ahead and let Mother know that they would be coming along right away for breakfast." With that, I laid down the "-" card and a 6, then laid down a "=" card and looked at J. He grabbed a 4 card to complete the equation and I said, "That left the grandson to help his grandfather pick up and prepare for breakfast." The I laid another 10 card down and said "After breakfast, Grandfather sent his grandson out to gather some wood so that he could whittle more whistles," and I laid out the "-" and 4 cards. Zoo Boy jumped in and grabbed a "=" and 6 cards, and finished the equation, and I wrapped up the story, "which left the granddaughter to help Grandfather sharpen his knife. When the grandson returned, they were a family together again and they whittled whistles together all morning long." Then I pulled the number cards out of one of the equations and laid them side by side.

That first day I finished by just letting the kids play around with the number cards. They built various families of three, and corresponding equations.


The next day I pulled out a spinner I'd made that corresponded with the card colors and explained the rules of the game. I spun the spinner and came up with a 6, which I picked out of the cards and then added two other cards (of my choice) to make a fact family. The it was J's turn, and he spun a 1, doing the same. Zoo Boy spun a 2, and so on and so forth until we were all out of cards. We played this game two days in a row, the 2nd day I pulled out cards to 25 to increase the options.


For the next couple of days, we played a game the kids have dubbed the "truth" game. I'm not sure if this is the same as any of the Enki games, it's something I thought of while working with the previous day's game. I spun the spinner and got a "6", then I made an equation (6+1=7) from the remaining cards.

J's turn was next. He spun a "10". He then had to put his 10 over my 6, and then make the equation "tell the truth" by changing one of the other cards (either the other number in the equation or the final number). He was also allowed to change the "+" sign to a "-" if he wished -- he did, changing the 7 to a 9 and making the equation "10-1=9".

Then it was Zoo Boy's turn. He spun a "3", and decided to change back to a "+" sign and change the 1 to a 6 to make the equation "tell the truth", 3+6=9. He then declared "number games" to be "the most fun games ever". Hooray for math!! We continued turn taking until no more "truth" could be told by the remaining cards.

More math games next week!

spring poems and ventures

Western European crafts, part 1

Honestly, I keep meaning to take pictures of us actually working on the crafts that we've been doing to complement our Western European cultural block. But I get so caught up in the craft itself, I can't seem to remember taking photos until after the kids have cleared out! But here's the remnants of a recent Quilling craft lead by my friend T, which all the kids (my two and T's daughter D) really seemed to enjoy, as did we adults.


Here's the creations from our first 'try it' day of quilling. J's picture is on top, of a campfire (he says the dark coil above the fire represents the dark night). Zoo Boy's is beneath J's, and is just a sample of the different types of coils and folds that T taught us to make.









For our formal quilling project, T printed out partial copies of St. Francis's "Canticle of the Sun" poem, and the kids created quilled suns above them. J's is on the left, Zoo Boy's on the right (I love his depiction of "Brother Sun"!). The boys were SO thrilled to be working with a poem that St. Francis himself wrote, and these are now hanging in an honored place in our house.

The boys and I also worked at home on a few projects -- here is some mosaic votive holders we made (zoo boy's is on the left, J's in the middle, mine on the right). This craft took several days to complete, but by the time we got to the grouting stage, Zoo Boy declared it "really cool".

Another "really cool" (according to the boys) yet really simple craft was coloring these "stained glass" pages, which now hang on our sliding door, brightening our dining room.

There will be more crafts to share before we finally leave this culture and move on to Western Africa -- stay tuned!

black holes

We've sort of had an unintentional study unit on black holes this week. The Map Man took the boys to a planetarium program (plus some related activities) on Saturday evening at The Children's Museum in West Hartford, and yesterday we met our friends Kyra and Fluffy at the Springfield Science Museum for their special exhibit on this most confusing of astronomical topics. We learned a lot. I honestly can say, however, that I still don't "get it". But it didn't keep me from enjoying the exhibit activities.

Above, J experiments with the magnetic/gravitational pull of a hidden black hole, trying to pinpoint where it is by the "stars" movement. (Black holes, being black, are understandably hard to locate, and you need to use star movement clues to find them.) Below is an example of the distortion that happens around black holes.

Above, Zoo Boy journeys on a space exploration of a black hole. The quote at the top of this post and the cartoon below pretty much summed up my experience! But the kids have a better grasp on the concept than I do -- I think their ability to think outside the box and the fact that they are not firmly entrenched in years of learning allows them to openly accept all the weird stuff that happens in the vicinity of black holes, whereas my brain rebels against it.

bikes, breakfast, and baseball

While I was gallivanting around Maine with dogs, ducks, sheep and cows for the weekend, the boys enjoyed the wonderful spring weather at home with The Map Man. It was the first time the bikes have been pulled out since fall, and J remembered everything he knew.








Zoo Boy has clearly outgrown his bike, but in typical ZBoy fashion, refuses to admit it or accept our offers to buy him a new bike. I really would like to get him really riding this year, but there's just no way he'll do it on that small of a bike. So we'll see what we can work out....



The boys jumped the gun on our cultural themes, asking The Map Man to make them pancakes from a Kenyan book. (We are going to be moving on to Western African culture in a few weeks, and while Kenya is most certainly not in Western Africa, it is culturally more similar to that than to the Western European culture we're still working in!) But I don't begrudge him caving in to their request -- anytime our kids actually ask to try something new to eat is an opportunity to be seized with gusto! J said he liked them, Zoo Boy said he didn't, and both requested more "traditional" pancakes instead for their actual meal.

Being spring, we of course broke out the baseball equipment. The boys were predictably thrilled and spent a bunch of time in the yard working on fielding and hitting skills.

Zoo Boy has taken a real interest in baseball all of a sudden (J has loved it for a couple of years). I'm looking forward to getting them out to a few minor league ball games this year.

I'm glad they were able to take so much advantage of the lovely weekend weather, because we're dealing with a week of rain and cold and ick now.