Springtime Again~ Chickens and Rubik's Cubes!

 

We recently got chickens for the first time! We are hoping to be collecting eggs within a few months :)

However, we realize the chickens are more "therapy pets" to us than anything else :) They really calm everyone down, and all the kids enjoy taking care of them. Chickens really make great pets!

When we first got them they were so tiny but within a couple days they grew out of their box! We got one Rhode Island Red, two Barred Rocks, and one California White. Their names are Ginger, Pepper, Licorice, and Lemon. Lemon is quite a character! Here is a pic of Rosie holding Lemon, who climbed right into her lap!

The boys (and Rosie too!) have recently gotten into Rubik's cubes and they are going cube crazy! I seriously never knew there were so many different kinds. They really enjoy these challenges every day and the cubes are both theraputic and inspiring to them- and math based- we use them as a big part of our schooling!

Here's just a bit of our cube collection, and Fynn solving an 11x11. He has gotten so good he has tutorials on his channel! https://www.youtube.com/@MrEFynn

And Rowan has designed his own puzzle based on a Rubik's cube.

More cubes! And Rowan holding one of the Barred Rocks

Rosie squealing with delight as chickens climb all over her!

Happy Learning!!

~b

Metal Detectors

We've developed a unique way of schooling here. It's come about through trial and error, failure and success. We look for what works and run with it, and abandon what doesn't.  We make plans and drop them at a moments notice. Some days we just drive up and down hills, because that's the only thing we can do. Usually our kids lead the way in their learning, in the form of play. Kids are natural learners after all, and they're good at it. Our job is to introduce new concepts and material into their games and see what they pick up. Fynn is a natural born scientist in that he learns everything he possibly can about whatever he is into and runs endless experiments to discover th' truth of th' matter. 

 Well, two people gave Fynn metal detectors for Christmas, so we decided to take one of them out to our classroom and try it out. I wasn't sure if he'd be interested or not, nevertheless we packed up our gazelles (the wagons are gazelles), metal detector and a digging stick and went to th' field. 

Fynn walked around with the metal detector a little bit, but soon lost interest and we went back to playing cheetah and gazelle, which is what we usually do out here. 

 Well, one of the gazelles got bit by a cheetah and had to be taken to the gazelle hospital, which is in another field about half a mile away. So we walked. On th' way we saw something in th' snow. 

After looking at it for a bit we realized what happened. Can you tell from looking at the pictures?

What me and Fynn came up with is that a bird was eaten by a much larger bird, and it left quite a mess of blood and feathers, along with a really spectacular wing print in th' snow. And then of course a fox had to come and check out th' scene. 

But we didn't delay long, we had injured gazelles to tend to. So off through the field we went, forging our way through snow that had turned to ice. If you've never walked through eight inches of hard packed snow you don't know what you're missing. 

Finally we made it to the gazelle hospital. Fynn gave them some medicine and sat with them while they were resting. 

As they were resting i decided to grab the metal detector and see what i could find. There was a little trail nearby so i thought to walk it, thinking this would be a likely place to drop something. I walked th' trail swinging the detector in slow arcs in front of me. Fynn got curious and started following me. Soon we heard that lovely sound of detected metal. Imagine a cheap battery operated buzzer and you'll know what i'm talking about. Nevertheless Fynn was excited, he got down and started digging with his hands, even though i'd brought along a digging stick. After a minute or two he pulled up an old rusty square lid. I hadn't seen him this excited in a long time. 

By this time he was hooked and wanted to look for more things. He took th' metal detector again and started swinging it in a slow arc, like he'd seen me do. I told him i followed th' trail because people drop things and that'd be a good place to find something. He agreed and kept to it. After a while we heard that buzz again, th' one we both now love. He put down th' detector and started digging again, but found nothing. I got out th' digging stick and we took turns digging, stopping periodically to test the area with the metal detector to make sure we were in the right spot. 

