The Study of Nature: Finding Native Clay

We went to one of the "wilder" of the parks -- less sculpting by the big machines, less manicured, more natural, because I wanted to see if we could take some of the things that Hero and I have been reading in Madam How Lady Why, about how water sculpts the coasts of England, and find some of the same kinds of action happening a bit closer to home. The outing was successful beyond my wildest expectations.

First of all, we found the stream that I thought that I remembered -- and it being fall, it's done like a number of the small water ways around here, and it's mostly dried up. Which was perfect: we could climb right into the stream bed, and with a little care the kids stayed out of the water (I threatened that if they got soaked we'd immediately go home) and had a good time checking out the stream's banks. We saw where water had undercut, and followed the stream bed a little, just fooling around exploring. It's amazing how often fantastic things happen when we look like we're just playing outside: the trick is to learn to be observant and to ask good questions while you play. (John Muir Laws is great for learning good observation and question skills.) The importance of play is easy to overlook, but it's during play that you see the serendipitous discoveries that happen as the kids explore the environment.

And that's how it happened this time. First, I asked Hero a few questions to help him see the way that water works on our land, and find connections between his reading and the real world, so that we could learn to see in new ways, the way that our book is teaching. The book is suggesting the possibility of a type of intense learning through careful observation that I'd never thought was possible, and I'm really loving the way that it's starting to shape our thinking. So I asked a few questions to get encourage the connection between our environment and the book. It took maybe 5 minutes. Then, I stepped back and they started playing. They found a log that had fallen across the stream, bridging the gap, which was a lot of fun.

I didn't take pictures of the digging process (I wish I had, but I didn't realize anything important was happening, at the time), but Dragon got down under that log, and started banging and digging away at the bank, while my friend Mrs. T. and I chatted and played with her baby, and the other kids did other things -- and pretty soon both boys were digging, because they'd found this amazing clay -- it felt more than a little bit like play-doh, straight out of the ground. They brought over some for the baby to play with; she wasn't having anything to do with it at first, but Hero was persistent and she did eventually check it out. Which meant that the moms got to check it out, too. I didn't get a picture of the clay balls that I told the kids they could bring home, but I did think to get a shot of Dragon's feet. He was impressively muddy; this kid is an all-in type of kid!

Happily, a lot of that came off as we walked over to the playground and back. So it's not all on my kitchen floor, needing to be swept up!

So, this morning, we got it out and started playing with it. The kids wanted to make something from it. I knew just enough to know that it probably needed to be cleaned up somehow, to make it more usable. Hurray for Google, right? I found instructions pretty easily: dissolve the clay in water, and pour it off.

The clay floats, forming a solution with the water, and the dirt sinks. So you can pour off the good stuff, and dump the parts that aren't usable.

Once we got into the process, I was feeling a little unsure about how to go about getting the clay back out of the water, so I turned to YouTube to see if I could find an example of what it looks like when it's done, and I'm glad I did: turns out that, you can do a lot of pouring in this process. You pour the clay-water off pretty quickly, and that leaves behind your sediment. We had a lot more sand that I'd been expecting.

Then, you let it sit some more and the water starts to separate back out, and you can pour that off too. It starts pretty quickly: this picture was taken after maybe 10 or 15 minutes, and you can already see the clear water layer forming on top.

After it had sat for a few minutes -- I think it was maybe half hour, but it could have been a little more -- there was quite the layer of mostly clear water. Pouring it off turned out to be a little tricky, so I left it to sit a while longer and tried a scoop the second time.

We had two containers, and the larger one looks like it's going to take  just a little bit longer. It's interesting to see the variation between the smaller batch and the larger. The ball of clay in the big bowl was considerably larger than what went into the mason jar, and so the solution was a fair amount thicker, and it seems like it's taking a little longer to separate. Or it could be that the water is spread out over the larger surface. I don't really know. But I think that getting the water off this one will be a bigger challenge.

