Family Hikes. They are still one of my favorite things to do on a nice Saturday. Sometimes it's crazy trying to pick a location that is suitable for our family, pack up the kids, prepare the water and snacks, and finally get on our way. There's always some confusion and often a few squabbles. But once we get outside and we are enjoying the beauty of God's great earth, it's always worth it.
I've learned not to hike in the summer, here in NC. We tried to hike Pilot Mnt. when I was 4 months pregnant in 90 degree weather with a toddler in a stroller. That was not fun! But hiking here in the "off season" is pretty nice. I'll admit that I miss the tall green cedars and the rushing of cool clear water over mossy green boulders; the crowded fiddle heads, spongy mosses and dappled sunshine. Hiking in the Pacific Northwest has totally spoiled me. Nothing here will ever compare with it.
Still...we are always impressed with the beauty of this area when we come upon it. I give you: Our December '18 Raven Rock hike.
The kids and I have been learning lots of fun things as we explored the biomes science unit from Moving Beyond The Page.
We learned lots about grasslands, deserts, forests, tundra and wetlands. I learned something new about the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, niches and ecosystems. It also gave a good chance to discuss the issues and political hype around climate change and global warming.
My favorite project from this unit was making a wetland model. We used homemade playdough for the land and a slice of florists foam for the spongy wetland. I don't think our model accurately reflected how wetlands filter and clean water for us, but it was really fun to do anyway. My husband had the day off and was able to join us in this project. It's always fun to have his artistic abilities around when these projects come up. I am no artist, that's for sure.
So...here's our wetland model. Yikes
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The sticks and pine needles gave it a bit more of an authentic feel. We did our best to include lily pads, frogs, fish, snakes, salamanders, beavers and a beaver dam, spider, spider web, and birds. See if you can pick out all those elements. :)
We took the test orally together as a way to summarize the knowledge we had gained. And today we finished up the unit by going to the NC museum of natural history where they have some amazing displays of local NC biomes. We also took a look at some other neat displays, like the dinosaurs. Roar.
Good way to spend a gray, drizzly December day over the holiday break.
It's been a wonderful year full of many blessings. This message helps me remember that Christ has always been there for me both in good years, and not-so-good years. May your Christmas be merry and bright.
We took a break from our regular art club happenings to do a little Christmas celebrating. Decorating gingerbread ornaments and then making "gingerbread" houses out of graham crackers which we decorated with leftover Halloween candy that I've had stashed away the last couple moths. It's always so fun to see the kids' creativity!
During the holiday season more of us are aware of the need for volunteer work and we feel that special desire to get out and do some good! It must be that Christmas spirit! I especially look forward to teaching my children about the value of service this time of year. Learning to love and serve are an important part of any moral education.
The difficulty for our family has always been that most places do not allow children to volunteer. This year we have been especially fortunate to find two local service opportunities that welcome and accommodate children.
1) Helping Hands. Earlier this year my husband and older children were very much involved with hurricane crisis cleanup after Hurricanes Florence and Michael came through our area. They traveled to other cities where the storms hit especially hard. I did not go, sadly. I was the backup crew holding down the fort with the younger children behind the scenes so that others could go out and serve. But we all play a part in making it happen, right? Helping Hands snaps into action in these situations. We sent crews for many consecutive weekends to help those affected by the storms. Here are a few pics of these guys doing their thang. Way to go fam!
2) Meals on Wheels. In partnership with another local charity, Meals on Wheels asked for volunteer drivers to deliver hot meals to housebound or elderly residents on Thanksgiving Day. What a great way to show gratitude (and get out of the kitchen)! We drove by the pickup point to gather our 14 meals and our driving route before setting off for our first destination. At each stop our entire family exited the car (party of eight, sir) and knocked on the door together to make the deliveries. Some of the residents were not interested in welcoming in eight strangers on Thanksgiving Day. They simply took the meal and said goodbye. That's fine. But there were a few residents who really were glad to see all of us and let us come in to chat. This was a great way for our family to connect with the wisdom and love of an older generation. It did tend to go long for the kids by the end of our 8th stop. But it was worth it. I WISH I had pictures.
3) Brown Bag Ministries. This place is so fantastic. Just show up and serve! It's local. So unless you're in the Raleigh NC area this won't help you much. But I'm sure there are other charities out there just like it if you do some digging. They do a number of things but on the Saturday morning we attended, they were preparing hundreds and hundreds of sack lunches for homeless individuals, as well as a hot meal. Our family helped assemble and bag the sandwiches. We also helped count out socks, scarves, and toiletries for the Christmas bags that would find their way into the hands of men at a homeless shelter.
