History - Day Four

I had decided not to bother writing with quills but this morning Jacob reminded me that we picked up seagull feathers when we were skiving on the beach on Thursday, so here we are.  I found these quill cutting instructions quite clear although very fiddley, the feathers are quite brittle and difficult to cut without them cracking (I really couldn't be doing with the soaking them overnight them heating them in hot sand bit) but there was no one around so I could use some expletives under my breath and that always helps.  Here are the resulting pens.

I  mixed washable paint with water to thin it out a bit instead of ink which is probably not very effective but both the kids managed ok and it will be much easier to clean up.

I had a go too and realized how glad I am that biros were invented, my current scratty handwriting is impossible with a badly cut quill and the idea of having to write shopping and to do lists in calligraphy is very scary.

History - Day Three

This afternoon has been play like a Victorian afternoon, it was supposed to last all day but I was not organized enough and had to go out for groceries this morning, as Victorian transport was not an option and it's too far to walk into Grand Bend, we drove and the morning was cancelled.

So, to this afternoon, I haven't been very strict with the Victorian thing (as you will see from the pics), I just wanted to give the kids a general sense of playing with their imagination without recourse to TVs, iPads, DS games etc.  Here's my list of activities they could choose from

• Make your own paper dolls
• Make spinning tops
• Play marbles
• Make a zoetrope
• Draw on slates
• Play outside
• Read

The paper dolls went down very well, Rose enjoyed colouring them in and playing with them, they have been named Sophie and Amy and have a number of dresses.  They are currently residing on the window sill in the sun room with an array of clothes and accessories..

Jacob thought spinning tops were boring and these days he really has no patience for anything that he is not riveted by.  He liked the zoetrope though (some v clever person has produced a pdf so you can just print one out and put it together, it takes a while but works pretty well) and made his own film strip of a dog jumping over something.

Marbles went down really well and they played that together and separately for nearly as long as the marshmallow poppers at the end of food week.  I found the research interesting as I had no idea that there are rules for marbles and I came across this  interesting snippet: getting your marble ready to flick with one knuckle touching the floor is called 'knuckling down'.  I have filed that one away for 'wowing' someone with at a later date, probably over a pint or two.

They also drew on slates (bizarrely we have two in the house), played outside and read books and Jacob managed to get through until dinner time, Rose watched TV while I made dinner which brings me to comment that keeping children busy without screens is very tiring and time consuming, although they seem to manage just fine on the beach.

I also made Rose a handkerchief doll but she was not impressed, she said she already has proper dolls and if I put this one in the doll house she will throw it out.  It will end up a poor foundling in the gutter, still, I suppose that's very Victorian.

History - Day Two

And not Day Three...

Today there has been a distinct lack of history and I have to admit that it is entirely my fault.  We went to the beach this afternoon with the intention of building a basin irrigation system, I even took my camera so we could download photos at a later date, but I left the buckets and spades in the garage - Oops - and didn't fancy scratching it out with my bare hands.

Yesterday was a little more successful, we had our trip to Lambton Heritage Museum ,I combined it with a free puppet show, a playground with some friends, a picnic and ice cream so I expect that the children have already completely forgotten the museum bit.

I think the people at the museum have done a whole lot of work clearing out since we visited last year, I felt much less itchy walking around and you could actually see the horse drawn vehicle collection.  We looked for and found a butter churn in the settler's cabin but could not find a single 19th century toy in the entire place.

There is a cute little schoolhouse that I mentioned before which has lots of math and grammar books you can look through.  Perhaps tomorrow when its play in the 19th century afternoon I might just tell Jacob and Rose that children in the 'olden days' didn't have time to play (not entirely a fib, specially when you're nearly 9) and make them do schoolwork all afternoon.  Or perhaps I can find a cowshed or something for them to muck out, can you imagine the state of Rose after that, I wonder how you accessorize for that sort of thing.

History - Day One

Today was pioneer food day and it took a whole lot of work I can tell you, tomorrow will be a day of convenience I think.  I did a bit of research over the last few days and came up with quite a few recipes from the 19th century that I shall link through to in case you have any pressing desire to try them.  Here's how it went.

For breakfast we had bacon and Johnnycake.  Johnnycake is like a sweet cornbread, predictably it was too much for Jacobs rather restricted palette (so he had a bacon butty) but Rose enjoyed it.  I'm not sure if there is a little too much milk in this recipe and if I do it again I might reduce it.  Tom did not partake and went for his usual Quakers instant gruel which is sort of authentic so I let him off.