We dug for nearly half an hour. Which is a long time when you're digging. At one point Fynn exclaimed, it's like we're finding a surprise, or a treasure. I started talking about going home and getting a shovel, or waiting till th' ground thawed out, but Fynn said just keep digging Papa, we're almost there. And then, and you archaeologists will know what i'm talking about, that oh so satisfying thump of th' digging stick hitting something solid, that isn't a rock. We had found metal. 

Fynn was jumping up and down with excitement. Dig it out Papa, dig it out he kept saying. What do you think it is i asked him. I don't know, dig it out and let's see. So we kept digging, but now with a target and a new ambition. To me it looked like a thick cog. We kept alternately digging and prying and realized that this thing had holes in it, and was not circular as i at first suspected. 

A few more minutes and we got th' thing out of th' ground, what ever it is. Neither one of us could figure out what it is, so we decided to keep it and do some research, ask around a bit. We'll start a box of things we find with metal detectors and save them, perhaps turn them into art work. All in all it was an exciting discovery. 

All that digging in frozen ground made us hungry, so we packed up our gazelles with gear and treasure and headed home. Back through th' snow and ice, over hills and down long streets. Lunch never tasted so good. 

Fall Homeschooling

Fall Home (Un)Schooling

Well fall is here, and for us that means that we get to have our "classroom" to ourselves again. Our classroom is a five acre field with a bike trail going through it. It's where we make model solar systems, hunt for insects, go swimming in summer, and mostly, pretend it's the African savannah and play games where our wagons are gazelles and cheetahs are out to get them. Summer time is great, but there's lots of other people out there, with their dogs, and, well, it's just nice to be able to concentrate on our lesson without th' distraction of explaining what we're doing. Fynn must be constantly moving if he wants to pay attention to anything, and of course he looks like he's not paying attention to anything at all. I tell people we're in school, learning about this or that. They see us playing chase with a wagon and a cheetah suit on. You see our dilemma here. 

 But now th' kids are all back in school, and th' field is our own. We come here twice a day, once in th' morning and once again in the evening. This year me and Beth both felt like Fynn needs to practice his reading and writng. We've come up with a few good ideas to help him, but he gets bored of most of them pretty quickly, and needs something new to keep him interested. We talked with him about improving his reading, and together came up with a plan. We are going to teach Bezzas (bee-zus, his wagon/gazelle) how to read. 

So now, when we get to th' gazelle field, th' first thing we do is teach Bezzas a new word. Either me, Fynn, Rowan or Bezzas picks th' new word, and Fynn writes it with chalk on th' bike trail, then helps Bezzas read it. Bezzas reads th' word, usually wrong, and Fynn corrects him and tells him what it really says. It's a brilliant concept that i'm not sure that i would've come up with on my own. Once again, I wonder who is th' teacher here. In this picture Fynn is teaching Bezzas how to spell halloween. (Rowan wrote the O2, he is learning about oxygen.)

 The other surprising lesson we've started learning about is degrees and angles. Fynn's favorite thing to do these days is ride his bike up and down hills. Any hill. Every hill. He names each one and we talk about how steep it is. He draws pictures of them. He gets on google earth and finds them and measures them. So we pulled out his old protractor. We got this for him years ago because he's always loved numbers and shapes. He's used it for all kinds of things, but never what it was made for. 

Yet, all we had to do was give it to him again and tell him that he could measure the steepness of his hills with it, and he was hooked. Since then we've been riding around measuring the angle of every hill in town, as well as the distance from trough to crest, and what's th' safest speed you can possibly go down it on a bicycle. It's like hanging out on th' job with a surveyor.  

I always wonder what are we going to discover next, and there is always something new.
Happy Learning!

 

Buffalo Berries

"Fynn, what do you want to do today?" 

This is how most of our days start. But he'd been planning this one for a while now. 

"I want to make a planet model all the way to Sedna."