It was great to feel part of something important and useful that would have a direct positive impact on our local community. And it was fun! We even saw some of our friends from church there in the crowd of volunteers. :)
If none of these ideas seem to be a good fit for you or your family, you can check out these other resources to find just the right volunteer opportunity: Just Serve and United Way.
It's so much fun to serve as a family. Even if you don't join up with a formal organization as part of a project, your own family can find a way to serve together. For example, we always like to put together a Christmas gift box with food and presents for a less fortunate family in our area. We dress up in ski masks late at night and deliver the box as secretly and stealthily as we can! We never reveal the family's identity to our children. So many fun Christmas Eve memories doing this with our young kids!
And here's another random thing: Our neighbor's tree feel down just a couple weekends ago when we got a few inches of snow. Weird. But it happened. This neighbor is elderly and is not often in her home, as she spends most of her time with family in VA. I loved getting out there during nap time to saw off branches and sweep up leaves. My husband did the heavy work with the chainsaw, and another neighbor took care of burning up the many branches. My daughter used some of the boughs (it was a beautiful cedar tree) to make a Christmas wreath for her as well. She returned the favor by letting us use the trunk to make benches for our fire pit. Win-win!
There are always things we can do together to serve those around us, and in the process we create many wonderful family memories.
More experimenting! It's so fun. I love that I'm finding time to try these simple projects. It gives me just a little sense of self indulgence.
So, I tried another one of Christa's great videos on how to make apple cider vinegar. Here's what mine looked like when I first put it together. Pretty, right?
My problem was that I didn't have a weight that would reach through the neck of the jar and keep all the apples submerged. I put a smaller glass jar down inside the neck of the large jar. This is how it turned out. I still had a few apples popping up. Not sure how that will affect final product.
Eventually, I figured out that I could do was take two different lids off of yogurt and cottage cheese containers and bend them until they fit down inside the jar, then put the small jar on top of those and push down a bit. That helped but didn't totally solve my problem.
Update, this is how it looks after about 10 days.
It's definitely bubbly and smells exactly like cider vinegar. And it's way easier to keep the apples submerged now.
First, a confession. Not a confession. A telling. My son has been attending public school for the last three months. I'm not sure why I didn't feel good about saying that before? Something maybe had me feeling a bit like a failure. Or a fake (ya know, cause my blog says that this is mostly about homeschool). There were multiple reasons for having him try out public school this year. I didn't want to send him. He didn't want to go. But we felt like it was necessary to help him understand the privilege it is to be homeschooled. Nuff said about that.
Anyway, he never liked it. I never liked it. It was less than ideal in every way possible. Finally, there was a "last straw" about a week and a half ago. We both felt like we'd have enough of the nonsense and the two of us came to an agreement about ending our experiment with public school and making a fresh start with homeschool. So I left him in just long enough to participate in the band concert (his first EVER!) and pulled him out of school the very next day. As we were leaving the school in the pouring rain he said to me with an absolute flat tone, "I'm so glad this is my last day. I HATE this place." I had mixed feelings about his statement. I was glad, of course, that my goal had been achieved: My son had seen for himself teh stark difference between public and homeschool. He had gained an appreciation for the pleasures and joys of homescool and the time and sacrifice required of me to make it happen. WIN FOR MOM! Of course, I didn't say that out loud. I'm sure the message was already lout and clear. But, then I stopped to think about all the kids at that school who probably feel exactly the same way. They don't have the option to school somewhere else. And they should. This left me feeling very sad.
I will say that trying band was the best part of our public school experience. I'm so glad he was "forced" into that and that he's found a new interest, maybe even a talent. He's agreed to carry on with trumpet as part of his homeschool, which makes me super happy. But we are even happier to have him start back into homeschool with us tomorrow!! :)
As I continue rediscovering things that I enjoy doing, I find that youtube takes me down many rabbit trails. They know me all too well by now, which feels creepy. But they do make good suggestions as far as the next video they know I'll love.
That's how I came across this fabulous lady at prepsteaders I've watched several of her videos now and each one has inspired me to do a new project at home.
First, Krista inspired us to make candied ginger. I've never liked candied fruits to be honest. They taste old, fake, dry, way to sweet and nothing like fruit at all. But Krista is so convincing in her videos! I decided to give it a try.