After breakfast the kids churned some butter for me, the recipe for this came from the Johnnycake site.  I wasn't holding out much hope as I have vivid recollections from my childhood of shaking top of the milk about in old jam jars for days and ending up with about 3 grains of butter.  This recipe works really well and only took about 10 minutes.  Here it is with my Galt potato bread.

For lunch we had bread and cheese, we were supposed to have apples with it but I forgot to buy some yesterday so Rose had grapes.  I made the bread to a recipe from The New Galt Cookbook, written in 1898, the recipe was only half complete so I had to do quite a bit of improvising but in the end it was very good, you'd never know it has potatoes in it!  Galt is where some of Tom's family are from so that was a nice touch.

Dinner was Chuck wagon beans, scalloped potatoes (from the Galt book), sausages and carrots followed by brownies from Mrs Small's Kitchen and Conkey's Tavern at the American Museum outside Bath in the UK c.1990 (recipe supplied on request).  Actually, I just looked up the museum website and it looks like they have gone upmarket, there seems to be a waitress service restaurant in the orangery so I suspect Mrs Small and Conkey have been given the old heave ho.

Anyway, I quite liked the beans but the kids were not impressed.

The potatoes were very good and the brownie had a universal thumbs up which is good as the recipe made vast amounts.  Here is Jacob eating some, he doesn't look particularly pleased, I think he is just experiencing extreme relief that there was something to eat that was not new or at all challenging.

Week Four - History

This week I am risking it and we are having a week of history.  This is a bit of a gamble and may be as successful as nature but least I can get an outing to the museum out of it and that's usually a hit.  Here's what I thought we could do.

• Trip to Lambton Heritage Museum
• Day of Pioneer food (inc making our own butter)
• Making Victorian toys
• Writing with quills
• A day without the modern world (gulp)
• We might revisit Ancient Egyptian basin irrigation systems that we missed on water week

Jacob has taken an interest in Romans recently so I'll have a think about activities around them over the next day or so, any ideas always gratefully received.

Nature - Summary

Yesterday morning Jacob and I carried out our one hour bird watch.  Jacob was very grudging to begin with but we sat in the sunroom opposite the bird feeder so he could multitask, eating breakfast while bird watching, that way it didn't really take up any valuable map drawing/bone collecting/reading Guinness book of records time.  Here is what we saw.

• Downie Woodpecker
• American Goldfinch
• White Breasted Nuthatch
• Red Bellied Woodpecker
• Rose Breasted Grosbeak
• Blue Jay

I am happy to say that this morning he correctly spotted a blue jay, downie woodpecker and american goldfinch so although he still can't remember the names of any flowers and doesn't know the difference between a pigeon and a seagull he can identify three wild birds.  I'm happy with that.  Anyway, here they both are posing with the crazy bird feeder made from copper plumbing.

So despite the weather and the lack of enthusiasm we kind of got through a shortened version of everything this week.  Nature inspired butterfly and flower cupcakes probably helped.

Not Martha Stewart but they tasted good

I don't think anything was particularly popular, not enough for final favourites for sure and our flowers remain stubbornly white.  Rose has been particularly interested in the Canadian Wild Flower guide book and has spent a considerable amount of time reading it to me so perhaps I have awakened an interest in at least one of them.

Nature - Day Four

Today I planned to have our garden bird watch but jacob arranged for the hot weather to continue and this morning I decided that groceries and beer were more important that bird identification.  Lucky Jacob.  We did get another couple of things done though.

We bought some white flowers and put them in coloured water to see if we can change the colour of the petals.  Rose visited them about every five minutes for the first few hours to see if anything was happening, I hope this doesn't go the way of the still, she will be gutted.

We also invented our own game using the marshmallow poppers from last week.  We made animal faces out of paper plates (this was the only nature element) and substituted pom poms for marshmallows so the carpet wouldn't get sticky, I put out swimming noodles as scoring rings and then let the kids just get on with inventing their own thing.

This activity was supposed to be outside, that way we could have used the water bombs and some water squirting things but it was 34 degrees in the shade (again) so we stuck to the relative cool of the basement.  Everyone is getting a bit hot and cross right now so it didn't go as well as I'd hoped but it wiled away nearly an hour with all the colouring and stuff.

Shooting yourself in the eyeball with a Pom Pom is a proven way to cool off?

Finally here is the cress from last week, we will eat some tomorrow.  Jacob tried it and said it is a pretty yuck but he'd rather eat it than spaghetti, he is so positive!

Is that Jacob or me?

Oh, I nearly forgot, we also went and fed rabbits and guinea pigs this morning on the way home from shopping.  No photos though as we are still without a laptop.

Nature - Day Three

Not much has been achieved on a nature theme today.  Once again my excuse is extreme heat and also spending three hours on the beach with some bus stop friends this morning, which was really lovely but all three of us are very tired now.