So we said OK and geared up to go with him to Sedna, the furthest known dwarf planet, at the edge of the Kuiper belt. He'd only recently started riding a bike, and he's still using training wheels, but we've been riding farther and farther, and i had a hunch he could make this trip, though it would take us most of a day. He's seven and rarely runs out of energy. So we packed some snacks and Rowan helped air up the tires and off we went. 

Sedna is far away. Like, really far. If you made a scale model where one foot equals a million miles in space, Sedna would be about sixteen miles from the sun, which would be only the size of a bowling ball. We didn't go that far, but we did go a long way, about ten miles in all- Fynn's longest bike ride yet. 

We all had a great time riding and then stopping at every planet so Fynn could get off his bike and draw them on the ground. Here's Neptune (Full of Tunes!)  

A Praying Mantis caught Beth, and didn't want to let her go. Which was really cool because we've been watching Kung Fu Panda a lot lately. Fynn started eating soup, his most detested food, because of Kung Fu Panda. Never underestimate the power of television. We Stopped at a park for snacks, and basically just rode and rode and rode. Fynn did really well at staying on the right side of the bike trail, which took some effort and focus for him. He can concentrate when he's moving, and we can have conversations. Most of our conversations are him asking me questions he already knows the answer to, or him telling me to watch what he's doing. But when we're riding, or running, or bouncing or swinging, we talk about all kinds of things. I'll ride to Sedna and back for that.

After riding for a while we found a Silver Buffalo Berry Bush. (Sheperdia Canadensis) We were all hot and tired and this was a welcome treat. A wild berry that can't be bought in stores, you only have two weeks a year to harvest and eat them, so we take every chance we get to enjoy this delicacy. We filled up on berries and then continued on our way.

After crossing a few streets and riding through vast open spaces we made it to Sedna. We all felt a sense of accomplishment at having come this far. And since the river was right there we went for a swim to cool off and relax a bit. We played in the sand. Skipped rocks. Looked at fish and crawfish.  

On the way home we saw a beautiful bull snake. We shooed it off the trail so it wouldn't get run over. We stopped for lunch at Wendy's, and rode home through down town. Down town is not exactly a kid friendly place to ride, and we're really proud of how well Fynn did getting through there. We all got sunburnt and exhausted. We drank a lot of tea. We did a lot of math. We talked about bugs and snakes and floods and buffalo. The kids ate buffalo berries for the rest of the day and then Fynn got on his computer and typed in "how fast can buffalo run".  Apparently they can run forty miles an hour. We watched a few videos of buffalo running and then the kids turned into buffalo and ran around the yard until it was dark. It was a good day.

We've always been interested in Native America. My dad, Fynn's grandpa, is Native American, though Fynn's never met him and I haven't seen him since I was two. Fynn and Rowan have not yet shown much interest though. But now, because of these berries, they've become fascinated with the buffalo, and that can only lead to Native America.The next morning we watched videos of buffalo on youtube and talked about how the buffalo used to cover this area. About how a lady who lived here a hundred years ago said it took a herd eight hours to pass her house, and how some of the settlers killed almost all of them to starve out the indians. About how the indians that lived around here lived with and loved the buffalo, and how they took care of each other. We talked about all this while eating buffalo berries.

We make planet models everyday, who'da thunk we'd learn so much on this trip. What's that old saying about doing the same thing and expecting different results? We must be crazy.

Flood Chasers

Flood Chasers

flood 6

Well, we went out to make our usual five mile long solar system model when something unexpected happened- our route was blocked by floodwater.

 Fynn hopped up on the bike and we forded one flood after another as they got deeper and deeper, with the water eventually rising above the bicycle's hubs. By this time we had mustered up a healthy fear of flooding. We came to the area pictured in the photo above (flood 6) and got really scared. I kept reassuring him that we were not going to ride through that, but we did have to turn around and ride back. He was on the verge of panic and clutched me tightly as we rode back to dry land, fording the flooded areas, which he named flood 1,2,3,4,5, and 6. He was now completely terrified of floods, and also totally obsessed with them. It should not surprise me, it's what Fynn does, he becomes obsessed with anything that scares him. He talks about it, learns about it, makes models of it. And somehow this helps him get over his fears, and, next to laughter, it's one of his best motives for learning.

