What’s new around the farm

On Saturday morning, I was scanning blogs and came across a post about making willow baskets. I was completely intrigued. I mentioned to John in conversation that morning that it would be fun to have willows on our property so I could make baskets too. I could picture myself making baskets with the kids.

Later that day, we were wandering by a garden shed at a demonstration farm and John asked a man working nearby what plant was leaning up against the shed.

Those are English willows, the variety people make baskets out of, the man explained. They are grown from cuttings.

When John said that I was interested in willows, the man shared a couple cuttings. There was a whole six hours from reading about willows to when I had the willows in hand. If only all of our ideas worked out this serendipidous-ly!

Now I have to figure out where to plant them. It will be three years until I have enough to make baskets, but it’s nice to know I’m working in that direction.

_______

One experiment we have going this year is cutting our own hay. We don’t have the land to cut all of our hay (or the time with the method we’re using), but we can cut some of our own. We bought two European scythes; one is currently equipped with a grass blade and one with a brush blade.

I had tried scything at a farm demonstration last year and was intrigued with the idea. It fits in with our hand tools and homesteading and zero carbon nights of mowing with the reel mower.

John had never tried the scythe until we purchased one, and he loves it. Scything is work, but it’s a relaxing motion and very satisfying. It’s fun to see the long stems of grass lying cut on the ground. It’s also handy when the lawn gets out of control and too long to cut with the reel mower! Not that this really happened or anything. (wink, wink)

We learned from another goat farmer over the weekend that in Europe historically people cut brush and dried it for their goats to eat over the winter. Goats are browsers so it’s healthier for them and they get more nutrition from eating more than grass hay. So far, although we have mowing grass figured out with the scythe, cutting brush has proved more difficult. It’s a good goal to work on though.

__________

In my quest to beautify our homestead, I’ve been collecting cheap but nice perennials slowly whenever I get the chance. I bought some from a lady in our town. I got a couple early clearance deals at Lowes. I went to a plant exchange and got some more, although some I can’t identify. It’s fun and that’s the most important thing!

Any new farm/homestead/garden things you are trying this year? Any talented farm/homestead layout people that want to share your skills here?

First grade homeschooling plan

Now that Hannah is 6, she told me that she wants to do more school. I have no idea what this means. Both kids love our school time each morning (first thing- before breakfast). I don’t want to do too much and ruin the flow that they love, yet I feel like we could successfully add a bit more to our schedule.

A lot of what we are doing works, so we’ll keep going for now: Bible reading, memory verses, occasional geography, Classical Conversations CD for memory work, learning a few words of French, Rod and Staff or Teach Your Child to Read for reading practice.

I felt great last week to settle on some resources to try. We’ll start some this summer and ease into our new habits, one at a time. There’s no rush! If something doesn’t work, I’m okay with ditching it. I try to buy used and I can usually sell what doesn’t work without too much of a loss. With this many resources, I’m sure to make at least one or two mistakes!

This is our list of resources for first grade. We wouldn’t do everything every day, and once we try these things, we can figure out how often it works to do them.

Miquon Math. This uses cuisinaire rods, which I have (a Montessori material). I am hopeful that I can find activities BenBen can do too, because he wants to be involved. This isn’t a formal math program; it’s math activities.

Telling God’s Story. This is a read aloud about the life of Jesus. There is an activity book too, but we’ll just do the reading.

Handwriting without Tears. Hannah loves writing, so this seems like an easy fit. Several people have told me this book is amazing.

First Language Lessons for the Well-Trained Mind for phonics/grammar.

Writing with Ease for grammar.

Explode the Code phonics workbooks.

The Story of the World, part 2 to continue our history read-aloud.

I already have Prima Latina and I would like to memorize the other two Latin prayers this year.

Watching Salsa, a kids’ TV show in Spanish from public broadcasting.

Eventually we’ll start Math U See for an actual math program. We have a lot already, so we won’t pick this up for awhile.

Of course we’ll enjoy lots of read-aloud books, the core of our homeschooling. I have a list of books, plus I’d like to read Aesop’s fables.

I feel excited that these books will be a great addition to our days. We’ll see if this is what Hannah had in mind when she said she wanted more school!

What has worked or do you plan to do for first grade? Any experience with any of these resources?

Kindergarten wrap up (part 2)

We’ve tried several different curriculums and books this past year, our first year of homeschooling. Of course I do my best to research the options, but some of my purchases haven’t worked the best for us. Some of them were good for the concept and then I decided to ditch the resource. I have a hard time managing lots of resources, so I usually get rid of what we’re not using. When I have too much around, I don’t use anything well.

