If one word described this week, it would be "outside"! We are participating in a program called 1000 Hours Outside. The premise is that an average child spends 1000 hours watching screens every year, and you are challenged to spend an equal amount of time outside! We managed to add over 10 hours outside to our chart this week!
First up, Avery decided to spend his allowance on a chicken! First he bought one silkie (will be a tiny, fluffy chicken when full grown), but it was trampled by the 75 cornish birds we picked up the same day (chickens which will be meat in 8-10 weeks), and he rescued his chicken and put it in the house in a box. Fluffles, is the silkies name (we wont know gender under it is full grown too, most chickens sold at feed stores are for egg laying and are pre-sexed as hens, however smaller breeds sold for 4-h and breeding do not come pre-sexed and could be either a hen or a rooster), Fluffles peeped LOUDLY all night long, as it was missing it's fellow chick friends from the feed store. So Avery asked to go back the next day and he bought a second chick, a bantam this time (tiny, non fluffy chicken, also un-sexed), and named it Phantom. Now Phamton the Bantam, and Fluffles the Silkie, are super happy together in their little box and Avery has been caring so sweetly for them.
Michael has one week left of Lego League!!! He has a lot of coding to finish up, but is working hard at it! Sounds like their team wont be finished enough to compete, but boy has he learned a lot from participating this year. He can load zoom and conduct video meetings on his own. He has learned a lot about coding and function of lego robotics. He has done almost all of it independently, as I have had to work on days he has his zoom meeting.
Wednesday was St Patricks Day!!! I completely forgot about it, but it was babysitter day and Donna to the rescue! They had a video on Irish legends which turned out to be a terrible story board style video of horrible animation, ha ha. But they made shamrock pictures, talked about Ireland, and played a lot!
Co-op visited a new to us wetlands and we looked for early blooming flowers and birds. Then we journaled our findings. Avery drew Steve from Minecraft. It is not often they all three follow the plan every day...haha. I was TIRED that day, and although we left before anyone else, and when I ran out of patience, we still managed two hours in the rain at the wetlands.
One evening this week we spent in front of the fire pit, roasting sausages, snuggling Meowz the over-friendly barn cat, and burning sticks and whatever else the boys found on the ground.
Our second co-op day was at our house! We toured the farm animals, the kids played bay-blades, and we planted peas in the rainbow stick tent behind the kiddos! We talked about compost and how peas grow, and how we will all be able to eat snap peas soon!
The boys have been asking to go fishing for years. Some years we manage to be in the right place at the right time to fish on the free weekend, but I finally got ducks in a row and bought a fishing license. Two boys bought fishing poles for their very own, and we scraped together 20+ year old poles, lures, and reels that John had for me and the third kid. Another couple hours outside enjoying the beautiful lake near our home, drinking chai tea to keep awake (me) and hot cocoa to keep warm (them). We didn't have any bites (yay, didn't have to figure out how to gut and cook something I am deathly allergic too...yet), and boys want to go again soon.
Our next science box came this week! It is all about electricity! A cool conductive tube makes noise when you complete the circuit. The first few experiments had us trying several types of items to see what materials are conductive and what are insulating. The second project was looping tin foil through cups of water to see how water is conductive. Another tube was full of styrofoam bean bag balls and had a collection of static electricity projects we have yet to complete yet.
Hope you have a fantastic week!
The Dillman's
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