Garden, garden, who's in the garden?

In little Annie's garden
Grew all sorts of posies;
There were pinks, and mignonette,
And tulips, and roses.

Sweet peas, and morning glories,
A bed of violets blue,
And marigolds, and asters,
In Annie's garden grew.

There the bees went for honey,
And the hummingbirds, too;
And there the pretty butterflies
And the ladybirds flew.

And there among her flowers,
Every bright and pleasant day,
In her own pretty garden
Little Annie went to play.

-Eliza Lee Follen

Week of June 27



How it looked "before"

Our garden went through quite a beatdown by our recent hailstorm, but most of the plants are still hanging on.   

The cantaloupe continues to creep out into wide open spaces.

The tomato plants are as tall as me now (though that's not saying much!) and are loaded with green fruits. 

The boys can't wait to pick the peppers when they turn red.

The little pointy Christmas lights are baby okra.

Cinnamon Basil and Sweet Basil before their haircuts.

We harvested some basil and decided to try drying some.  After some research and a little trial and error, we learned an easy way to do this.  First, wash the freshly cut basil and lay it out on towels to dry.  Turn the oven on to 350 degrees, and then turn it off as soon as it reaches that temperature.  Pull the leaves off the stems and discard the stems.  Arrange the leaves on a baking pan, and put them into the warm oven. 

Check on the leaves every 5-10 minutes and stir them around a bit.  They will immediately begin to darken.  Your goal is for them to get dry, but not cooked or burnt.  You can feel whether the leaves are still moist, and you want to take them out as soon as they feel dry and are a dark greenish/purplish color.  Now for the fun part--

Set the pan out to cool, and once it is cool enough to touch, use your hands to crunch up the leaves. 

We mixed some basil with oregano which I had already dried to make Italian seasoning, and left some basil plain.  We used empty spice bottles as containers. 

We're looking forward to getting some tomatoes from the garden so we can use our homemade seasonings to make pizza sauce and spaghetti sauce.

Summer Read-along/Do-along

   If you're reading Moon Over Manifest along with us, you will have discovered by now that letters play a large part in the storyline.  Abilene discovers letters in the cigar box she finds that were written from Ned, who is serving in World War I, to his buddy Jinx back home in Manifest, Kansas:

"I selected one and held the thin paper to my nose, wondering, hoping that I'd smell something of Gideon as a boy.  Maybe smells like dog, or wood, or pond water.  I felt like I was floating in my daddy's world of summer, and hide-and-seek, and fishing when I opened the paper and read the greeting, Dear Jinx, it said in an unfamiliar penmanship."

   Abilene is hoping to discover more about her family and where she came from through these letters and Miss Sadie's stories.  She doesn't know much about her background, and as the story progresses, she learns more and more about the people of Manifest and her father. 

   Many of Manifest's citizens are immigrants from places like Norway, Italy, Poland, Greece, Scotland, and Russia.  The fictional town of Manifest is based on the real town of Frontenac, Kansas which was an immigrant town in 1918.  People from 21 countries settled there, and only 12% of its people had parents who were born in the US.

   The library has lots of books on the topics of immigration and genealogy.  A few kid-friendly titles I found at our local library are:

Ellis Island by Elaine Landau (Scholastic Children's Press 2008)

A History of Multicultural America, The New Freedom to the New Deal by William Loren

   Katz (Steck-Vaughn Company 1993)

Coming to America, The Story of Immigration by Betsy Maestro (Scholastic 1996)

Immigrant Kids by Russsell Freedman (Scholastic 1980)

Do People Grow on Family Trees? Genealogy for Kids and Other Beginners by Ira Wolfman

   (Workman Publishing Co. 1991)

   We decided to combine letter writing with genealogy and do a project to find out more about our family tree.  There are several websites devoted to genealogy, and OMSH's post over at The Pioneer Woman Homeschooling broaches this topic with several great sources and suggestions in the comments.  We are going to start at the beginning to build our family tree by finding out who our closest relatives are. 