First, what we like and regularly use:

French flashcards (Hannah picked these, her idea, and she loves them)

Bible time (Jesus Storybook Bible, DK Children’s Illustrated Bible, Children’s Everyday Bible)

The Story of the World, Part 1 (history read-aloud)

geography (GeoPuzzles, Montessori Maps, talk about globe and name countries)

Classical Conversations Cycle 3 (This is memory work on a CD. I don’t require the kids to know anything they listen to, but they have memorized an amazing amount of history and geography from listening.)

Telling time. This isn’t a resource, but we worked on it this year.

Resources we like but don’t use all the time:

Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons (Hannah made it halfway through the book and I realized doing this was always my idea and not hers, so I stopped for now. She likes it and I like it, and I assume we’ll pick it back up again eventually.)

Rod and Staff  Grade 1 grammer (We almost finished the first workbook for this. Again, Hannah and I both liked it, but we decided to take a break for now.)

Kumon math workbooks (We have Addition and Subtraction. Hannah does these on her own initiative.)

Come Look With Me: Enjoying Art With Children; The Art Book for Children (We love both books, especially Come Look With Me. They show a piece of art and have questions for discussion.)

Prima Latina (We just memorized two of the prayers in Latin this year. The weekly lessons are far to advanced for us! My kids like to memorize, so this is right up their alley.)

Five in a Row (With this, you read aloud a selected picture book for 5 days and do related activities. We loved the book selections! I’m not good at doing activities, so mostly we just read the books and talked about them. This is a great resource if you have younger kids because everyone can be involved.)

The core of what we do is read aloud books. The kids love chapter books. They give great history lessons and character lessons and give fodder for imaginary play. We read several of these books multiple times. I’ll star our very favorites!

• Entire Little House series, except The First Four Years *
• Charlotte’s Web *
• Sarah Plain and Tall *
• The Blue Hill Meadows
• In Grandma’s Attic
• Pollyanna
• Mr Popper’s Penguins
• Winnie the Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner *
• The Boxcar Children *
• DK First Book of Fairy Tales
• The Cabin Faced West *
• The Velveteen Rabbit
• Pippi Longstocking
• My Father’s Dragon
• The Family Under the Bridge
• Peter Pan (abridged)
• The Secret Garden (abridged)
• A Little Princess (abridged)
• The Trumpet of the Swan *
• Mrs. Piggle Wiggle’s Farm *
• Hello, Mrs. Piggle Wiggle
• Mrs. Piggle Wiggle
• Five Little Peppers and How They Grew
• The Courage of Sarah Noble *
• Strawberry Girl

That’s it, I think. What have you done or are you planning to do for Kindergarten?

Kindergarten wrap-up (part 1)

Homeschooling this year has looked different than I expected. I started this year with a small list of things to work on. Because what we do does not feel forced, it can feel like we’re not doing anything. That’s not true. But we do less than I thought we would and we do different things than I planned.

Classical education encourages not starting school before age 6; before that point, free play is encouraged. When I think through history (or what I know of it), children have not started school until this point. The Greeks and Romans began school at age 7. Laura Ingalls Wilder was 8 before she started school (and she was a teacher by the time she was 15). We start children early now, but I haven’t seen evidence that this pays off in the long run. That’s my opinion.

As we all know, you can find a convincing article to back up any position you hold. It’s fairly easy to be lax when the kids are not yet “school age”. The pressure is relatively small to do otherwise, child prodigies aside. My kids are little, but Hannah is old enough that people expect that she should be doing certain things.

However, Hannah is content with hours of imaginary play. To do more schoolwork means taking away play time. I know from watching friends’ kids that kids do move away from self-directed play in the near future. Therefore, I feel strongly that we shouldn’t have lessons to go to, deadlines to meet, or worksheets to finish.

The work of a child is play. My kids feed their pretend animals and dress up and play farm and dollhouse and act out stories from books. They live in a world in their heads and feed off of each other’s imaginations.

I have read that kids who don’t play enough as children and are pushed hard early, make up for it later on. They go through bouts of immaturity and irresponsibility and depression later, because they don’t know how to play. We can catch up on academics if we ever felt behind. Kids who learn to read late catch up with their early reading peers quickly. But we can’t get back these hours and days of play.

