Birds of Prey Eat Fish

When the things we learn about show up in the kids' play, I know the learning is sticking. This time, for the first time, it's Dragon initiating a game about something from school. I'm loving that!

Dragon has decided that Ospreys are the coolest birds around. He asks me, daily, to show him this clip:

He particularly loves the part where the Osprey shakes itself. We also check in on Cornell's Osprey nest cams. They actually also have a second nest with cameras on it, so we peek at both. We look at the Red Tail Hawks that just hatched, and keep an eye on the Great Blue Herons, and Bald Eagles (they have eaglets already!) but Dragon likes the Osprey best.

I recently got a new sewing machine, and have been making a series of small projects, exploring that capabilities of my new toy tool. One of the first thing was a set of monsters, one for each kid. The boys helped make them, and Hero actually did quite a bit of the work on his (on the right).

When we started watching the Ospreys, Dragon asked me to make him a fish, so that he could be an Osprey. No problem. Happy to do it! And so I did. It was fun. Of course, then Hero had to have one as well. My new machine isn't (technically) an embroidery machine, but it sure does have some nice decorative stitches, which I put to good use on these fish.

The boys decided that they "needed" fish. After all, birds of prey eat fish. They look pretty happy about the new meals. I like it when they like the things I make!

Soggy in Space

What happens when you wring out a wash cloth in space? It certainly wasn't what either Hero or I guessed!

At the Pond: Week 1

Over at Angelic Scalliwags they're doing a year long pond study. It's been showing up in my feed regularly for almost 2 months now, and the idea intrigues me. We've been doing nature study for a long time now, and we recently introduced sketch books successfully. But it's been very open-ended. We go to the park and wander around looking at pretty much anything that catches our interest. The instructions for Hero's sketch book are very simple: draw anything from nature. Something that grew, rather than was built by people. While we definitely have some places we visit regularly, it's not been anything terribly intentional. That's just the wild spaces I know about within a reasonable drive of our home.

The idea of a weekly visit to our pond is intriguing. The idea of investigating ecosystems and getting hand-on with some of the science that you could do at the pond - even just doing the "look for interesting things" that we've been doing, but in a for focused way, on a particular environment. It's an appealing idea. So we're went to the pond.

The day looked lovely. Really, it was lovely, in an Early Spring kind of way. We only stayed about 20 minutes because that wind was a great deal more brisk than I'd anticipated. It was downright chilly.

The boys threw rocks into the pond. What could be more natural? They loved throwing the rocks and seeing the splashes, hearing the thwonk of the rock hitting the water.

We had a look at the cat tails along the bank. That was fun. The boys had never touched one before, so I grabbed one that hadn't burst yet & pulled it over where they could reach. I'd forgotten how soft they are.

The silly thing burst while Dragon was touching it, and that brisk wind blew seeds all over him. Surprised us all! Enough that I forgot to take pictures, which is kind of a bummer. He was cute with cat tail seeds all over him. I think I'll have too look up cat tails in the Handbook of Nature Study and see what I can learn about them. Seems like I remember reading about them being good insulation; maybe we can do something fun with that.

A Little Tigress

We've been debating what our Baby Girl's online nickname ought to be since well before she was born. We've finally settled on Tigress.

A Little Stargazing

Photo Credit: NASA

We headed outside at about 10:30 pm last night. It was chilly. We had our lawn chairs and my phone, with the Skywatch app. Love that app! So many times I've wished for a real live person to give me a tour of the sky. Skywatch does that for me, so that I can figure out what I'm looking at up there.

Last night when we first got out, Hero wanted me to show him Orion. However, that's a Winter constellation around here, so he wasn't up. We did, however, find the Big Dipper. And with the help of Skywatch, we also figured out Ursa Major. That was particularly exciting to me, since I've known that the Big Dipper is a part of Ursa Major for ages, but had never quite figured out where the larger constellation is. Now I know. We also located the North Star. He wanted me to show him the "South Star, that's opposite." I gave him the short answer; it was bedtime. But we'll be back to the concept.

