Carving A Pumpkin

 One of the first pumpkins we got this year was this beautiful white one. We were playing different scenes from Curious George's Halloween Boo Fest, and the kids decided they wanted to carve a pumpkin like George and The Man in the Yellow Hat. We had a little time before rest time to do something, so we decided to go for it! This pumpkin was very easy to get the seeds out, and the kids both did a great job helping. They were also unusually behaved for that time of day, so we had a lot of fun together.

all clean

making sure the lid fits

time to carve the face!

There he is!

 We had a lot of fun!
Happy learning & have a fun Halloween!
~Beth

Field Trip: Pumpkin Patch!

It was Saturday morning and Rico and I were having our coffee.

The kids were talking non-stop about pumpkins. They drew pictures of pumpkins. They talked about how to grow a one-ton pumpkin and how they wanted to grow one next year.

 I pulled Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder off the shelf and read to them about when Almanzo grew a giant pumpkin and won the contest. They even listened as they colored their pictures!

 Rico whispered in my ear, "Let's surprise them by taking them to the real pumpkin patch." So we piled in the car and headed out to Jake's Farm, where we've been going for pumpkins since Fynn was little.

Fynn and Rico guesstimated how much each pumpkin weighed, then weighed as many as possible on the real scale.

Who's that scarecrow out there?

Or that one?

We had so much fun! When we got home, we made our own pumpkin patch in the backyard.

 Where's your favorite place to pick? Let us know in the comments below!

 Happy learning!
~Beth

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!