We spent a while, pouring, waiting, scooping, and pouring again, trying to get as much water out as possible, while losing as little clay as possible. It's pretty tricky: if you disturb the clay layer, it sends up clouds of clay particles into the water layer. And it's really easy to disturb it. I think that the clay particles must be pretty lightweight. But after a while, we'd made some progress, and I started thinking about what I wanted to sacrifice to be a filter for these. They need to stay separate, because Hero had a larger lump, and had done nearly all the work with his, and the little kids had combined theirs and had a lot more help with the process, agreeing that whatever clay comes out at the end, they will split evenly. So it's problematic to just put the two containers together and work with a single lump, although that would simplify things.

I wish I knew how well this stuff is going to wash out of the clothes and fabric we use.
I need to check if we're freezing tonight... I wonder how that would affect things.

The kids want to get some more clay, and have been debating if they think it would be best to go back soon, in spite of the cold, or wait until spring, and risk the water being in the way. I've never paid enough attention to the stream to have any idea how full it gets in the spring and summer. We'll have to wait and see on that one. I am not super excited about digging in the cold, myself, and the filtration process is going to be tough the more we get below freezing, which should happen any time here. Whenever it is we go, I'm loving the way that they're learning to think things through and plan how to do what they want to accomplish.

I also started to study how to get the clay to a point where it's usable, and figure out how to go about making it into a thing. Nobody's really decided what they want to build yet, but before we can make a project, we need to have workable clay. Looking at this tutorial for using local clays, it looks like it may be worth our while to call the local pottery shop and see if they can help us out at all with firing our projects. I don't think that the oven is going to be enough. But the site does have a procedure for getting the clay ready to work. This process is going to take a while, I'm thinking. Lots of evaporation that needs to happen.

Which is what the guy said when I called the local pottery shop: get it wet and remove the impurities, then work on drying it out. And the drying process isn't quick. Unfortunately, it doesn't sound like we're going to be able to have it fired at the pottery shops, so whatever we do will still be just messing around. Or maybe we'll learn from the survivalist websites how to fire things in the backyard. I don't know. But we've had a good time learning about this process. It's pretty interesting to see what we can do with fancy dirt that the kids dug up while they were playing!

Out in Autumn

We are enjoying an uncommonly mild Autumn. Everybody is kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop, but we're enjoying it until then! When we were out the other day, the first thing we noticed that, although it was mid-morning, there was a lot of water (dew?) on the plants. 

Each little hair on the Mullein was decorated with its own tiny drop. 

The pictures don't really do it justice. And that was just one of the lovely things we saw. 

The kids were all about the quarry area of the park this time. We stacked rocks with the Littles for quite a while while the Bigs played in the bushes.

While we sat and played with the rocks, we found these cool leaves with deep groves in the veins. I don't know what kind of tree they came from, but the looked really cool. 

The goldenrod seeds were beautiful, though my phone struggles to do them justice. 

There were a lot of beautiful little things that it would be so easy to walk by. I love that our Nature Study days help me slow down an see some of this stuff. 

Hero had a chat with a naturalist the other day for a Webelo project, and one of the things the naturalist told us is that nests of sticks tend to be birds' nests; squirrels build with leaves, and they most prefer oak leaves because they break down much more slowly than other types. So I was excited to find a squirrel nest while we were out. 

I was amazed to find these still blooming; I guess the mild weather hasn't been cold enough to put them to sleep, even though we've had several good frosts now. 

When I was a kid, I used to think Autumn was ugly. Dull brown and nothing at all to see. Looking around now, I'm amazed at all the things I was blind to. I'm glad I've learned better; Autumn is lovely.

Weekly Wrap-up: the miscellaneous one

One thing that doing these wrap-up posts does is it makes me aware that we don't have all that many "regular" weeks. Still, there is learning in every week, and good overall progress, so what we're doing seems to be working, even if it is a bit crazy from time to time. And that pretty much describes this week too. A little crazy, but some good things happened.

One of the awesome things going on is that Hero is getting so much better are reading, and it's so exciting to me! Just this afternoon, he got out his box of easy books, sat down, and started to read. He still likes the security of having someone next to him to help with hard words, so it didn't take him long to ask me to join him, but I was so excited that he was taking that initiative to start the process in the first place! Seems like every book he reads, he starts out uncertain because it looks "hard" but by the end he's got it handled and it's no problem. We're well into All About Spelling 1 now, and finally getting to the point of having words to learn, and it's so fun to see him laughing because "You can't even fool me, Mom! These are easy!" That works for me. We'll buzz through the easy stuff and slow down a bit when we get to something that's more challenging. And in the mean time, it's offering a nice review of the CVC words. After all the work on vowel pairs we've been doing, revisiting CVC words is a both a needed break and a valuable review.