   Family Tree Kids has all kinds of resources for getting started on your family tree.  My kids are going to write letters to aunts, uncles, etc. asking them to fill out this family group form as a starting point. Sure, it would be easy to email it as an attachment, but to practice letter-writing, we are going to use good old fashioned paper, envelopes, and stamps for this project.  They will learn how to properly address an envelope and how to structure a basic letter requesting information.  I don't know if their favorite part will be getting to put the letters in the mailbox at the post office and pulling down the door to make sure they dropped inside or getting letters back in the mail!

Friday photo

Burst

Curriculum Fair: Where in the world...?

   Geography is one of our favorite subjects to study, and we do some independent geography lessons as well as including it in our other studies, such as reading, history, and Bible study.  I'm a Navy brat, and one thing we did when I was a kid was keep a large world map on the wall in our hallway.  Whenever we got a letter, tape, or postcard from my dad, we would put a pin in the map to mark where he was.  We learned a lot about the world through his travels, and seeing where he was helped us mark the days until he traveled back home.  I still have the dolls he brought me from the countries he went to, and I use them for "show-and-tell" with my boys.  We have a large world map on the wall in our homeschool room, and we use post-it flags to mark the places we read about.





Here is a sampling of what else we're doing:









Beautiful Feet Geography




This literature-based geography study uses the Holling Clancy Holling books to teach both American and World geography.  The maps are large and printed on art-quality paper, and students use color pencils to mark them as they work through the books.  The books are beautifully illustrated and  appeal to all ages.  My kids and I are doing this study during the summer.

The Melissa & Doug wooden jigsaw puzzle is the perfect USA puzzle for my hands-on learners, and it is challenging because you have to know where the states go to put it back together.  Each piece fits against each other instead of having individual frames to fit them into, except for Alaska and Hawaii.

The Global Puzzle is a 600 piece map of the world.  We haven't built it yet, but it's on our bucket list.  We'll have to find a place to leave it out where our cats won't scatter it.  I have heard that it is really challenging, especially the ocean parts, but that students learn a lot through the experience of building it.  We love puzzles, so we're looking forward to the challenge.  You can see this puzzle in action here.
   

 

Audio Memory

   Geography Songs are fun and addictive, and they make learning geography facts easy.  We've worked through several of them, and my kids enjoy putting their USA puzzle together while singing to remember what state goes where.  The Audio Memory website has some samples you can listen to, and the product is available as an MP3 download or as a kit which includes a cd and a workbook with a world map.  We have the kit, but we pretty much only use the cd.  This is hands-down one of my kids' favorites.  They can get goofy and silly while they dance, sing, and learn.

Uncle Josh's Outline Maps

  

   This cd is a great resource to have on hand--you can print any map you need whenever you need it, and they are perfect for adding to a report or notebook.  These are basic blank blackline maps, and my cd also includes some bonus color maps and labeled US states.  I started out with the Outline Map Book, but once they started making the cd version I went with that for convenience.  We've been using this for years, and it is one of our "foundation" pieces.



Knowledge Quest



   The nice thing about the Knowledge Quest maps is that they are also printable from the cd and they show areas at different times in history.  These are beautiful maps to add to student journals, projects, and notebooks.  These maps are wonderful to have when studying different cultures and time periods.  Here is a free World History Sampler you can look at or download if you want to take a closer look.

   Our homeschool support group hosts a USA festival every other year, and an International festival on the years in-between.  My kids have learned a lot of geography as well as facts and history from the research they have done to prepare their presentations as well as by attending the events and learning from the other projects.  Our planner prepared a passport for each student to have "stamped" as they visited each exhibit.  This is a wonderful group activity that we look forward to each year.

   We also participated in the Great American Postcard Swap last year, and they boys used these notebooking pages to document state stats and facts for USA notebooks that they each put together.

When the sky falls

Golf balls from the sky

No, those aren't golf balls, they're hailstones.  We had the worst hailstorm I have ever experienced the other day.  It came upon us suddenly, and it felt and sounded like the sky was falling.  It was coming down fast from above and from the sides as the wind swirled and ice pummeled everything.  It only lasted about 5 or 6 minutes, but it was enough to freak out the kids and our dog (and Mommy.)  My oldest grabbed his video camera and started filming and is already incorporating his footage into a movie.

June snowstorm?

It looked like it had snowed outside, and some of the ice was so thick that it even remained on the ground the next morning.  Our neighborhood looks like a war zone!