At about 3.30 this afternoon I managed to muster up the energy to get the glue gun out of the basement and we made bunny and dog bits and bobs holders out of old jam jars and scraps of felt.  Here are the finished jars, no prizes for guessing who's is who's.

And here is Rose with hers.

Jacob's enthusiasm didn't extend to being photographed although he quite enjoyed using the glue gun, he told Tom that he burned his fingers but the black dots are whiskers and not finger ash!  Shame I didn't think of using burned extremities as decorative features, it would have lent a certain 'je ne sais quoi'.

On the topic of enthusiasm, I told Jacob that I plan to have the one hour garden bird watch tomorrow morning before its too hot in the sun room, he asked me if he could bring his DS or read a book and just look at birds occasionally.  I said probably not.  Yesterday on the beach he thought a seagull was a pigeon, how do you get to nearly 9 and not know the difference between a sea gull and a pigeon? It would be nice if by the end of the week he could identify at least one wild bird and one wild flower but I'm not holding out much hope.

Nature - Day Two

This is definitely the least successful week so far, partly I think because the hot weather is so draining and partly because of the general lack of enthusiasm from Jacob.  If only flowers were electronic or could be programmed or something.

This afternoon we went on a rather shortened version of a wildflower walk, it was so hot that we kept it to the garden, we took photos of wild flowers with the iPad then went indoors to identify them.  It was so hot that we only stayed outside for about 5 minutes and in that time I managed to acquire another 4 mosquito bites (all on one foot), ah well, here is the list of flowers we found and subsequently identified.

• Daisy Fleabane
• Yellow Sweet Clover
• Day Lilies
• Black Eyed Susan (rudbeckia not thumbergenia)
• Ox Eye Daisies
• Queen Anne's Lace

And here are the kids in the garden.

Jacob Loitering in the Black Eyed Susans

Rose, Daisy Fleabane and Queen Anne's Lace

Both and some day lilies

Jacob took the 2013 Guinness Book of Records out of the library today so when I got fed up of hearing 'interesting' facts about Star Wars and Bill Gates I asked him to find me some Canadian natural world records.  This was like pulling teeth but in the end he came up with three.

• The polar bear is the largest land carnivore
• The wolf is the largest candid
• The Edmontosaurus, found in Alberta, is the dinosaur with the most teeth, more than 1000 apparently

Shame we are not likely to see any of them around here although Rose tells me that dinosaurs hung out in parking lots in England before Nana was born so there may be some film footage knocking about somewhere.

Nature - Day One

Today the Humid X was up above 40 degrees so nature had to be explored indoors, no wildlife walks or beach combing for us today.  Instead we had a microscope session in the dining room where Tom and I had broken down and put on the air conditioning.

First we spent about 10 minutes in the garden melting and finding things that we might want to look at.  Here is most of what we gathered.

Then we got out the microscope and got on with it.

Actually, I think that I found it more interesting than either of the children, leaves look really neat when magnified and I didn't realize that flower petals look like coloured bubble wrap.  I hadn't anticipated that Rose couldn't really see any of it as she's not got the hang of looking through a tube with one eye yet and she started to get a bit upset and frustrated, I should have bought a dollar store magnifying glass for her to look through instead.

Jacob got into it when I managed to find him some rudbeckia and day lily pollen and one of the teeny flowers that make up a yarrow flowerhead.  I think he found it more interesting looking at the very small stuff and not just closely at things you can see with the naked eye.

Hopefully we will be able to go out of doors to do something more exciting tomorrow, maybe some beach combing, and we might collect some pond water to see if we can see any microscopic animals swimming in it.

Week Three - Nature

I've gone for an all things wild week this week at risk of Jacob being bored to tears, mostly because I would like to expand my knowledge of Canadian wildlife hereabouts.  Here is the proposed list.

• One hour garden bird watch
• Wildflower walk
• Beach combing expedition
• Microscope session
• Feeding the rabbits at Westland Greenhouses (good excuse for me to have a plant fix)
• Making rabbit and dog bits and bobs holders
• Magical colour transformation of cut flowers
• I'm just working out some sort of game involving throwing homemade animals into hoops or pinging last weeks marshmallows at homemade animal shaped targets in a quoits kind of a style.  Not get that quite figured out yet but I'll get it sorted.

I should probably have organized a sun week for this week as the forecast is hot, today it is 32 degrees in the shade, the weather network says the humid X is 34 but I think this is out by at least 50 degrees as I am slowly melting.

