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Instead of displaying GB’s work from the Colonial Unit in a lapbook, we have been displaying it for friends and family on an empty wall near GB’s bedroom. It works out well because everybody has to go by the wall in order for me to cut their hair. Here is a picture of how it is looking:

From the top left side, going clockwise, we have the wampum necklace, then his rope bed and straw mattress. Then we have the woven blanket, his colonial cookbook, the box he stenciled, the ‘Bees’ fan, a sheet on colonial archaeological finds, the homemade candles, his pine needle sachet, pictures from the wattle and daub house, the tarred and feathered loyalist, things you’d find in a colonial barn, his colonial pop-up houses, John Smith’s life, crops from a plantation, a map of the thirteen colonies.

And in the center, at the bottom, you’ll see our latest addition to the wall; GB’s silouhette. I love this! When I was a kid my grandparents had some of these on display of my dad and his sister from when they were small. So I enjoyed making this one of GB. It brought back nice memories.

This was a fun game that GB and I enjoyed today.

Basically, you print off identical BINGO cards that have large numbers printed in the squares. These numbers have been rounded. We were rounding to the nearest thousand, but you can go as high or as low as you want.

Then on strips of paper, which you place (folded) into a small bowl, you have the un-rounded numbers.

Each player alternately takes a piece of paper from the bowl, rounds the number on it (ex. 33,565), then finds the rounded number on the BINGO card (ex. 34,000). Then you mark your card and put the folded strip of paper BACK into the bowl. The first player to blackout the entire card is the winner.

It seems like it would be a quick game, but we kept getting repeat papers, which is ok because that’s just more practice. This game, as is, was too easy for GB, but it was on the Time4Learning website that we are previewing, and he wanted to play it.

And don’t you think the markers are just gorgeous! I borrowed them from Jabem. He used to use them for his Magic tournaments. Thank you Jabem, hope you don’t mind…

GB and I did not intend to skip ahead in the challenges. But we got kind of carried away today with an investigation. We started the day by going to our neighborhood pond. We were looking for tadpoles because we raised tadpoles to toads last year and it was so interesting that we want to do it again.

So we traversed our way around some of the perimeter of the pond looking for tadpoles or even some eggs. GB used his new dipping techniques that he learned in our nature classes.

He even checked the gutters that feed into the pond. No luck…. We’ll keep looking though.

We did find this cool looking thing hanging on a tree. So we snipped off a little branch and brought it home for further investigation. There must have been about 20-30 of these things.

We also found some seed pods. These are from a maple tree. GB decided to plant them because he likes maple trees.

This is what they look like under our stereo microscope at 10X magnification. You can see all those little lung bombs pollen bits along the stems in in the cracks and crevices.

Next we decided to look at this pretty little thing. From our field guide, we were able to identify the tree as being a white oak tree. You can see a bit of the leaf on the plate of the microscope.

I thought this was just stunning! This was at 30X magnification. And it really looked like fiber-optic glass; especially with the light shining through it.

This was at 10X magnification.

We thought it was so cool and pretty that we wanted to figure out what it was. So we looked through the Handbook of Nature Study and decided that maybe it was the beginning of an acorn. I mean, who knows what an acorn looks like in the very beginning. I’m sure lots of people do, but this was our thought process at the time.

So then we looked on the internet because we wanted to see a color picture to match up to our pictures. But we couldn’t find anything in Google using “oak+tree+acorn+female+flower” But when I switched to ‘images’ I found several that portrayed ‘galls.’

So that was our next path on the investigation. We started looking for ‘oak tree galls’ and found lots of them. Oak trees get lots of galls. We finally found out that this is a wool-sower gall. Here is what else we found out:

Wool-sower Gall - a fuzzy ball about an inch in diameter found on a White Oak twig. If you split the gall open you find seedlike items. Wool-sower Galls are fairly common in some parts of the country. The gall is made by a Cynipid Wasp, Callirhytis seminator. Cynipid Wasps, members of the Family Cynipidae, are 4-6 mm long (0.16- 0.24 inch), so they are much smaller than the wasps you see buzzing around gardens and house eaves. They are black and shiny with roundish abdomens and thoraxes, with a sort of hump on the back. Lots of gall-making wasps are found in this family. Some species live in galls made by other organisms!

Well, that was really interesting! So we thought, “What happens if we decide to dissect this sucker?” We wanted to see if we would see any of these wasp larva. So…………

Don’t worry……… we were careful……… I’m not sure that Pampered Chef products were ever intended to be used in precisely this way though…..

This is the gall split open. You can see the tiny little parts that look like seeds.

GB wanted to look first. We went outside to dissect the gall because I was worried that some strange flying wasps might fly out at us when we punctured the gall……..even thought I knew they would be babies of sorts. Wasps are wasps…… that was my fear. But they didn’t. It looked pretty harmless……. so we ventured on with our investigation.

This is the inside of the gall. You can see the little seed-like pods near the twig.

And this was at 30X magnification.

Funny thing……… When I was peering through the lens of the microscope, I thought I detected movement. So I wiggled the gall around a bit and changed the focus. And I DID see movement. It was a tiny little wasp larva! So I put my camera up to the lens of the microscope and got this video:

This is him, all grown up.

Cool, huh? I’ll tell you what, that Pampered Chef stuff got a thorough cleaning! And NONE of the gall material made it back inside the house.

These are my in-laws. This photo was taken 55 years ago today.

It’s an amazing thing to have a marriage last 55 years.

Congratulations, Grandma and Granddaddy!