The boys are getting along so well. This picture is actually from last week, when I was feeling sick and the Daddy was out of town going to our new nephew's baby blessing. I really wanted to have the house tidy not wrecked when he got home, but just the bare bones was all I could really do. So I offered Hero a couple dollars to clean the living room, and he not only did it, he did it well, and he let his little brother "help" with the vacuuming. What an awesome kid!

Another thing that we did since my last "wrap-up" was we made bread again. A friend of mine was complaining that the hard cider he made in his home-brewery tasted like bubble gum, and was trying to figure out what happened. He mentioned that he'd gotten the "pitching rate" wrong, and me being incurably curious, I asked what is a pitching rate. He told me it's the amount of yeast you use. He also mentioned in passing that when you use cold yeast it doesn't rehydrate properly, and you get deformed yeast cells that can't do their job. So I tried warming up my yeast before I bake to see if it makes much difference in bread. Wow. Does it ever. I got 2 loaves instead of one, and the crust was perfect, and the bread was soft and light, and my kids raved over it. All I did was measure my yeast onto a saucer and then ate half a bagel with Nutella before I put it in the warm water. Definitely going to add that little bit of delay to the routine. And, yes, that's bread dough around Dragon's mouth. For whatever crazy reason he thinks it's tasty to eat raw bread dough. Ick. But it doesn't seem worth it to fight him on it. He calls it "cookie dough" and it can't be any worse than eating that stuff!

 

Let's see. Other fun stuff we did. We watched some YouTube videos about the space station. I didn't keep track of which ones this time, so I can't share them. Seems like we never get history and science to work in the same week, so there's not much going on in history right now. But we learned about the shuttle and the space station and even bumped into the Hubble telescope. Always fun. We're supposed to do some moon stuff next week. And we're supposed to finish off Rome in history. We'll see what I actually make happen.

I had another ultrasound this week, and this time I actually got some pictures digitized so I can post them! She's getting bigger, and looking more and more babyish all the time, and it's so exciting! Both my sisters have had their babies now, and I'm getting close to the beginning of the third trimester. For whatever reason, this time I'm just ready to be done and have the BABY already. But she's got to finish baking and it's sort of driving me crazy. Such is life. I don't really want her to come early (she threatened to do that; it was stressful). I read Ina May's Guide to Childbirth, and it starts with all these lovely stories about people coming to see Ina May and then going on walks in the woods while they labor, and I was thinking, "That sounds great! I wonder if I can convince the Daddy to take me to the park to wander around when I'm in labor, before we go to the hospital?" And then I remembered: this baby's due in February. And we live in the North. And suddenly laboring in the woods didn't sound so lovely anymore. I guess I'll just stay at home where it's actually cozy until it's time to go. Maybe next time the baby will be due in a season that is Not Winter. Cuz I still think that the woods would be an awesome place to do the first parts of birthing.

Let's see. Other interesting stuff with school. We didn't do much history, but we did a bunch of science. I have the worst time getting those two things to coexist in the same week! But this week we learned about the space shuttles and the space station, and we even bumped into the Hubble telescope. Next week we're supposed to do some fun stuff with the moon. I've got a fun art project in mind; hopefully I can be organized (and the family can be healthy!) enough to get it done. And also finishing up Rome. We're starting the Middle Ages in history, but it's turning out to be a pretty slow start. However! My books are getting organized, bit by bit. I'm hoping to give them their own post here shortly.

 

My friend CH came back from her trip to Europe a few days ago (it was a sort of study abroad thing, and she had a great time), and her family and ours got together for pumpkin carving. Of course, there has to be a photo like this one. So she kindly posed for me. And then we got down to the serious business of carving cool pumpkins. I spend too much time on Pinterest, so I knew just what I wanted to do: those big pumpkins eating little ones are hilarious. So I did one. And Hero had to do one like mine, so he and the Daddy did his. And the Daddy did one. And poor little Dragon wasn't allowed to touch the knives, which he thought was meanness. But we did let him pull out pumpkin guts, and he liked that. Did you know that pie pumpkin guts are considerably ickier than carving pumpkin guts? I didn't ether, but they are. Ick.

