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A Closer Look at Birds
As the weather cools and the world gets buried in white winter, we begin to set up our patio bird feeders and wait for them to be discovered. Living in Eastern Canada, we tend to see blue jays, cardinals, chickadees, nuthatches, grey jays, mourning doves and pileated, downy and hairy woodpeckers. With these new visitors beginning to come by each day, a study of birds was definitely in order! Miss 7 noticed as the leaves fell off the trees in the fall, the birds’ abandon nests were more visible, we…
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A Closer Look at Pigs
This week with “The Playful Pioneers” curriculum we studied PIGS…swine, sows and hogs. We first sketched a picture of a pig and labelled all her parts with the help of “Farm Anatomy” by Julia Rothman. Of course, the girls had a good chuckle about the word “rump”. We mixed whip cream and cocoa to make a nice muddy mess for our pigs to play in. The girls would get the pigs completely covered and then run to wash them off and repeat the process over and over. …
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A Closer Look at Sheep
After reading about Almanzo’s day sheep shearing in “Farmer Boy” by Laura Ingalls Wilder ( “The Playful Pioneers” curriculum), we were inspired. We used “Farm Anatomy” by Julia Rothman to learn all about the different parts of a sheep and the various ways in which they are sheared. The girls had a mini-hands-on experience with this with the help of our Playmobil sheep set and a little bit of cotton wool. I simply wrapped the sheep with the wool and they pretended to “shear” it off…we then washed the “wool” and…