Our project turned out so well that we decided to make LOTS of this stuff and give it out as our neighbor gifts for Christmas this year.
That bag has about 50 grams of product in it. I had used one large root with lots of branches (from Walmart) for our first test batch. It made enough to nearly fill this jar below. But my family ate most of it before I could put it in gift bags! This is all that was left before I could make one little gift bag out of it.
I suspect that it would have been enough to fill 4-5 bags had it been left alone. oh well.
So then I went to a different, fancier grocery store and bought pretty much all of their ginger. It was a lot! Not sure exactly how much. Surprisingly, I found this second bunch of ginger to be of lower quality. It was not as big and round, it was stringer, and the color was more grey instead of bright white. Anyway, I think it turned out fine but peeling it took a lot longer.
I got another 12 bags of candied ginger from this second batch. UG. I'm going to have to make probably 3-4 more batches to get as many as I need. Which is fine. It's not hard. It just takes time. And ginger isn't that expensive. It's pretty affordable. It does take quite a bit of sugar. But lucky for me I got a big 50 lb bag of organic sugar not long ago from the bulk buy that I participate in and so i feel ok about using it up for this project. I also find that I can reuse some of the sugar that gets crusty and sticks to the pan. I just scrap it into a jar, break it up a bit and reuse it. Same for the syrup. I kept the syrup from the first batch and reused it in the second batch so that it took a lot less sugar to get a nice syrup going.
So here's the video I watched with my girls.
TIP: I found that some of our ginger was still a big moist the next morning. So I turned on my oven and let it warm up to the lowest setting. Then I turned OFF the oven and stuck the tray of ginger inside for 20-30 mins. They came out much drier! So if your ginger isn't totally dry in the morning you can try drying them out in a warm oven. It does also help to have very thin slices as suggested in the video.
Also, I tried adding some candied ginger to my herbal tea as suggested in the video, and found that while it DID sweeten my tea nicely, I couldn't really taste the ginger much. However, eating one of these is for sure a real treat. They are delicious and have just the right amount of kick.
Now, what to do with all the ginger water I've got??? I've got 3 quarts saved so far and some I just threw out because it's getting overwhelming. It's SUPER potent stuff.
UPDATE: Kay, so our first two batches went really well, but I still needed more bags to hand out as gifts. So I went to the store for the mother load. I brought home four pounds of ginger root! Yikes. The cashier was looking at me funny. So my girls and I spent a good long while preparing the ginger and boiling it the three different times. I put it in for a final boil and left it at a low simmer with my husband to watch over it. My older girls and I had been invited to a cookie exchange and off we went. When I came back the house had a charred smell and our ginger was a total loss :( This is now the status of our last ginger candy batch:
Two posts in one night? Sure! I've got lots to say I guess.
One of our Science Olympiad friends has had illness at her house of late so we had to do some studying on our own this week. We had fun creating a set of data, graphing it, and interpreting it. Let me share our little experiment with you that we used as a way to collect data points.
Maybe you've heard of this one.
Using a pipette we counted how many drops of water different coins could hold before teh water tension broke and leaked onto the table.
Our hypothesis was that the quarter would hold the most drops of water compared to a dime, nickel or penny. It's the biggest with the most surface area, right?
That was not what we found. We found that the nickel actually held the most water. This confused us. We tested the quarter three times total and the nickel twice. We got the same result (nickel holds more) each time. Maybe the smoother surface or different edge has something to do with it. ??
Anyway, so then we made a line graph, bar graph, and pictograph with our data.
From there we had a discussion about outliers using these videos as reference:
That one (above) gets a little technical but is helpful on some level. (We also used his set of data to discuss mode)
Here's another video that brings it down a notch for elementary school students.
I think this next one was actually the most helpful. There's a lot of information here. We stopped the video multiple times to go over various concepts.
The girls are also going to need to know something about accuracy and precision. I certainly don't remember learning this stuff as a kid! I'm glad that they are getting a head start on something that most people might consider to be a "tough" subject: Statistics. Maybe it won't seem scary to them when they get to higher levels of math because they'l remember having fun with it as kids. ?? hopefully, right?
This article helped a lot to get our feet when on this topic.
Family Hikes. They are still one of my favorite things to do on a nice Saturday. Sometimes it's crazy trying to pick a location that is suitable for our family, pack up the kids, prepare the water and snacks, and finally get on our way. There's always some confusion and often a few squabbles. But once we get outside and we are enjoying the beauty of God's great earth, it's always worth it.