 

 The other big thing we did was go hiking. (When I'm planning school it's called "nature study".) And that was awesome. We were traveling with the Daddy while he did some work in a neighboring state, and when we do that we like to visit their state parks. This was a particularly successful outing. The Daddy took Hero and they went on a long hike. Sadly, I don't have the pictures they took, so I don't have any of Hero for this event. But I took a couple of Dragon on the little hike we went on, after he was done playing on the swings we found. We had a great time! We listened to chickadees and nuthatches, and then we hiked down to the little waterfall -Dragon's first- and on the way back he discovered moss. He wasn't so sure about touching it at first, but after he'd tried it once we had to make several more stops to investigate moss. Along with rocks. And sand. And logs. It's so fun to see the little things that are fascinating to little kids. Reminds me to be amazed.

 That's pretty much our week. If you'd like to see what other folks are talking about, you can find more wrap-ups over at Kris's place!

Bob the Builder

I was browsing my posts that never quite got published and came across this from two Halloweens ago, I think. Wasn't he a cutie?!

Weekly Wrap-up: The Appley One

I love autumn! The colors, the smells, the trips to the orchard, the FOOD. Autumn is good eatin'! We went to the apple orchard near here, and they've got apples, which are yummy. We also got several pie pumpkins, which I am in process of cooking down, pureeing, and putting in the freezer. Not only is it cheaper than grocery store pumpkin, it's easy, and I keep hearing about how there's shortages... don't want to be without the pumpkin! Pumpkin pie, pumpkin bread, pumpkin scones: YUM. Plus, the orchard makes for good pictures.



I think my favorite part of school this week was that we added Narration to the mix. I ran across such good ideas on the Charlotte Mason Carnival that I decided to go ahead and try it.

One thing I loved about the ideas on Practical Pages was that in every case it made the story touchable. I decided to go with something familiar: our flannel board. I made color copies of a couple of the illustrations, covered them with contact paper & sewed felt on the back. I'm not sure that I'll do this again, cuz that was a lot of work for what we got out of it! But, if it was a favorite book, and I though that he'd tell the story a couple of times & enjoy playing with them, then I'd absolutely do it again, cuz it's not that much work.

Clearly, this is going to take some practice. The actual narrating part was surprisingly tricky. Monkey wasn't sure what I wanted... I wasn't sure what I wanted. I'm not sure that I'm any better at summarizing a story than he is! But we did it. And we'll do another story next week. And practice makes everything better.

Math went well. Math is probably Monkey's favorite, right now. We did more flannel board stuff.

Same stuff, different day: mostly. Math Expressions had us do trapezoids & octagons (OK, they were supposed to hexagons, but I made 'em before I realized that. I oughta read the instructions better, I think!). Last time we did the "mat" activities they had a different focus.


The book also suggested singing math songs, so we did a couple of those this week too. "One, Two, Buckle My Shoe" and the like.


We also did patterns on the flannel board because it's fun. Monkey brought me his dot-to-dot book one evening and asked could we please do some? Why, YES!

We did a little Nature Study on a trip to the park for a playdate (though I also count the orchard for nature study).


Phonics is going really well: I decided to focus on just drilling with the games, rather than trying to do much reading in the Bob Books yet, because it was so frustrating to Monkey, and I want him to enjoy reading. So we got the Reading House (practicing rhyming cvc words, from Happy Phonics) back out, and he loves it now. Used to hate it. But it seems to make more sense to him this time. And I'm working on making cards of the words that are in those Bob Books to practice in our games. We'll probably start using them this next week. But it's so nice to have him asking for more of his phonics games again!

We finished Charlotte's Web, so we're just starting a new Read-Aloud. We read the first few pages of Stuart Little, but a friend loaned us Mr. Poppin's Penguins, so I think we'll switch and read that next instead.

Bob the Builder