martinzoo

Last Friday we FINALLY finished our New World Explorers unit. I know, it took us forever. And you are probably royally sick of reading about it. We really had fun with it, though. And my Explorer wall was very high impact. Family members would come over for haircuts and have to peek at the wall to see what was new.

The end of the unit mostly detailed pirates. What a good way to end the unit. I think all little boys are fascinated with pirates, and mine is no exception. We made some coin booty out of cardboard, glue and paint. And then we used the booty in board game that we made.

After cutting the two sizes of coins, we drew coin designs on them with glue. Then we let it dry and painted the smaller coins gold. They were the Doubloons. Then we painted the larger coins silver. They were Pieces of Eight. When we were done, we cut the coins to represent different coin amounts. When cut into pieces, Doubloons became Escudos, and Pieces of Eight became Reale. Rather than create many different coins for differing amounts, like we do now, they would just cut the coins into pieces to make change. Smart, I guess. As long as the coins are soft enough.

Our board game was really simple. You chose a character, either the Captain, the Pirate, the Sailor, or the Cook. Each character has a list of items they need to collect. You roll the die and move around the board, landing on items. If your character needs the item you land on, you buy it with your coins. The first person to obtain all items on their list is the winner. GB won the first game. It took us quite a while to become comfortable enough with making the change. So the beginning of the game was a lengthy learning process. But it was fun enough that we’ve played it several times now, and even brought it to the swim meet on Saturday.

Our next unit is exciting! We will be moving into the Colonial Period of American History. I went ahead and bought the cd from Homeschool in the Woods. And I plan to supplement that with Kris‘ fabulous book, Great Colonial American Projects You Can Build Yourself.

Our last unit, the Explorer unit, was supposed to take us 5 weeks, and ended up taking more like 10.  I want to take a little breather and get a bit ahead in our curriculum. Then when GB is losing wind from the traditional stuff, I’ll whirl in and get him started on this. Gotta keep him on his toes. Well, he always walks on his toes anyway, but that’s another subject….LOL! Anyway, who knows how long we’ll spend on this one. I like taking my time and really delving into these units. This, for us, is the funnest part of homeschooling. No wait, the field trips are the funnest, and we should be able to do a lot for this unit, here in good ole Virginia. But units are definitely the second funnest.

Autumn is one of our spelling words this week. So even though I usually refer to the season as ‘Fall,’ today I will use Autumn. It sounds much more formal, don’t you think? Maybe a tad stuffy? Autumn…. Fall….. yeah, I like Fall better. It suits me better. But every now and then I’ll just pop out with an ‘Autumn.’

So after a really nice, soaking rain last week, we finally have some decent signs of Autumn. It took so long for some color to appear in the leaves this year, that I was on the verge of believing that we were just going to skip color and go straight to freeze. I am NOT ready for cold weather yet!

So this is what we see in our yard:

Since my best blogging buddy, Dana, doesn’t really get an Autumn foliage, I especially wanted her to see these pictures.

Enjoy!

Rain….

We needed rain.

Our local lake was down eight feet and losing an inch per day.

Thursday the prayers were answered. We were blessed with an astounding 3.54 recorded inches of rain. Some localities, like ours, got more. I wish GB and I had had the forethought to make a rain gauge and put it out to check our area. But we were so thankful for some rain. Even the fall foliage suffered. It wasn’t nearly as beautiful as it has been.

This was 10:00 a.m. Thursday morning.

12:00 noon

12:15 ~ Prayers answered!

Rushing water from the gutters…. ain’t it grand?!

Yesterday we went to the Chesterfield Berry Farm to pick out some pumpkins with our homeschooling friends. This was our second attempt. Even though Virginia is in a severe drought, we actually got rained out last Friday. And what a puny, mistimed rain it was. It only lasted one hour. Just long enough to mess up our field trip….

But not long enough to do any good for our drought conditions. Today we have rain in the forecast. A real rain. It’s supposed to last four days and provide us with *inches* of rain. Here’s hoping!

The drought did not diminish the quantity or quality of pumpkins, though. We had a spectacular selection. Everyone was quite happy with their pumpkins. And the children had fun running amongst the rows of bright, orange fruit.

GB has decided that his pumpkin is too perfect to carve. So we will only be carving mine. We have decided on a wolf howling at the moon for our pumpkin theme. I hope I can do it well enough to pass the GB inspection.

He is in charge of scooping out the guts and separating the seeds. We will be using the seeds in an estimating activity and then an eating activity. I also thought we would try growing mold under several different types of conditions.

The driver from our hayride must have eaten his Wheaties, because he was in a great mood with lots of energy. Enough energy that he offered to let ALL the children have a sit on the top of his tractor. As you can see here, GB was thrilled at the great height of the seat.

The corn pit provided a solid hour’s worth of entertainment. These children were fascinated by a huge bin with a two foot depth of dried corn. For some reason GB thought it would be a good idea to give it a taste. Don’t worry, I’m sure he’ll be fine. Yeah, I know, it’s kinda gross, but not to a kid. And really, it was too late to do anything about it. So I’ll just let that go… Ok? The kids thought it was hilarious to tuck in their shirts and then fill them up with corn, making them all look like pregnant women and guys with beer guts. Quite funny!!

This is the corn cannon. You take a dried ear of corn, load it into the barrel, prime the cannon with air, and let ‘er rip! We watched several people, including one arrogant dad, try and miss the targets over, and over. Out of five shots, GB hit two, earning him the respect of the employee in charge. GB wouldn’t listen to advice on how to aim the cannon. The arrogant dad and the employee both told him to aim high, but he decided to shoot straight on, and was pretty successful. My ears were ringing when we left. The cannon was really loud.

This is a train that the Berry Farm created out of hay bales. Isn’t is cool?

GB really wanted to go through the corn maze. But I have an unnatural fear of being lost. It probably borders on being a phobia. And this maze encompassed EIGHT acres of corn. I had visions of being lost in it for hours! Plus, it cost $7.00 each to give it a try. So we did not do it. I admire the skill involved in creating it, but I do not want to partake. I’m sorry, call me a party pooper.

Virginia is celebrating 400 years. So I thought the maze was beautifully appropriate. Isn’t it cool what they can do from the ground…. And then look like this from the sky?