Food - Summary

So that was food week.  I've just been looking at our aims and objectives list and we got through everything on the list except sprout sunflower seeds, I couldn't find any that weren't roasted I'm afraid.  Also our cress is still a bit teeny but we planted it so I'm considering it done.  I forgot to mention that as an additional activity we looked at yeast through Jacob's microscope, it was a bit dull which is probably why it got fogotten but now the microscope is out it will be used again.

Jacob's favourite activity this week was the marshmallow poppers, he says he can't remember anything else which is a great testament to my teaching skills, I think I'll tick that off my list of possible new careers.  Rose is in bed so I can't ask about her favourite but I'll hazard a guess that it wasn't tasting avocados.  Mine was inflating balloons with cooking ingredients, that sort of chemistry always seems like magic to me and I might do the baking soda and vinegar one again all on my own!

Food - Day Four

Yesterday we had the day off.  Jacob went to his friend's place to play in the pool and Rose and I went to the beach.  Canada, the promised land.  We did plant some cress in the evening, if I was really organized we'd have done that at the beginning of the week and been eating it by now.  Oh well.

On to today, (after we came back from the beach) we made marshmallow poppers, I got this activity from a book called 'Make These Toys' by Heather Swain.  They are leftover party cups with the bottoms cut out, and tied up balloons with the tops cut out wrapped around them.  I also advise duct tape to keep them sturdy.

I'd say this has a good chance of being in final favourites week, the kids played with them for a good hour or so.  We tried to collect as many of the marshmallows as we could from the garden but I don't think we got half as many as were fired.  I fear we may be contributing to obesity problems in the local chipmunk community.

We also had a blind tasting session.  I chose 10 foods with a variety of likes and don't likes and a couple that they wouldn't recognize.  Here they are.

Tom helped out with this one as blindfolds kept coming off and I couldn't pass out food and take photos at the same time.  I asked them to feel and smell the food and guess what it was before tasting it and they got them all right except for the two unknowns, it wasn't long before things degenerated and Rose said everything smelled like poo (except the chocolate cookie) and thought she was very hilarious for thinking of it.  I had a vain hope that they might suddenly discover that they really like mushrooms or that eating cucumber is not the worst thing that can happen to a four year old, but no such luck.

The avocado produced this series of photos which nearly made up for my failure to extend their palettes.

Food - Day Three

Wow, I'm shattered with all this summer school stuff, I'm going to have to go into some sort of rehab programme in September to recover from my own children.

Today we demonstrated how yeast works and the children made their own dinner, which is not the time saving activity you might think it is.

The yeast demonstration (thanks again Science Bob) looks very similar to the baking soda one but with an orange balloon, we put water, yeast and sugar into the bottle and put a balloon on top and waited for it to inflate.  This time it is much slower because it is microorganisms growing and producing the gas (I think).  Here it is when first set up.

Then we got some bread dough going to compare the rising dough with the blowing up balloon.  Jacob and Rose measured, I got the kneading started, then we split the dough and they finished it off. They did a good job.

By the time the dough was rising the balloon had blown up nicely (I put it on properly this time!) and the bottle had filled up with yucky brown froth.

So we went to pick up the mail and spent an hour at the playground while the dough was rising.  Next it was rolled into pizza sized portions (by the children) there was enough for a bread bun each for lunch tomorrow too.

And the fillings went on.

Finally it was cooked and eaten.  Jacob said it was much better than the ones I make because I put on too much tomato sauce, that is more than a tablespoon to an entire pizza.

This has been declared a possible activity for the final favourites week, it is nice to think that I am awakening an interest in the culinary arts but I am in danger of them thinking that my life of cleaning and feeding everyone is fun.  Perhaps we'll do housework next week, a good dose of hoovering and cleaning toilets should put an end to that.

Food - Day Two

I'm very tired today due to a night of very itchy mosquito bites so this will more than likely be a dull post.

Today we made pictures with veggie prints.

Not sure about the cross face

It's funny watching the different approaches that the kids have with this kind of activity.  Jacob wasn't very enthusiastic and said this definitely won't go into the final favourites week (mind you, it was 28 degrees in the shade and very humid so it was hard to be enthusiastic about anything really) so he was just trying to produce something decent as quickly as possible.  One is a garden and the other is the trail left by a lion after treading in various food stuffs.

For Rose it is all about the process and the end result is irrelevant, she spent ages over these, smearing paint all over the place but I have no idea what they are.

These are the stamps, we used apple, carrot and potato.  Also celery, if you cut the end off a bunch it makes a lovely rose shape, a little like canal boat paintings.

We were going to get some sunflower sprouts going as well today but I just got the seeds out of the cupboard and realized that I only have roasted ones.  Durr, we could wait a long time for those to sprout, it would be even worse than the still.