Welcome to Summer School

Welcome to our summer school. To many it may not look like school, but to all those unschoolers out there I am sure they will acknowledge the learning going on in our house. Today was the long awaited day of dissecting the owl pellet. Over the past couple of weeks I had collected a few items about owls that I thought Grace might find interesting. For our first go around with this sort of thing I ordered a synthetic owl pellet to get away from the gross factor. The synthetic was a bit disappointing because all the bones were in the middle and Grace didn't really have to do any investigating to find much. From our bone chart we did determine that the bones were from a rodent. Now Grace wants me to order the real deal. With the owl pellets being very inexpensive I have no problem with that. All the owls cards above are owls found in North America. We sorted out the cards that could be found in the South and it was narrowed down to Great Horned Owl, Barred Owl, Barn Owl, and Eastern Screech Owl. Most owl pellets sold for dissection come from the Barn Owl.

Grace looked up pictures on the Internet of the owls found in our area as well as the Elf Owl and the Pygmy Owl. These guys are as small as sparrows. Some interesting facts we learned: A clutch of young Barn Owls will eat a total of 1000 mice before leaving the nest. In captivity some species of owls can live 30-60 years. I have always had a fascination with owls. Talked to hubby yesterday about possibly building an owl box, but we are hesitant because of the chickens in the backyard. Even though they are in covered runs we are still hesitant.

Other things we tackled today was an Imax video about Egypt, 30 minutes of reading on her part from Peter and the Shadow Thieves, one chapter of a read aloud from The Kane Chronicles, and she is also working on some animation from software she downloaded from the Internet for her Bamboo pen.

Summer Days

I wish I could say lazy summer days but we are still just as busy in these first days of summer as we were during school. Of course Grace doesn't realize that we are actually still doing school just not math and writing. Today I made a list for Grace to accomplish. She did some watercolor painting of the baby chicks, read 30 minutes from her book, I read a chapter from our read aloud and she did a vocabulary page. This afternoon we headed back to a friend's house to swim for a couple of hours. Once home I immediately started in on dinner. After dinner my sister came over and I gave her some of the veggies from the garden then we went to my mom's house to bring her a bag of veggies too. The baby chicks are progressing very nicely and so much fun to watch. The dogs are much more relaxed this go around with chickens in the house as opposed to having the 6 Buffs. I guess 6 make more noise than 2. Although Angel (toy poodle) is still very protective of them. Scott went down to the garden again tonight and came back with three heads of lettuce and some carrots. The carrots were still a little early and very small. Hoping tomorrow we can stay at home and be lazy. Oops, I forgot, the library is having a retirement party for one of our favorite library ladies. But that's okay, Grace can turn in her hours for reading and get some prizes.

Garden Update

The garden is coming along very nicely. Tonight hubby brought home 3 squash, 1 head of iceberg lettuce, 1 head of romaine lettuce, 1 bell pepper, numerous red potatoes, a few sugar snap peas and a few strawberries. The red potatoes were a big surprise. We had no idea it would be this soon. Definitely not prepared. In the next 1-2 weeks we will be harvesting all the red and white potatoes. They were planted in early April. So tonight I got on Amazon and ordered our dehydrator, some oxygen absorbers and the book "The Dehydrator Bible". No one in our family is very fond of frozen vegetables and even less fond of canned vegetables, so drying seemed the only way for us to go. The two heads of lettuce will probably be the last until the temps cool down in the Fall and we can plant again. Just too hot right now. It is such a blessing to see the harvest of what was planted a couple of months ago. It can be very addicting, just like hatching baby chicks. My husband mentioned the other day that he would be happy just to be a farmer, maybe one day.

A New Week

We had a very busy weekend and now the week is shaping up to be busy also. Saturday was a pool party, Sunday was church and Grace had a friend come over and spend the night. Today Grace went back home with said friend and didn't return until tonight. Tomorrow we are heading out to Dahlonega to visit my niece's first apartment. Tomorrow is also Grace's 12th birthday so we will be going out to lunch. Her actual party is this Saturday and they will be playing laser tag. This afternoon I got the delivery from Home Science Tools so later in the week we will dive in to a study about Barn Owls with some books from the library and working our way through an owl pellet. The baby chicks are well and growing. So much more fun having them in the house than out in the coop. Looking forward to one more egg hatching next week. I am doing alot of reading this week as well as cross stitching. Mostly spending alot of time indoors due to the mid 90's temps. Very humid! Can't do much outside. Me and Grace have started watching what we eat more, drinking more water, and walking. I think Grace has already lost about 4 pounds, while my old self have only lost 1. It stinks getting old!

End of the Year Picnic

Each year our homeschool group has a end of the school year picnic. The past two years a family in our group has graciously hosted. 11 families showed up for the event. It is tradition that any graduating senior have to walk the diving board and all the other kids line up and blast them with water guns. The temps have been incredibly hot the past two weeks. Only the first week of June and already in the middle and upper 90's. Good food, good fellowship.

Happenings

Today Grace attended her first real grown up class. That means I wasn't involved. A group of homeschooled girls ranging in ages from 11 - 16 came together for a CPR/First Class through Red Cross. Once I picked her up she was full of information and so ready to save a life.

Next week I hope to receive in the mail our box of fun science items from Home Science Tools. Grace requested an owl pellet to investigate for bones. In the meantime I found a great book to go along with the owl pellet. An Owl in the House, A Naturalist's Diary by Bernd Heinrich. This book chronicles the journey of a man finding a baby owl, raising it to be released back in the wild and the many years that follow where the owl stays close by. Really looking forward to using this as a read aloud next week.

Our local Walmart is a small one with no grocery store. That is all about to change. The Super Walmart will open this end of this month. In the meantime many items are being clearanced so they will not have to move them to the new store. Today was some of the fabric. The picture above is two yards each of material I want to make into skirts for myself. The bottom picture is two yard each of material to make Grace a couple of skirts. The best part was 8 yards of fabric for $15.00. That means four skirts for $15.00.

Recently I have also picked up some more great books from the library to read over the summer for encouragement and research for homeschooling. Free Range Learning, Educating the Whole-Hearted Child, and John Holt's Instead of Education Ways to Help People Do Things Better.

Baby Chicks

The last batch of baby chicks was born on Monday. Everything has gone off without a hitch so far. We bounced back and forth about taking the chicks from the mother or leaving them for the duration. Yesterday morning the decision was to leave them with her because she finally came down out of the nesting box to show her baby chicks what to do. But by the afternoon she was trying to steal an egg away from another sitting hen. We decided it was time to move the two inside and tell Speckles to get over the sitting, she was booted back in to the run with the other hens and rooster.

Now we have a brooder back in the house again. Only this time we have two chicks to take care of instead of six. They were very noisy for the first couple of hours looking for their mom. Grace held then for quite a while and this helped tremendously. They woke up three or four times during the night, but seem to be eating and drinking well on their own. Today is day four of their lives.

I knew I had not shared a picture of the Buffs in a while. These girls are just the best. Friendly, calm, everything you would want in a hen. Growing very big very fast. They are only 10 weeks old.