A Hidden Habitat

I haven't written on this blog for a very long time now... almost 5 years now. In fact, I haven't written much at all in the past year. But, I miss it, so I may try keeping up with this blog again, if I can find the time.

Hannah is wrapping up her freshman year at the local high school, which Ben will also attend when he is a freshman next year. Becca is finishing 6th grade, and Kayla will actually be old enough for kindergarten next year!

I have been furthering my own education a bit as well. In the fall, I completed classes to become an Ohio Certified Volunteer Naturalist (OCVN), and this spring, I attended the Environmental Education Council of Ohio (EECO) annual conference. I have loved nature education since I was in college and worked at the Philadelphia Zoo. Though my certification was in Social Studies Secondary Education, I always had a longing to teach about nature and wildlife. Because of this passion, I have been volunteering a lot at our local nature center. I recently helped with a 5-week nature journaling program for 4th graders at an urban elementary school, and I will be assisting with many field trips at the nature center this spring. I love it!

I have also been incorporating even more environmental education into our homeschooling. This week, Ben had to take the state Geometry test on two separate mornings as part of his preparation for entering high school. The beautiful weather inspired me to take the rest of the school day outdoors.

We walked around our property and talked about nature - what we saw and what we wondered about. Becca kept dashing around looking under rocks and logs for red-backed salamanders, which we find all over our property. She did find a few, including this large gray one and one that measured only an inch from head to tail.

As we rounded the "hairpin," as the kids call the sharp bend in the walking path around our property, we glanced at all of the logs in various stages of decay next to the path. "Hey," I told her, "you should see if you can flip one of those really rotting logs and see what you find underneath." The log ended up being so rotten that it pulled apart instead of turning over.

 First, we noticed patches of white fungus spread across the inside of the log.

As we looked closer, we began to see even more signs of life: a tiny mushroom, a spider web and a small brown spider, myriads of tunnels with reddish brown ants scurrying through them, a salamander, a centipede, a beetle, and five or six of these beautifully colored millipedes. An entire miniature ecosystem lay hidden within an old log on the forest floor.

We decided to examine the millipedes a little more closely before returning them safely to their

rotting log. We learned that they are called Euryurus leachii, or Leach's millipede, and they primarily live in decaying hardwoods. Apparently, they even glow under a black light, though we didn't have the opportunity to test that out.

Becca, in particular, seemed to love this investigation. She and I talked about all of the things she had found, as we walked back toward the house. She wanted to find some way to demonstrate what she had learned. At first, she mentioned drawing a picture, but then we discussed other ways she could model the hidden habitat we had discovered. When we got inside, she instantly collected her craft supplies and got to work. I love her final results!

On the outside/front, she used green yarn to create a soft bed of moss with patches of bark showing through. She added a turkey tail fungus to the edge.

The front flips up to reveal the inside of the log, where she drew a millipede, ants and their tunnels, a centipede, a worm, a spider and a web, a mushroom, and streaks of white fungus.

I look forward to doing even more nature exploring with the kids in the future. I am amazed at how much we can learn when we begin to ask questions and look beneath the surface of what we see.  Just as we had to peel back the layers of the log to see the hidden world inside, we can also discover hidden realms of knowledge by just taking the time to stop and dig a little deeper into the world around us.

City Mice, Country Mice

This school year so far has slightly resembled the fable "The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse."

In August, when school began, we lived in a smallish brick home on a busy street in the city. For recess each day, the kids played outside in our small backyard, with strict instructions to never leave our property or get too close to the road. They quickly tired of playing in the small yard and yearned for more freedom - freedom I could not grant because of the neighborhood in which we lived.

At the end of September, we moved into our new home, on 5 acres of land in the middle of the country. The kids roam the property, playing in and out of the woods, leaping over the small stream, never tiring of playing and exploring.

Hannah has named her favorite trees, and she constantly shows me interesting bugs she finds. The first day, Hannah excitedly brought me a giant leopard moth caterpillar, and this weekend, we laughed together at the dancing of a colony of beech blight aphids on a tree branch. We also found a particularly odd cluster of bugs, which we finally identified as adult and nymph oak tree hoppers. And, this evening, Becca discovered a walking stick in the living room as she headed up to bed. The kids love looking up and identifying all of the interesting species of bugs.

Of course, the one type of bug none of them like is spiders, particularly the wolf spiders which keep coming into our home. Yesterday, Hannah picked up her sneaker and a large one fell out, and today, one kept creeping out from under the wall in the school room as we worked. Josh finally caught that one this evening and relocated it to the barn, hoping that might keep it from returning to the house.

We also all enjoy seeing wildlife we rarely or never saw in the city - dozens of deer, chipmunks, squirrels, blue jays, cardinals, sparrows, nuthatches, chickadees, Carolina wrens, tufted titmice, downy woodpeckers, and red-bellied woodpeckers. Two mornings, we even had a great blue heron land in the yard! And, this is only autumn. I cannot imagine all of the birds and animals that will be here in the summer! Hannah has been begging to work on her bird project again, creating her own bird guide for all of the different birds she sees. I love that all of this nature and beauty surrounding us inspires them to want to learn.