Of course I’m new at this and in three years, I might tell you how wrong I was, but we have to start somewhere!

I am also learning about myself as a teacher. I don’t set up activities for my kids. We all have our strengths…and that is not mine. We read lots and the kids ask me questions and this I can do. However, I don’t set up craft projects (although the kids have craft supplies and do their own projects) and I don’t set up science experiments or enrichment activities. I cannot do things like this consistently. Curriculums that require this of mothers are not curriculums for me.

We all look forward to the school time we’ve settled on for now, and yes, we’ll continue “school” over the summer. Our routine is easy enough that we don’t need a break. Hooray! Tomorrow, I’ll write about what curriculums/books we have liked and what specifically we’ve worked on.

Look who’s 6!

Hannah celebrated a big birthday last week…6 years old. I think it’s so interesting how kids grow. She actually looks older to me- sometimes it happens overnight.

Of course, she is thrilled to be 6. She told me now that she’s 6, she needs to do more school and she is ready for more responsibility. Love it!

For her birthday, she wanted me to surprise her with activities and then we had a party with a few families that night. I was concerned that her birthday would be a flop because it was a constant conversation for a month leading up to the day. I tried to encourage her not to talk about her birthday so much, but she counted days on the calendar and was fairly well obsessed with it. In the end, she told me it was her best birthday ever. However, I want to do better at not making a big deal of birthdays before the day. Any ideas?

Hannah’s big day included the playground, a homeschool group pond study, burgers cooked by Daddy on the grill, horseback riding with our neighbor, and then a party with 3 families at our house that night. We had fajitas and cake and did pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey and a pinata. I love whole family parties.

As for Hannah’s birthday interview, here were her responses:

How old are you? 6

What do you want to be when you grow up? a librarian and a Mommy

Where would you like to live when you grow up? North Carolina or South Carolina

What is your favorite thing to do? ride horses, go to parties, jump at the Maine Jump or on a trampoline

What is your perfect day? day we went to Canada with her friend Julia

What would you like to learn about? how to teach my kids when I’m a Mommy

Who is your best friend? Julia and Lucy

What is your favorite thing you did this year? Maine Jump, Christmas, birthday

What did you do for your birthday? Pin the tail on the donkey, pinata, pond study, playground, and ride horses

Favorites:

food cake and coffee cake

vegetable green beans and carrots

drink orange juice

animal horses, sheep, fish

book Berenstain Bears, Frog and Toad are Friends

song Home on the Range

color pink and purple

toy dolls

game Guess Who

restaurant Mexican restaurant in Bangor for quesadillas, also pizza restaurant

school activity/subject learning about the human body

holiday Christmas

birthday present suitcase, umbrella

Where would you most like to travel? Canada, Kansas City, California
What are some of your wishes for this year? lose a tooth soon and have fun

Happy birthday, Hannah!

Activity with purpose

The goal of time management is not to do the most activities in the shortest amount of time. I forget that sometimes.

I can get caught up in how much I can add into my routine and how to maximize the moments in my day. However, activity only has meaning if it has a purpose. I could shoot baskets for 30 minutes each morning faithfully for years, but if there is no purpose (for me) in shooting baskets and I don’t care about basketball, what has that done? Shooting baskets could have purpose for getting fit, it could be time spent with another person, it could be fun, but there should be a reason that I do it. Silly example (and no I don’t shoot baskets), but you get the idea.

A few months ago, I realized that my arms needed to be strong for summer, so I did pushups every day. I have continued doing pushups every day since that time. I realized though, that doing pushups every day no longer fits. My goal is being able to enjoy activities because I am fit enough to enjoy them. Now, I am using my arms to play tennis and mow the lawn and I’ll be swimming soon. Discipline for the sake of discipline doesn’t get me anywhere. It’s just cluttering my calendar and robbing energy that could be better spent elsewhere.

Another habit I gave up recently was doing situps. They had seemed necessary for a time after having babies, but then I realized they were just a habit and since I’m getting other exercise, it’s not a needed one.

The purpose of exercise to me is twofold: enjoyment and being fit (not being fast). Running is time to myself and something I enjoy and it keeps me healthy. Yoga keeps my body healthy for running. Are other exercise-like activities (pilates, pushups, squats) necessary for me? If it doesn’t match up with what I value, it’s not something I should spend my time on.

Taking away extra routines makes my days simpler. If I cut out the clutter of activities that don’t matter to me, I have more space to dream and do the things that do matter.

