Dinosaur Shrimp

Today we started getting the habitat ready for our triops eggs.

These pictures are horrendous, I must have had my camera on a funky setting, sorry.

As you might have guessed this means we have journeyed past the Cambrian explosion and are exploring the ancient mid-to-late Paleozoic seas...in other words we are only weeks away from DINOSAURS!!! I have so many resources, games, movies, tapes, stickers, cards, activities and books for dinos I really think interest will wane before we exhaust the materials. I figure we'll just explore as long as it's productive, and then move on no matter how much/little is left.

I have a tons of great stuff planned for early mammals,the ice ages, and hominids. Not to mention modern animals and classification! I figure we should be doing prehistory (scroll down to the bottom of this page and click on Science and scroll through that page if you have no clue what I'm talking about) at least until Spring. The we can ditch the (semi-) structured science and concentrate on relaxed, outdoor nature study. Or that's the plan, at least.

~EH.

Lizards, Rabbit-Trails, and Balance

We spent part of the afternoon on Friday clearing out our courtyard so I could start getting things set up for our (3rd Annual!) haunted house, and when we picked up the sand and water table to move it to the backyard we found this little guy.

Scote immediately rushed in the house to grab his nature bag and field guide, and kept screeching to himself, "Oh, I just can't wait to research this!" and "What kind of lizard do you think it is? Do you think he is a carnivore?!! I hope he is in my book." and the like.

He is finally at that stage of independant reading (3rd-ish, I'd say) where the whole world of information (or at least most of our home children's library) is opening up to him. He still needs help on some of the larger and more esoteric words, but by and large he can find the information he needs by himself, and it was really gratifying to see how excited he was about doing his own research!

Days like this almost convince me to unschool full-time, but ultimately I think the kids thrive better with at least a few morning hours of challenge and structure, and I've seen such immense progress in our structured/sequential subjects (memory work, maths, Latin, history) that I can't imagine abadoning them...or at least not completely.

I guess what I am trying for, ultimately, is everything in balance.

A few focused morning hours of structured rigor in the schoolroom, and afternoons full of nonsense and play and nature where we can just follow the intellectual rabbit trail wherever it might lead. I imagine that is what made a good classical education in the past, that balance...it's a sort of Alice in Wonderland approach to education, I guess. Reading How Doth the Little Crocodile is so much more entertaining after having read How Doth the Little Busy Bee, otherwise you never even get the poet's joke at all! I think kids need the best of both worlds, to each enrich the other.

~EH

If a picture is worth 1,000 words...

...then here is my 4,ooo for today.

Chicken Run is at least 10 times her original size (she can no longer even fit into her tunnel!) and she is fully feathered!

Here is a timeline game I made, which we played today for the first time.

This is the sort of thing you would pay a hundred dollars for in a montessori shop! I paid about 20 dollars for the blue booklets (along with some yellow ones not pictured) and made all the other materials myself. I could have made the books as well, since they have the text in a free printable format online , but I bought cheap ink for my ink-guzzling epson CX6400 and now it won't print at all, anyway the ink cartridges for my model would run me about 55 bucks, so this was a bargain.

Here is a close-up of one of the cards. This one shows a trilobite, and some other ancient sea creatures.

Chicken Run Update

She's almost fully feathered, as you can see, and about 5 times her original size!

We had to move her earlier this week because she figured out how to leap up and flap her wings to jump out of her box. You can see the red heat lamp in the background, which she won't need much longer, and some ramps and rocks we put in her cage for her to play with. We also made a tunnel out of two plastic cups duct-taped together and she seems to enjoy running through it several times a day.

She is very easy to feed. We just sprinkle crushed game bird meal (40 cents a pound at the feed store), very small universal bird seed mix, and millet sprays and she pecks at it on her own. We also saw her eat a small cockroach that was attracted by the heat lamp (yuck!) and small, live meal worms are her very favorite. It is very interesting to watch her hunt and peck (she is very accurate and can even consistantly select one color of seed out of many strewn on the floor of her box) and the growth and development from egg to almost-adult bird has been very fast paced and exciting!

Overall it has been a very fun and educational experience.

If you are interested, you can order a small incubator with instructions and 4 quail eggs here for less than 30 dollars.

~EH

Carlsbad Caverns Pictures

Above you can see the natural entrance to Carlsbad Caverns. The night before we watched hundreds of thousands of bats swirl out of this opening in the desert like a tornado!

In a series of S turns and steep ramps you descend 750 feet below the surface to see some of the most breathtaking geological formations imaginable lit with disney-quality lighting. You are permitted to take as many pictures as you want, but I found it nearly impossible to get a good shot underground, but no biggie since the bookstore has very affordable photos, postcards, and books.

You can see some examples of the pictures I wanted to take but couldn't get to come out Here.


Here's my (freshly 6 year-old) Scote. The blue folder behind his back is his junior ranger booklet. If you've never been to a National Park, the junior ranger program is a small workbook that you buy for a dollar, the kids do activities in the park and have rangers sign off on the different tours and programs they attend. Once they are complete you return them to be checked and the kids are fussed over, sworn in, and given iron-on badges and an announcement over the loudspeaker.


Here they are with their badges. They were so proud of being junior rangers they wanted to donate the rest of their spending money to help the park. I told them that any money we spend in the park helps the park, so it was okay to buy something they liked instead. They still put their loose change in a collection box, though.

It was a great trip!

~EH

The hatching of "Chicken Run", the quail

Field Trip

Well, the field trip today was supposed to be to the planetarium, only they are closed until September 1st, so last minute we went to the zoo instead. It didn't fit in with our prehistory plans, but it was fun anyhow.

We did manage to sneak some prehistory in there, though.

At one point they saw a faux rock wall inside the sea lion exhibit that had shells embedded and they started hopping around excitedly saying they found a giant piece of fossiliferous limestone, and later the kids spent their own money to buy some polished rocks from the machine.

It's funny how sometimes even without planning things that you are learning have a way of coming up no matter where you are. Not only did the geology manage to creep up on us, but Dodo had fun reading some of the scientific names in Latin. The ones with colors in their names she was able to understand, so that was really cool too.

Sorry the picture quality on these is so poor, I had to set it way low since like a big retard I forgot my memory card in the van!

NOTE: If you look at the picture above you can see how much Scote is growing to look like his father, the likeness is just astounding! You can see a picture of Ssgt Eccentric here for comparison. Please disregard his ridiculous hair...his unit is known as the "mohawks" so they all walk around looking like freaks over there. Maybe it is some sort of psychological warfare to psyche out the afghanis or something. It certainly scares the bejeezus out of me!

By far the coolest thing we saw all day was in the South American aviary... A mother bird laid about 8 eggs in the grass not even a foot in front of us! We could have reached out and touched her if we wanted, but more than likely she would have attacked us, or possibly freaked out and hurt her eggs in panic.

She hissed and reared up like an angry snake as it was.

It was really interesting watching her go through the process of laying, she bounced her rear end up and down in the exact same way as our (dearly departed) evil rabbit Veela did when she was birthing kittens. I might try this trick next time I spawn another Eccentric!

Quick Quiz

Which one is Scote the Goat, and which is the real goat? I'll give you a hint, the real one stinks. Or does the fake one? Oh well, I know one of them did, anyway.

It's Ugha's dream to ride a real "efellent", but this is as close as she's come so far.

FUN FACT

Did you know an elephant can fit on a blue whale's tongue?!

Just look at that sky, it looks painted on! And underneath is El Paso's favorite sea lion, Sunny.

The end of a long, hot day. I can't wait for fall when it goes down to 70 again!