Farm Week: Day 3 Berry Picking

Today our special "farm" activity was going strawberry picking at a nearby berry farm. We went with my friend, Julie, and her two children. This morning we read the story Jamberry by Bruce Degen. We have owned this book forever and the boys have both heard it and enjoyed it. However, it was fitting to pull it out again today. Homeschoolshare has a whole unit around this book. My oldest son completed one of the papers from that unit and I had printed several others for my younger son, but he wasn't interested in them today.

While we were at the berry patch, I remembered another perfect book for this topic. We have this one too, I think, but didn't pull it out to read yet. It is The Little Mouse, the Red, Ripe Strawberry and the Big Hungry Bear by Don and Audrey Wood. I just did a quick Google search and found some activities for this book.........click here (scroll down)........and here (free printable activity sheet). There are lots more out there..........just type in the title on Google and you'll find a bunch.

We had a perfect day to go berry-picking. The weather was perfect. A fun surprise was that the berry patch also has a fantastic playground which our children could play on for $1 per child. Actually, playground isn't even a term that is accurate to describe it. There were so many cool buildings to explores, logs to climb, etc. We are definitely heading back there this fall for pumpkin picking and a hay rack ride. I didn't take very many photos without children.........just this one of a little hand picking berries.

And this one of our lovely berries. My oldest son has eaten a TON of these already, just plain. As soon as I publish this post I'm going to do a Google search for strawberry recipes. I was thinking I might attempt strawberry jam, but I'm not sure we picked enough. And frankly, I'm kind of intimidated about making jam. One of these days..................

A final lament..........I am chomping at the bit to be able to show a bunch of great home dec projects I've finished up. DH was going to hang them tonight so I could photograph them, but by the time we had time to do it, it was past 9:00 p.m. and time for the boys to go to bed. So the big reveal will have to wait until tomorrow.

Snack basket

Here is a little thing I pulled together today. It's definitely not an original idea. I was reminded of it when I read this post on Carisa's 1+1+1=1 blog. If your children are like mine, they are constantly asking for snacks. Setting up a basket of healthy snacks will help them be more independent and I love that idea! So from now on when they ask for a snack, I will refer them to their basket. The basket won't be refilled until all the snacks are eaten. Here's a picture of our basket. I decided to do a joint basket instead of individual ones like Carisa. We'll see how that works.

Farm Week: Day 2 Making butter

Our farm activity today was making butter. It was a great success! I've never done this before, but my oldest son did it last year in his kindergarten class. If you'd like to try this yourself, I have a few tips based on our experience today. To make butter you simply need heavy whipping cream (available in the dairy section next to the milk) and a jar with a lid that screws on tightly. We used an empty plastic peanut jar. I was overzealous and bought two half-pint containers of whipping cream. However, if I do this again, I'll just use one.



Pour the cream into your clean jar. At least with 2 half-pints, each boy got to pour one in.



OK.............now screw the lid on tightly and SHAKE!!! We took turns shaking, but Mommy did most of the shaking, so be prepared for that. One internet source I read said the whole process should take about 10 minutes. I think it took us more like 15 minutes. One thing that happens is that the cream will get really thick, so thick that it doesn't even sound sloshy when you shake it. I wasn't anticipating this and thought we had messed it up somehow. At that point I poured the mixture into a bowl to see if there were any lumps of butter. Below you can see what it looked like at that point. NOTE: You DON'T need to do this...............just keep shaking past this part...........sorry for the bad photo.



After doing the above, I poured most of the cream back into the jar figuring that if I hadn't goofed it up, perhaps butter was yet to come. I shook for a few more minutes and surprisingly, the cream separated into butter and buttermilk after all!! Yay!! You can tell when this happens because instead of thick cream coating the side of your jar, you will begin to see clear spots and it will sound sloshy again while you shake it. When this happens, take off the lid and you will have a lump of butter with some remaining buttermilk. Below you can see what ours looked like when it was still in the jar. Isn't it cool?



I scooped the butter into a container and salted it lightly. My oldest son drank some of the buttermilk that I poured off it.

Then we spread our very own homemade butter on some warm buttermilk biscuits fresh from the oven. I had put these in to bake right before we started so they would be warm when our butter was ready to spread. Before you get too impressed with my domestic talents, let me assure you that the biscuits were the generic refrigerated biscuits in a tube. They were still SO fabulous when served warm with butter.

Sneak peek!!

I am really excited about a few home dec projects that I've been working on. I had out my can of Colonial Red spray paint today and this evening I made a trip to Home Depot and Hobby Lobby. I have lots of things in the works that I can't wait to post about. Until these projects are finished............here's a sneak peek. Anyone want to guess what I'm doing? By the way........if you want to totally be inspired by what others are creating, go immediately to this post from Thrifty Decor Chick. You will be blown away by the Goodwill/thrifted items that people have transformed into beautiful home decor.

Farm Week: Day 1

We got off to a good start with our study of farms today. The boys and I enjoyed the book All the Places to Love by Patricia Maclachlan & Mike Wimmer. After I read it out loud, I shared with my sons some of the places from my childhood home that were my favorite. I was blessed to grow up in the country on an acreage. Our family owned about 13 acres and thus I had lots of room to play outdoors. My favorite places were: a redbud tree with branches low enough for me to climb, an apple tree with a tire swing, our country "lane" which I liked to walk down and ride my bike on, our chicken house, our grapevines (I loved to pick grapes off them in the summer and squeeze them out of the skin and eat them), our garden (it was HUGE........I'm sure lots of work for my parents), and my little playhouse (This was a wooden "camper" that had been in the back of my uncle's pickup. When he didn't want it, it was "parked" in our backyard and became my playhouse. It had a little front step, windows, and a linoleum floor. It was so awesome.) So..........I had so many places to love growing up. I hope my boys will have similar memories as they get older.