There is no badge for the person who gets the most done each day. I don’t want to always be racing to get things done. I don’t want a cumbersome to-do list. I do want to feel like I’m moving forward on my goals.

One of my priorities is taking care of my home, but I can determine my cleaning priorities. Sure, I should sometimes clean other areas, but if those areas being dirty doesn’t bother me, I don’t have to do it all the time. My priorities are the dishes being done, the kitchen counters clean, sweeping the kitchen and living room, the living room picked up, and that my house is not clutter-y. If there is two weeks of caked on food on the floor under the kitchen table, it doesn’t bother me. If I have laundry not done, that doesn’t bother me. A pile of magazines bothers me more. No one else can tell me what my house should look like. Goodbye guilt.

Figuring out our priorities gives freedom, because it helps us to let go of the things we are not striving for. My goal with this blog is to write a few times each week because I enjoy it, I want to improve my writing, and it’s healthy for me. Because my priority is not having a certain number of readers, I can let go of a lot of blog related tasks.

Another priority is feeding my family good food. That doesn’t mean elaborate meals, but it does mean preparing food. It means lots of time in the summer when I put up fruits and veggies. That time is in line with my priorities and it helps me to feel good spending it.

We are a reflection of how we spend our time. Our time shows what matters to us, whether or not the likeness is positive. It takes time to think through priorities, but it’s time well-spent because we can clear out activity clutter.

Have you recently cleared something out of your schedule that you realized wasn’t necessary to you? Have you ever thought through your cleaning priorities- what did you come up with?

How did food get so complicated?

Hannah, of late, has become interested in money and buying things. She has money from birthdays and bottle recycling she picks up and various sources, but until now, she’s been content to hold onto it. She has never talked about buying anything or asked how much things cost.

Last week, at the grocery store, she told me she’d brought her wallet and she was interested in buying some food, like cheese or butter. I told her we should price things and then she could make a thoughtful decision about what she wanted to buy. She liked that idea. We made up a little price list (with pictures) of various grocery store items she was interested in, like cheese, butter, milk, and apples. It was fun. We weighed produce. We sat in front of the dairy case for ages until the owner came over and asked if we were looking for something.

We discussed sales and how some items go on sale so regularly that if you stock up in those times, you never have to pay the full price. We talked about coupons, although there are rarely coupons for these things (sometimes cheese). Of course then we had to discuss various brands and kinds of everything and how different ones cost different amounts. On some things I might buy the cheapest option, but other times, I buy a certain brand for a certain reason and how on milk, for instance, we are buying the most expensive option.

And I thought, how did this get so complicated? How do I explain no hormones or antibiotics in dairy? Conventional vs organic? How some companies support the farmers better?

I didn’t even get into buying things from various sources, like farms I buy from directly, a regional buying club, the two grocery stores and a health food store. I always get certain things from certain sources. This is the small grocery store in our town that I only ever buy 15 different items from and I still can’t explain in a good way why I buy what I buy. This should not be!

I am always learning more and refining what I buy and talking through all of this made me realize how much there is to learn. I do not buy perfectly, but until I was explaining it to Hannah, I had no idea of how much there was to be conscious of. Most of these buying practices become a habit and then I don’t think about them anymore- it’s just what I buy.

Hannah was a good sport to listen to me spout off about all of these aspects to food, but I could tell she was confused as to why I don’t just buy any apple and why I don’t buy the meat at the store. It wasn’t what she expected. I feel frustrated sometimes at the poor options we are given to buy at some stores, but talking with her, I realized that it is just all too confusing.

Everyone isn’t up on the lingo of free range and grass fed and natural. Everyone isn’t going to understand how the pork and chicken are produced. Companies delight in this; they love to make new products that appeal to some niche, whether or not it’s valid or even good for you. I was shocked to realize last week that artificial sweeteners are still sold in packets (I thought those had gone away- I must be out of touch!). I read just this month about a “new” beef coming out produced by cows that eat flax in their rations (another new product with different labeling- higher in Omega 3′s!). No wonder people get confused.

Yet, this is an important conversation to have. Our buying habits do have an impact on our world.

It’s amazing to realize that 100 years ago, milk was milk. Eggs were eggs. Butter was butter. Chicken was just chicken. How ever did we get to this crazy food system?!

And no, Hannah didn’t buy anything (yet). I think her head was spinning from all my talking!

Can anyone else relate? Have you had this conversation (or tried to) with your kids?