(See the deer in that photo? I am amazed at how well they blend in, especially in the evening.)

We have definitely had to adjust quite a bit to living in the country, but we love it. My kids (and I) may be "city mice," but unlike the mouse in Aesop's fable, we feel perfectly at home in the country and have no desire to go back. This city mouse would rather be a country mouse any day!

Explorer Camp

What a busy autumn we have had! We traveled nearly every weekend in October - to Grove City College for our homecoming and Josh's reunion, to Josh's family's house for a fall festival, and to my parents' cabin in Pennsylvania for a nice visit. In between, we squeezed in Hannah's seventh birthday party, too! Part of our travels included one of my favorite homeschooling weeks so far - "Explorer Camp" at my parents' cabin.

The kids and I packed the car and left home on a Monday morning for the long drive to Pennsylvania. After a somewhat crazy car ride, which we spent listening to our Chronicles of Narnia radio dramas, we arrived at the cabin early in the evening, and the kids helped me unload the car. I placed a cardboard sign on the cabin's door, labeling it as our "Base Camp" for the week.

Because of the light drizzle, I let the kids watch Winged Migration while I made dinner and organized our things. Fortunately, everyone went to bed early to be well rested for the morning's activities.

While they slept, I planned the next day's agenda and created a map of our "base camp." I gave the rooms different names that made the cabin seem more like a camp, and I hung the map on the refrigerator.

Then, I wrote out the schedule for the day and hung it on the fridge as well.

The next day, I began the morning with breakfast and an introduction to Explorer Week. I poured the kids juice in coffee mugs and told them it was "explorer coffee," so they could begin the day like real explorers. This turned out to be one of their favorite parts of the week! Then, in light of our theme, I took our morning devotions each day from Numbers 13-14, which tells the story of the Israelite men exploring the land God promised them. We read and discussed a portion of the story each day during breakfast, and then we moved into the "explorers' lounge" for our lessons, which we referred to as "seminars" or "briefings."

Each day involved some indoor learning. During the week, we studied explorers and Christopher Columbus, eastern forests, autumn and leaves, making and reading maps and globes, finding North using the sun and on a compass, and the geography of the world. All of our curricula seemed to reach a common place at the perfect time for our trip. Our MAPS curriculum introduced real places on the globe, and our science curriculum addressed making and reading maps and finding the points of a compass. At the same time, we began Galloping the Globe by discussing the world and labeling continents and oceans. I also drew quite a bit from a wonderful resource called Woods Walk, which teaches about forests through treks in the woods. Because of the freezing temperatures that week, our indoor work allowed time for the weather to warm a bit before we bundled up and headed outside for our exploration.

The kids loved their time exploring in the woods.

Carrying their explorer notebooks, we hiked in the woods along my parents' stream and behind their pond.

We ran down the road to their property.

And, we climbed up the hill into a Ducks Unlimited project with abatement ponds designed to clean the acidic water contaminated by the mines.

The kids drew pictures and wrote notes about the many things they discovered.

Using a variety of field guides, we identified many of the things we found.

Tree Club Moss in the woods:

Witch Hazel blooming all around:

And, after studying a fallen log...

...we identified two interesting varieties of lichen - British Soldiers and Pyxie Cups:

We also identified many of the fall leaves, tracing them on similar colored construction paper and then cutting them out to make lovely fall leaf collages.

Overall, we had a wonderful week and the kids learned so much more through hands-on experiences and exploration. I think we may make this a seasonal event, except maybe winter (brrr!), so we can see how the forest changes throughout the year. This is the kind of learning that makes homeschooling so much fun!

A Matter of Science...

... or perhaps I should title this "The Science of Matter."

One disadvantage of buying my curriculum online is that I do not always know if it will meet my expectations. For that reason, I debated about this science curriculum for a long time before I finally purchased it. In fact, I think it sat in my Amazon cart for almost 6 months before I finally committed to buying it. However, after a little over a week of school, I can say that I am more than delighted with this book! It has exceeded all of my expectations so far.

The author of this book, Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding, is an environmental scientist who dislikes the random fashion most elementary science curricula use to present topics. He decided to create a book to teach even young children to think about science as a whole and to see how various topics build on each other. Rather than jumping from animals to weather to rocks to plants, this curriculum weaves together different branches of science while guiding students to think as scientists.

Using the book, we began with the idea of organizing things into categories. We practiced grouping items around the room into categories, and I showed them how to complete larger jigsaw puzzles using the same idea. First, we categorized pieces into edges and non-edges. Then, we grouped them by color. A seemingly impossible task quickly became much simpler.