I'll huff, and I'll puff...

Our house looks like it was the victim of a drive-by shooting.  But ours didn't get as many holes in it as some of our neighbors'.  My garden got beaten down a bit, but it already looks like it will bounce back. 

So, of course, we wanted to find out why hail happens.  One of my favorite weather books is Eric Sloane's 1949 Weather Book which contains wonderful drawings and factual information about all forms of weather. 

There are many books about weather, but this one could be used as a supplementary science text, and it makes weather concepts clear and understandable.  I just love the style of Sloan's drawings:



From Weather Book by Eric Sloane 1949, Dover (2005) unabridged republication



Through our research, we found out that hail played a role in World History when a hailstorm destroyed so many crops in France in 1788 that it contributed to a food shortage.  This compounded civil unrest which led to the French Revolution.

The largest authenticated hailstone occurred in Kansas in 1970 and weighed in somewhere around 1 pound, 11 ounces, but many larger pieces have been reported all around the world, just not "officially."

In the midwest, crops are damaged by hailstones so frequently that many farmers carry hail insurance.  Hail can totally destroy crops and kill livestock.  Entire herds of sheep and cattle have been killed in hailstorms.

"Ostrish egg" sized hail fell in an 1885 Texas hailstorm.   The Chilled Catfish of Concho County sounds like a tall tale but is reported to be true.

Hailstorms raining down critters along with the ice have been reported numerous times--everything from birds, frogs, water mussels, and worms to a turtle encased in ice.

The Let's-Read-and-Find-Out-Science book, Down Comes the Rain, explains the water cycle and includes a wonderful explanation of how hail forms, and this series of books can usually be found at the library.



Down Comes the Rain by Franklyn M. Branley (Let's-Read-and-Find-Out Science 1997)



You can slice a hailstone in half and actually see the layers of ice that formed as it journeyed up and down before falling to earth.  We discovered that if you hold a hailstone up against a bright light, you can also see the layers inside.

My youngest was terrified during the hailstorm, but now that he understands what hail is and why it happens, I hope he will feel more secure the next time one rolls in.  I think my oldest must be a future storm chaser, though, because he wants to film in HD next time!

Friday photo



Time in a bottle.



Summer Read-along/Write-along

If you are joining in on our Summer Read-along, you may have read that Abilene discovers something hidden away under the floorboards in her room the first night she spends at Shady's house.
>Spoiler alert<
When she pulls out "the something," she finds that it is a cigar box containing "papers and odds and ends."  She discovers letters, a map, a cork, a fishhook, a silver dollar, a skeleton key, and a wooden doll:
"To me they were like treasures from a museum, things a person could study to learn about another time and the people who lived back then."

These "artifacts" become the framework for Miss Sadie's stories about 1918 Manifest, and Abilene finds herself seeking to uncover the mysteries of the past.

Our local cigar shop sells cigar boxes for a dollar--I've also gotten some at thrift stores.  If you cannot locate a cigar box, try using a shoebox or other empty box and even decorate it to look like Abilene's Lucky Bill cigar box.  Find some small trinkets such as Abilene's.  Some items could include a bottle cap, a spool of thread, a gumball machine prize, dice, a game piece, a safety pin, a paperclip, or a small magnifying glass.  Place several items in the box for your kids to "discover" as they write (or tell) their stories. 

As Miss Sadie shares her stories with Abilene, Abilene begins to feel a connection to the people of Manifest.  Objects can connect us with the past, especially if we know the stories behind them.   I remember looking at trinkets in my Grandfather's drawer with him as he explained what each little thing meant to him.  A teeny-tiny telescope with the entire Lord's Prayer written inside it, a miniature violin with strings, a pocket watch, a boy scout knife--all of these things had a story behind them which I would have had to guess if he had not shared them with me.  Shows such as American Pickers are so fun to watch because you find out the history behind the items they showcase.

Encourage your kids to imagine who may have placed these items in the box for safekeeping and why each item is significant.  Have them come up with a story for each item and tell it or write it, either independently or round-robin style.  Ask them to be creative and use lots of descriptive words in their stories. If you have a child too young to write his story, act as his "secretary" and either type or write as he dictates it to you (and don't edit!)  Kids may also enjoy illustrating their stories.  These can be as long or as short as you'd like, and each item can inspire an independent story, or they can all fit together as Miss Sadie's stories do. 

