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11-20-07

A friend of ours who raises gamebirds recently loaned us an incubator and gave us some chicken eggs to try and hatch. We have learned SO much from this experience. If you can at all do it, you should. It is so magical to see a little chick hatch out of an egg and then watch it grow and develop.

Out of 6 eggs, one successfully hatched. 2 eggs were not fertile, one only progressed to a very early stage, one made it about half way and one was a breech birth and died from complications/exhaustion. I had NO idea a chick could be breech in the egg! Poor little thing just finally gave up after about 2 days of trying to get out. I wish we would have tried to help it out sooner. :-(

Our one successful chick, Picatta, is thriving in his/her (??) cardboard box. She (I guess I'll call it a she, although we don't know) is starting to get her feathers in and is growing much faster than I imagined a chicken would grow. She makes all kinds of trilling bird sounds in addition to her cheeps. Every once and awhile she screeches when she wants attention. I didn't know chicks were really that social!

I think she thinks our youngest son is her mother. Every time we let her walk around on the floor she ends up in his lap.

Our dog has been whining now for the last 3 weeks everytime she hears a peep. She will let the chick crawl up on her, etc. but the only thing that is keeping her from eating this tasty little morsel is our ever vigilant eyes (and a stern, "NO BITE").

Here are some pictures of Picatta's first day:

Chicks hatch at the end of the egg that is the widest. This end has an air cell and the baby chick starts using it to breathe before it hatches out. We actually heard peeping from inside the egg!

Look at the egg itself, it's not the usual bright white like the chicken eggs from the store. This type of chicken egg is from a araucana which lays green (and sometimes blue) shelled eggs. We also had some eggs that were brown.

Once our chick had pecked nearly completely around its shell it started pushing the two halves apart.

The first thing to pop out were the chicks big feet! Then the head slipped out after a bit of flopping around.

Our dog was verrrrrrrrrry interested......

Here is the newly hatched baby once it was nearly completely dry. The first evening it could not stand up yet but kind of half crawl-walked. The next morning it could stand up and was walking around its box cheeping.

11-7-07

Ds finished some more WP notebooking pages. Here are some pics:

The Battle of Little Bighorn:

Sharing the news about moving west and a page about Levi Strauss and the invention of blue jeans:

Transcontinental railroad and traveling west in wagons (the top part of the wagon page is lift-the-flap):

Some history pocket things about the Oregon Trail pasted into ds's history notebook (including a "quilt block" made from felt):

A Wild West wanted poster:

More History Pocket stuff:

History Pockets Moving West is schedule in the WinterPromise Middlers Pack but we are just doing the pages whenever we feel like it and have the time.

I also didn't end up liking the Down the Yukon by Will Hobbs and am substituting Caddie Woodlawn instead. Caddie Woodlawn was scheduled as a reader in the LA package, but we aren't using that this year. Instead, I am using the readers as substitutes for some of the adventure reading assignments.

11-2-07

WinterPromise had it scheduled for us to build a log cabin out of twigs, but we decided to use Lincoln Logs instead and then pulled out some Playmobil to complete the whole scene.
I love having the excuse to "play" with Playmobil! Shhh don't tell anyone I'm grownup! Don't tell anyone either that our oldest (a junior in high school) still joins in when her little brother pulls them out. ;-)

Actually Playmobil make an excellent compliment to just about any homeschool history study. You can easily build and act out just about any scene.

"Hey, we're having a test. Show me what you learned with your Playmobil." "Narrate to me the last chapter we went over." "Create a different ending for the story you read."

Playmobil is a way to flesh out characters and historical situations that makes them easier to remember because they are personalized in a hands-on and fun way.

Ds is ogling some of the Roman Playmobil sets. I'm thinking about our future ancient history studies.....

Here's a prairie dog craft ds made for WinterPromise's Animals and Their Worlds. Some might think crafts like these are just busy work, but for Ds, they are a visual reminder of the things he's learned. We also watched some cute videos online. You can take a look at some of the other things we did in my AW gravy section week 3.
I think WP's Animals & Their Worlds is my favorite part of the day. Ds said he likes it as much as he likes WP's history (American Story 2). I asked him why he likes them both so much and he said, "There are so many activities." He is a little bummed that this week is our last week learning about the African Savanna. I assured him he will probably enjoy learning about the rainforest just as much.

Someone sent this video link to one of my email lists. I thought it was hilarious. It just goes to show you that you shouldn't learn math via algorithms!!

The video came at a good time since I just recently toook extra time teaching multiplication with double digits. I had to pull out Math-U-See because Ds wasn't getting the concept with RightStart. I guess it's good I have so many math programs on hand! Something clicked last night and for the first time, HE GOT IT! Yay! Today we'll be learning how to multiply double digits with carrying over (back to RightStart). It is such a relief for ds to finally get this concept. I tried teaching it to him last year, but he just wasn't ready for it. I could see him heading down the algorithm path and so I stopped our lessons cold. He needed to understand the WHY of it all before we could move on. We backed way off and took things back a notch. Ds just needed more time to mature.

Here's a helpful video I found at United Streaming (you have to have an account or use the 30 day free trial): Maths Mansion 16: Double Digit Dating . The video really illustrates what you are doing in multiple digit multiplication. It's an interesting and understandable way to do this type of math problem.

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