This week, building upon that idea, I introduced the concept of matter and its three states - solid, liquid, and gas. We found various items around the house and organized them into these three categories. I showed them that all of the liquids needed containers to keep them from flowing into the carpet. Josh even explained "viscosity" to them, and they could identify which liquids had higher or lower viscosity. We experimented with ice and butter on the stove and saw how matter could change from one state to another, and we also discussed how living things are a combination of the three states - not just one.

As a final project, I put together a small book, with a label or sentence on each page, and I allowed the kids to write and draw what they learned about matter. I gave them a lot of freedom, though I required that they write at least one thing on each page and I assisted them with spelling if needed. I was so impressed! Their books showed just how much they really learned about the subject:

Ben, age 5 (kindergarten):


Hannah, age 6 (first grade):

A Summer Summary

Now that school has started for the year, I feel like I should give a brief summary of our summer. Between my badly sprained ankle, the blessings and demands of an abundant summer harvest, and our two long vacations, I have been too busy to post until now!

Here is just a brief list of the fun we had:

• Camping for a week at the state park, including crayfish hunting, rock climbing, and canoeing.

• Riding the trolley into Philadelphia (from my parents' house) to see the Franklin Institute.

• Spending a day at a friend's house, including picking blackberries and meeting their chickens.

• Visiting the Please Touch Museum with grandparents and friends.

• Exploring the Camden Aquarium.

• Enjoying Grandma and PopPop's cabin

• Picking apples and plums

• And much more!

Now that summer is drawing to a close and we are beginning a daily homeschooling routine, I look forward to the coming of fall. I love cooler weather, colorful leaves, apples and pumpkins, and the spicy, earthy smells of the season. And, I enjoy looking back at our fun, knowing we could not have asked for a better summer!

A Creepy, Cool Bug

A few nights ago, I walked onto our porch to put cans in the recycling bin and noticed a strange looking bug on the screen. I called Josh to come look, and he captured the bug in a little bug cage to show the kids.

The kids squealed in fear, and I must admit that the bug looked quite dangerous. About an inch and a half long, it had a long, pointy tube on its back end with another thorn-like point above it. It looked like a very large wasp with two stingers, though I suspected it might use the long tube for laying eggs and not for stinging.

After some creative googling, we identified the species. It was indeed a wasp, though it was a wood-boring wasp and not a stinging one. In fact, this species could do more damage to local trees than to us, though we figured that out after we released it... The bug we found was a "pigeon horntail." It uses its long, slender ovipositor (that scary looking tube) to deposit its eggs into the wood of trees and then infects the trees with fungi in order to soften the wood for its larvae to eat. I hope that this particular pigeon horntail decided to lay its eggs in someone else's trees...

Anyway, after watching it for a few minutes, we let it go in our bushes. I did get one good picture of it, before it flew at me and I screamed and jumped away despite knowing that it could not do me any harm. It certainly looked intimidating!

Later that night, Hannah was excited to find the pigeon horntail listed in her little bug guide in her room. I actually enjoyed examining and learning more about it, even though I panicked just a bit at the thought of it landing on me... What a creepy and cool bug!

Spring, Sweet Spring

Suddenly, this past weekend, the lamb of spring arrived and chased away the lion of winter. In fact, after such a snowy winter, this March has been remarkably mild. On Saturday, the sun shone and a warm breeze blew, rapidly melting the large piles of snow and transforming the landscape into a mess of muddy ponds and tiny leaf-filled streams. Even the first tiny crocuses appeared in the only part of my garden not blanketed with snow.

On such a beautiful day, the annual Maple Sugar Festival lured us out of our house to brave the crowds at Malabar Farm. We were fortunate enough to arrive early and get parking, since they had to close most of their parking due to the mud and turn many cars away. After quite a long wait in the mud, we finally reached the front of the line for the wagon ride up the road to the festival.

As we climbed into the wagon, the assistant asked if Hannah and Ben would like to ride up front with the driver. They loved it!

In spite of all the mud and snow, the kids enjoyed trekking from station to station, learning about maple syrup. A Native American man explained how the first people in this area processed the sap to make sugar.

Using sticks as tongs, he removed very hot rocks from a fire and placed them into a log trough filled with sap. This kept the sap boiling, evaporating the water and leaving the sugar behind. The kids enjoyed smelling the steam, with its appetizing cotton candy scent.

The next station demonstrated how early settlers in this area made maple syrup and maple sugar.

Afterward, each person could taste a tiny amount of maple sugar.

Finally, we visited the "Sugar Shack," where they still make maple syrup today.

Inside, a large vat full of sap simmered and boiled, as steam billowed up to the ceiling and out through the vents.

The kids look forward to this part each year, because, after waiting patiently for the end of the presentation, everyone got a small taste of fresh maple syrup.

Before we left, we purchased our yearly gallon of maple syrup and a few maple candies, and then we rode one of the horse-drawn wagons back to our car.

Although the kids wailed and yawned and squabbled from exhaustion the whole ride home, we all had a wonderful day together. We look forward to the Maple Sugar Festival each year as one of the sweetest signs of the coming of spring. Well... perhaps with the exception of those first lovely flowers!