Most importantly, have fun!

If you have any mementos in your own keepsake box, you may want to pull them out and have "show and tell" with your kids.  Take the time to tell your kids your stories.

Summer Read-along

I hope you'll join us for our Summer Read-along with the 2011 John Newbery Medal Winner, Moon Over Manifest by Clare Vanderpool.

We'll be sharing the summer with Abilene and the folks of Manifest and learning a little bit about life in 1918 and life in 1936.  This book is great as a read-aloud for multiple ages (mine are 7-13) as well as an independent reader for ages 9-14.

You can read a synopsis of this book here.

I'll be sharing some resources and ideas for extension activities as we go along.  Be sure to grab the Learning Table Summer Read-along button, and read an excerpt of the book here.

Review: The Waiting Place

Book Description

A collection of essays describing the beauty and humor that can be found in what often feels like a most useless state—The Waiting Place.

We all spend precious time just waiting. We wait in traffic, grocery store lines, and carpool circles. We wait to grow up, for true love, and for our children to be born. We even wait to die. But amazing things can happen if we open our eyes in The Waiting Place and peer into its dusty corners. Sometimes relationships are built, faith is discovered, dreams are (slowly) realized, and our hearts are expanded.

With humor and heart-breaking candor, Eileen Button breathes life into stagnant and, at times, difficult spaces. Throughout this collection of essays she contends that The Waiting Place can be a most miraculous place—a place where beauty can be experienced, the sacred can be realized, and God can be found working in the midst of it all.

Includes stories on waiting for:

the day to end a place called home the fish to bite a baby's healing church to be over a husband's return children to grow a mother's acceptance a loved one to die As Eileen says, "To wait is human. To find life in The Waiting Place, divine."

   Eileen Buttons' The Waiting Place is a collection of little time capsules from the author's life.  It can be read straight through, or even better, it can be read in small bites, savoring one story at a time.  Though it is not a devotional, each essay does give you something to think about, and the book is perfect for picking up when you have 5 minutes to read.  It is, however, hard to put down--so though I read it straight through, I will be returning to the individual essays from time to time. 

   Often heartbreaking, Button's essays capture moments that are easily relatable--the longing for a father's approval, the discomfort of being with a morbid grandparent, the revisiting of memories from a childhood home, the need for a mother's acceptance, living and dealing with depression, the birth of a baby with medical complications.  Button's writing style, both funny at times and making you want to cry at others, make The Waiting Place my kind of book.  Her honesty and candor make this book so compelling and meaningful to the reader.  She feels like an old friend, and at times, she feels like me.

   The lesson of this book is to embrace all the moments in our lives as they happen--to embrace the waiting places in our lives:  "We can wait all our lives for the next stage to come.  Or we can choose to see the waiting place for what it often is:  unexpectedly magical and holy."

{ The publisher has provided me with a complimentary copy of this book or advanced reading copy through BookSneeze®, but the honest opinions I have given are my own.}

And sow it grows

Week of June 6

Week of May 23

Cantaloupe roaming free

Corn rows

Corn grows

Tomato plants looking for a better view

Baby mater

Poblano pepper

Basil/zuccini tug-o'-war

{Update 6/14/11--The basil won.  See those little white spots on the zuccini?  It's mold, and it is spreading from one squash plant to the next.  I finally gave up and pulled up the cucumber, the yellow squash, and one zuccini plant to try to prevent the mold from spreading any further.  The remaining zuccini had a couple of moldy leaves, and I broke them off; not sure if that's going to work, though.} 

Bean poles covered in pole beans

Friday photo



Home



All God's creatures...

All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures, great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lord God made them all.

-Cecil Frances Alexander

   A reverence for nature, a love for all of God's creatures, respect for life, compassion, selflessness, responsibility, joy--all were learned and cultivated in my boy through the care and keeping of his rats.  