As we rode home, we talked about flooding. He told me he was sorry for fussing, that he just got scared he was gonna get washed away. He asked me why the bike trail flooded, and we talked about rivers, and flood plains. We talked about erosion, and saw areas where the trail or riverbank had collapsed. We talked about storms, and what happens to the animals that live in these flooded areas. I told him what it was like growing up in east Texas and living through hurricanes and floods, and how one time, after a big flood, i had seen a house stuck way up in a tree. He loved that story.

As soon as we got home he got on his computer and looked up floods. He spent the next couple of hours looking at pictures and videos of them. Then he filled our pool with dirt and water to make his own flood. Later on he came up to me and said "Ok Papa, we're flood chasers, so can we go look for some more floods?" I said sure, so we gathered up Rowan and we headed off to another section of river known for flooding. Fynn was careful not to let Rowan get too close to the water, as he is the kind of kid who will dive right in. It was nice having an extra person to watch out for him. We told everyone we saw we were flood chasers. Some of them looked at us as though we'd said the moon was a great piece of cheese and we were going to eat it. But we were in awe of the power of water, we didn't care what they thought. We watched massive pieces of driftwood floating down the river, saw dams made of all kinds of debris. Stood on a bridge watching the water rush below us. Fynn said it looked like we were on a boat. "How fast are we going" he asked. Perhaps wisely, neither of the kids would even stick a toe in the water.

A couple of days later we went back to the first flood that had so captured Fynn's imagination. We had to pass a sign warning of the flooded trail, and Fynn made me read it to him over and over, then had me take his and Rowan's picture standing by it. By this time the water had gone down quite a bit. Floods 1-5 were not there anymore, only flood 6, the big scary one. But now we were on foot, and it was crossable. I stepped into the water to show the kids that it wasn't too deep and Fynn started to panic again. I told him it was safe, and walked out to the middle and then back to show him. Then Rowan wanted to walk through it too, so I convinced Fynn to climb on my back and together the three of us walked through the flood safely to the other side.

 On the way back Fynn let me put him down in the middle and he walked through the water by himself. He was so proud of himself for doing something he was scared of. He stopped every person we saw on the trail and told them that he had walked through the flood and asked them if they were going to walk through the flood too. He was hopping up and down and flapping his arms and could barely speak through his excitement. We caught a toad and let it go. Fynn loved the idea of toads being born as tadpoles in the water. When we got home he was so excited about walking through the flood that he did something that we thought he might never do. I'm going to respect his privacy on this one but let me just say that it is a big deal. This led to other smaller breakthroughs for him, like flushing the toilet, which used to scare him, and blowing his nose, which also scared him. It's amazing to watch how conquering one fear flooded him with the courage to face his other fears. It is said that bravery is not the lack of fear but rather the ability to face your fears head on. If this is so Fynn is the bravest person I know. 

The next day Beth, Fynn, and Rowan got out their science bucket and made a model town to flood. The power of nature had instilled fear and awe, as it should. We learned about geology, meteorology, earth science, physics and density, climatology and topography, maths relating to speed and distance. We read all the flood warning signs and learned some new words. We covered history, talking about past floods both here where we live and in the area i grew up in. It was a flood of knowledge. 

As the waters receded we were left with places at once both familiar and strange. Old, yet new. We are flood chasers. We chased this flood, and it changed us. It told us a story, offered insight, into ourselves, and the ways of nature. We are like the land, the same, yet different. Old things have been washed away, new ones washed in. Old places to explore, new things to discover. So go, find your passions, and your fears, be brave, and chase them. You may be surprised at what you discover.

Flood!