We've done a lot of reading about Astronomy, but I decided that it's time to take it outside. Hero has been able to find things when I try to show him in the sky, and the boys both love to find the moon. So I'm planning to get outside about once a week. Gotta love homeschool for this kind of thing! Next time, maybe we can find the Little Dipper and Ursa Minor. I'm looking forward to it.

Early Spring

Last week we woke up to some truly beautiful weather. Ice storms are remarkable. And we were spared the power loss and tree damage. It's weather that I love to watch from my living room.

With any luck, it was Winter's last gasp. I'm really hoping that it's finally early Spring at our house. For real. No more snow. Though our forecast would suggest that's probably not the case quite yet.

Still. It's warm enough that we're venturing out.

It's not really that warm yet; "warm" days are still mid-40s. But it feels warm.

The sun and the wind and the birds... delightful.

 

 

 



 

It sometimes felt like The Winter That Refused To Die. But even here, we occasionally put away the snow shovels. Though if we do it too soon Old Man Winter laughs and gives us another 6 inches. Hopefully that's not what he's got in mind this week.

It's muddy and wet and cloudy and windy. But it's warm enough to be outside in light jackets, if only for short times. And it's so nice to be outside again.

Jomon Pottery Activity

We're studying Japan right now. We like Japan. The Daddy and I have been there for a visit, before kids. We have various albums of traditional Japanese music laying around, and we recently added Japanese to our school line-up. So finally getting to Japanese history for the first time is pretty exciting.


Photo Credit

Hero's pretty excited too, and was asking to do more "Japanese history stuff." I didn't have a lot on hand; the ideas in the Story of the World activity guide were, for once, not very satisfying. An internet search didn't turn up anything good. I couldn't even find a documentary on the Shrine at Ise, which floored me. And then I remembered that the Jomon period is named for the way they decorated their pots, and it's so simple: they pressed rope into them. So we looked at some pictures. Later in the period, things got much more elaborate. But the Early Jomon pottery is very accessible. This pot seemed relatively representative, so we printed it out for reference.
Then we broke out the play-doh. No mess, no project to figure out what are we going to do with it. Just a model of the pot. Yarn made a good "rope" for pressing into our clay. We talked a bit about how this kind of pot was smalish, so they think they were practical every day pots - stick it in the fire and cook your dinner pots.

I was pleasantly surprised by how nicely the yarn went onto the pot. Wrap the stuff around, and then pull it off. Nothing to it. Turns out nicely authentic looking. If you overlook the fact that it's teal play-doh, and not actually clay. But the design is good!

Hero watched to see what sort of crazy plot I'd hatched, and then he gave it a shot too.

He wrapped the yarn. This step was pretty small, and he worked at it a bit. I didn't remind him to press it in, and maybe I should have; he wasn't super impressed with his results. But it was very authentically his, and I think that counts too.

As with every project, Dragon tagged along too. He gleefully squished my first effort and then was very intent upon making a project of his own. He never did tell me what it was this time.

I'd have to say: not bad for a spur-of-the-moment project. I'm pretty sure that the boys enjoyed it, and hopeful that they'll remember a little bit more because of it. The yarn went into the play-doh toys; I'll be interested to see if they do anything with that in the next little while.

Voluntary Reading

Hero has started to make the leap into voluntary reading! Early in the week I asked him to put a couple books away but he got distracted and sat down to read one. No complaints here! I've been hoping for this for quite some time!

Later in the week I conned him into trying a chapter book. It happened like this: we were chatting and I told him about the Magic School Bus, and how they shrink and grow and fly and so on. He seemed intrigued, so I also told him about the Magic Tree House books. Then I grabbed one to show him. When I flipped it open, I was pleasantly surprised to realize that it was well within reach.

"You can totally read this!"
Skeptical Look
"No, really. Here. Try it."

He's a good sport, so he did. About three pages in (which is huge that he went that far), I shut the book.

"But you don't have to read this. Reading is hard and boring..."
His stuffed animal started "attacking" me about this point
"...and you don't like to do it, so we can just stop..."
He's protesting at this point, because he's hooked on the story. So we keep going. And in the end, he read 6 pages. Sure, I helped him with some of the multi-syllable words, but there wasn't that many. We're reading book 3 - Mummies in the Morning. He wants me to find the first two books in the series. I plan to work on that ASAP!