Before we sat down to our "farm work", my youngest son had been playing downstairs and had found a pair of cowboy boots we had bought at the State Fair last summer. He decided he wanted to be a cowboy for the morning..........so he donned his cowboy hat and boots. It was in this garb that he sat down to do our farm activities. How perfect!! I couldn't have planned it any better. I snapped a quick photo of his cowboy-booted foot swinging under the table as he worked on his papers.



As predicted, my little boy liked doing his work. He had a paper from Enchanted Learning with farm animals to color along with another one from the same site where he had to circle the letter for the beginning sound of various farm animals. He is shown below doing that paper. My oldest son completed his papers first and sat with us while my little boy did his coloring paper. He taught his brother how to say each color in French, which was pretty cool.



Below you can see my older son doing his crossword from KidsDomain. He enjoyed doing his work as well.



We didn't do any cooking activities today, but we did go to the library where we got several more farm books. We will delve into those tomorrow. Sadly, I'm feeling too lazy to go pull them out of the bag to list the titles in this post. I will be sure to reference them this week, however. Tomorrow is supposed to be cool and rainy here. I think we will make butter and spread it on biscuits for our cooking activity. That should be fun.

Thanks so much to those of you who left comments about our dog, Buzz. I truly appreciate your kind words and thoughtfulness.

Farm Week: Introduction

This summer I decided to plan some topic-specific activities to do with my boys. We are not planning on taking a big family vacation, but there are a few places within driving distance that I thought would be fun to visit. So........I decided to plan some "field trips" and to spend the week before the trip doing related activities. Even better, I purchased a special book to go with each week's theme. This week we are going to visit a farm on Friday. So we'll be doing some farm activities all week. I will post about our activities each day. My book for this week is All the Places to Love by Patricia MacLachlan & Michael Wimmer. It is truly one of the most beautiful books with the most beautiful illustrations that I think I've ever seen. Sometime tomorrow morning (Monday) the boys and I will sit down and I'll read it to them. We may then read it several times throughout the week. Homeschoolshare has a unit study for this book. It has some great ideas, but I felt they were a little advanced for what I wanted to do.







I've set up the book on top of our organizer in the office. I've also placed a "workbox" for each boy on top. (I would use the workbox system if I ever end up homeschooling......it is a great system. You can read more about it at the link I've provided or by Googling it. Many homsechool moms have written about it on their blogs.) I have the workboxes labeled with the boys' names, but didn't put the labels on until after the photo. I am planning to place each boy's activities in their tub so they can find them in the morning. We will be making a trip to our local library on Monday morning to check out some non-fiction books about farms to supplement our learning this week.







The next photo shows the tub for my youngest son. He just turned 4. He has 2 papers in his tub for Monday; both are from Enchanted Learning. If he doesn't want to do them, that's fine. However, he usually likes to do paper-pencil activities, so I think he'll be excited. I'll post more tomorrow about how he responded to it.




My oldest son has an easy reader from Reading A-Z. He is a very fluent reader, but I printed this one in French (I LOVE that you can do that!) since he is learning French at his Montessori school. (My younger son will "read" the same book in English.) His papers for Monday include a paper to alphabetize farm animals and one to label the animals in French (both from Enchanted Learning) and a farm animal crossword puzzle from KidsDomain.

We will also be doing some "farm cooking" activities this week. I will post each day about what we're doing. It should be fun.

Splash!

I realized today that I haven't written anymore about our dog, Buzz, since writing about the severe seizures he had a few days ago. He came home Friday afternoon. Most likely he has a brain tumor. Since most vet clinics outside a university setting don't do MRIs or CAT scans, there's no way to confirm this for sure. However, that is probably what's going on with him. He has some permanent neurological damage.........he drags one foot a little, is somewhat clumsy now when he moves around, and we think his vision is a bit impaired. However, the good news is that he hasn't had anymore seizures. He is taking Prednisone and Phenobarbitol (I don't know if I spelled those correctly) and that combination of medications seems to be working. We don't know what the future will bring, but for now, we will try to continue to provide a loving home to this sweet little guy. Below is a photo I took of him today.



The other thing that's been going on around here is that we set up our pool for summer. In the past we've always just had an inflatable pool that we dump and refill every few days. At the end of the season last summer, we bought one that can stay up all summer. It has a filter and we spent ALL DAY yesterday trying to get the chemicals at the right levels so the boys could swim. Long story short............the boys got to go in today. It was a little cold, but they had a good time. I took a ton of photos, but most had the kids in them, so I only have a few to post. The first photo below shows the pool with the top ring inflated. This pool is 10 feet in diameter, so a little bigger than the ones we've had before.



After the top ring was inflated, we filled it with water. The ring floats up as the water rises. It took over 2 hours to fill it.



The next photo is funny. The boys wanted to swim as soon as they could once the pool was ready but they quickly got cold. Later in the afternoon they went in again. My oldest son was apparently so excited to go swimming that he put his swimming trunks on backwards. So this photo captures the excitement of swimming in your new pool for the first (second) time.



Hope you are all enjoying your summer. I think it's already going too fast and I'm bemoaning the fact that I haven't gotten much done on my to-do list yet. But, I'm trying to remember to be "in the moment" and to relax and enjoy myself.