Family Schooling: Back to School

We started our more rigorous school schedule again this week.  We are doing a new Biology curriculum from The Good and the Beautiful called Kingdoms and Classifications. It has been great so far.  It is geared towards grades k-6 so all the kids can participate in various ways. The older kids do microscope labs.

 Their are matching games with pictures of different types of cells. Those red cups are a sorting game that shows the order of taxonomy by decreasing magnitude.

 The kids sorted buttons by different characteristics.

 Brother S is learning to read this year and we are using a new curriculum that is supposed to help all the kids with spelling and letter direction/order.  It is called Spell to Write and Read.  I love programs that can work for all the kids together.  One of the first exercises is running around the clock - they need to know the clock so that they can form letters according to placement around the clock face.  They learn cursive and printing at the same time. It is supposed to help prevent or remediate dyslexia because of the way the cursive letters flow in one direction.

 Sister A and Brother M also decided to do an art project based on this foldable house.

 They made foldable house for their dolls.

 We had some tiring days getting back on school schedule.

Family Schooling: What happened over the summer?

We try to do schooling during the summer, but it is much less rigorous than during the school year.  The kids read to themselves quite a bit, and we read a lot of picture books each night, but these are the substantial "educational" books that we read together:

Butchering Days: Rabbits and Chickens

I don't have a lot of pictures from these activities because I am usually a big mess and it is not something that I enjoy doing.  It is sad and stressful, but I know that all my animals are treated much more humanely than commercially raised ones. They just have this one bad day. We try to remember the sacrifice that comes with eating meat and do not waste any part of it. Even the heads, innards, and tails that people normally don't consume we use to feed our dogs and cats.  We grow about 80-90% of the meat that we eat. We don't eat beef generally and only consume about one rabbit or one chicken per week to feed our family of six. I use bits of ham or bacon as flavoring, but in general I try to prepare as many plant based meals as possible.

 Here I am getting set-up for the big meat chicken butchering day. We tested out a new propane heating system for the scalding pot. It worked great and I think it will be extremely helpful when we do the bigger birds in November (turkeys) and December (geese). I am selling turkeys and geese for the holidays. My neighbors brought their birds and I did ours. Working together it took about 6 hours to do the 40 birds -- that is pretty slow, but this was their first time butchering so I think it was great.

Elders and neighbors came (again) to learn and help butcher rabbits over Labor day weekend. 

Family Schooling: Entomology

We catch a lot of bugs around here.  I am forever saying "Let's look it up" and googling things like "stinging caterpillar".  This one below is a very mean saddleback stinging caterpillar that we found "painfully" in the basil leaves. 

We found this hercules beetle on our deck.  He is huge!

  Lightning bugs.

 Tree frogs and toads of all common varieties.

We started a little collection with all the already dead specimens that we find. If they are alive, the kids want to release all of them. Though I did not let them release the stinging caterpillar.

Field Trip: Loy's Station Covered Bridge and Playground

(Bridge Photo from Wikimedia)

 For our last beach play date of the summer we decided to do something a little different -- we went to a creek and playground next to a beautiful old covered bridge.

 It reminded me a lot of playing in the creek when I was little. Their were little freshwater clams and crawfish. We looked up "bivalves" when we got home and had a little science lesson about them.

Canning: Peaches, Salsa, Jam, Soups and Chicken

 I took this picture for my friend's grandma.  She donated 150 canning jars (in her basement gathering dust) to my canning project. So sweet of her! These are all her jars. Hubby is putting together new racks of shelves for me.  All the others are getting full. Current total for the year is 318 jars.  Only about 180 to go.  That will be mostly apple sauce and more soups with garden produce. I want to try canning cubed sweet potatoes (still to be harvested) and some winter squash soups. Then we have our turkey harvest day in November. We will harvest the last of our extra roosters etc that day as well. Plus, I want to can the next batch of rabbits that I harvest.

I started pressure canning when we butchered our meat chickens. We butchered 23 birds (one was a guinea fowl that was bothering Miss L).  I took 12 chickens and packaged up the 24 drum sticks and 24 breasts in the freezer. Then I put the rest of the carcasses in big pots to boil slowly for a couple hours.  That made 7 quarts of chicken and about 13 quarts of broth. Those jars on the top row are the broth and 7 jars of meat (plus some minestrone that I made with the chicken broth and veggies from our garden).  Five of the other broilers went to the friend that I borrowed the plucker from and the other 6 went into the freezer as whole broilers. 

 Our elderberry bushes did amazingly well for their first year of bearing. When I planted them last year they were just 12 inch twigs. We harvested 18 cups for ourselves and gave a bunch to our neighbors and other friends. I made peach elderberry spread with 6 cups and the rest are waiting in the freezer to be made into syrup for winter time ailments. They are definitely a messy crop though. We learned quickly that as much of their prep as possible should be done outside. 

We made lots of tomato and tomatillo salsa, both are recipes from the Ball Blue Book of Preserving.

 We harvested about 60 lbs. of tomatillos thus far, with many more growing.  My kids are good at helping with the husking. In addition to salsa, we canned tomatillo chicken soup and tomatillo chili.

 I put all the jars of canned peaches, tomato sauce, and salsa in boxes on the big shelves. We still have about 10 jars of salsa left from last year, but I think that will work out perfectly because the new batches need time to ripen on the shelf before they will be really good.

Farm Fresh: Kittens and Bunnies and Dogs, oh my!

 The kittens are doing great. They are so good with the kids, especially brother S and little sister L.  They are easy going about getting carried like babies and petted...somewhat roughly.

 A friend's HOA went after them for having their pet bunny on their deck and they had to bring him back to me. He was their only pet and they loved him so much. He is a very friendly guy. I don't think he belongs among the "livestock" bunnies anymore.

 Our sweet dogs have been incredibly tolerant of his free ranging on our deck while we find him a new home. 

 It's a big animal party on our deck!

 He will hop right on my lap.

 And he likes to eat the left over bits of oatmeal from breakfast.

 We have been growing some LARGE varieties of tomatoes this year and with all the rain these past couple weeks they are extra large.

 Mama hen hatched 5/6 eggs that she was sitting on. I was so surprised that on the second day she hopped down from the coop with the tinies and was teaching them to scratch for food. I am sure they will be better foragers than most of my other chickens.

 These are our last batch of incubated chicks for awhile.  It is the first time since January that our basement has been free of poultry brooding.

 The new black rooster that my friends gave us, Eos, is already passing on his genes and making pretty patterns in these chicks.