   Remus and his brother Romulus joined our family two and a half years ago after being rescued from the feeder rat cage at the pet store.  My oldest has an established pet sitting business, doing everything from feeding cats and walking dogs to caring for exotic pets both in their homes and ours.  One client had him take care of her rats in our home because she was suffering from a serious illness and had her home on the market to sell.  She couldn't care for all her many creatures, and so she placed the two rats in my son's care.  He grew to really love them, and when she was unable to take them back after three months due to her illness, she asked him if he would like to keep them.  He, of course, said he did, and they lived with us for almost a year.  They were already senior citizens when he took them in, and they lived a very comfortable and busy life.  After their passing, my son really wanted to continue to be a rat owner, so we decided to rescue some from the pet store.  

   I have to admit that I was not a rat person when the first two entered our lives.  My only experience with rats had been with a very wild and high-jumping one that had infiltrated our pantry through a hole left by the plumber--no fun at all.  However, after a few days with Tonks and Bella, I realized how fun they really were.  They were clean, smart, and much easier to take care of than any other pocket-pet we'd ever had.  They slept all night (unlike hamsters,) and they were sweet and gentle and loved to be held (unlike hamsters,) and they were clean and fastidious with their nests.  They quickly became part of our family.

   If my 13-year-old's bedroom door is ever closed, it is because he is holding the rats or has his cockatiel out of her cage and doesn't want the cats to come into his room.  He can be found sitting on his bed playing his guitar or reading a book with his bird sitting on his head and a rat nestled in the crook of his arm.  He keeps their cages in order, and he cleans their bowls and prepares fresh food and water for them every day.  He is diligent and responsible and caring and loving.  For the past two weeks as Remus had started ailing, my son hand fed him with baby food and chunks of melon.  Remus finally quit eating or drinking, and he passed away last night.  My son kept vigil last night, holding Remus and checking on him regularly.  When he came to wake me up at 3:30, he told me he thought Remus had died.  He held him tenderly, and we wrapped him in a blanket and prepared a box for him.

   I have watched my son grow this year from a boy to almost a man as he has shot up in height and his voice has gotten deeper, but he showed his true maturity over these past weeks as he cared for Remus. 



Remus
(aka Harry Remus Potter)
March 2009-June 2011



Hands and Hearts Coupon

Hands & Hearts

   If you missed my post about the Hands and Hearts history kits, you can check it out here.

The coupon code for 15% off any order is "learningtable" (expires at midnight on June 11, 2011.) 

Review: When Sparrows Fall

  Miranda Hanford is trapped in a world of control, abuse, and deceit. She knows she must escape for her own sake and that of her children, but she cannot take that step until her "knight in chinked armor" shows up and teaches her to trust again. Once Jack enters her life, she and her children begin to blossom, and Miranda is able to face the truths that have been hidden away for so long. Miranda's dysfunctional childhood groomed her for marriage to a controlling and emotionally abusive husband, but she is slowly able to discover her own strength and in the end, her knight doesn't really rescue her--she learns how to rescue herself.

  I don't usually have much time for "pleasure reading" because I'm always reading something for school or pre-reading my sons' books, so When Sparrows Fall was a nice change of pace for me. I enjoyed getting caught up in Miranda and Jack's world. As the young widowed mother of six children, Miranda must rely on her estranged brother-in-law for help after she is seriously injured in an accident. Uncle Jack, a college professor, brings much needed fun and spontaneity to Miranda's sheltered household. You will fall in love with her kids as they discover some simple childhood joys for the first time, like playing with bubbles, going to a car wash, and sugary breakfast cereal! One of my favorite scenes in the book is when the kids gravitate toward the book and magazine section in Wal-Mart: "Martha spied the early readers. She dropped his hand and sat on the floor as if she were in a public library and about to commence reading for free, for as long as she pleased." Jack adds some much-needed balance to the lives of Miranda and her children, and he begins to heal from his past as well as he grows to love all of them.

  This debut novel by Meg Moseley, a homeschooling veteran, is written beautifully, and though the characters are somewhat stereotyped and can be exasperating at times, the book makes a nice escape on a hot summer day. You'll want to add it to your tote for reading by the pool. As a homeschooling mom myself, I liked the fact that homeschooling was woven throughout the story as a normal part of life, yet it wasn't the focus of the book.



  

If you'd like to read a sneak-peek, you can download it here.

{Waterbrook Multnomah Publishers has provided me with a complimentary copy of this book for review purposes.}