Knitting Iris

Polar explorations or, "A very long post for an even longer winter"

E, wrapping himself in our comforter the morning his cold relapsed back into an ear infection.  Poor boy.  But this was last week and he's almost back to his normal self now.

OK.  So, what with the entire household wracked to one degree or another with illness, we've been slacking quite a bit at the homeschooling this past week or so.  What energy I've had has gone into worrying about R's fevers and coughs, and about E's ear infection and about how he was having trouble hearing, and the way he was reacting (scattered, spaced out, and emotional), we think, to the decongestants the doctor put him on. 

The whole thing has been kind of freaking me out to be perfectly honest, but he seems to be improving, and we've taken him off the decongestants, opting for vitamin C, echinacea, and garlic, instead.  It's been at least a couple of weeks since we've eaten any dairy, now.  The cheese is probably moldy deep in the fridge somewhere. 

It's time to get back on track, both healthwise and school wise.  Seeing as we didn't take any "official" Spring Break, I guess you could call this past week it, whether we wanted one or not. 

Since there isn't much to share from the past week or so other than the fact that it's been pretty trying and emotional for me, I figured we could do a little look-back at some of what we did do over the last few months this winter, in sickness and in health.

Inspired greatly by my parents' trip in January to Antartica, we've been doing a study of the polar regions, both north and south, the people and animals who thrive there, and those who have explored and studied these areas of our world.  They came back with amazing stories and pictures to share, and they even swam in the Antarctic Ocean, if only for as long as it took to get a picture to prove it.  Now that, I'd say is a true polar bear plunge, or "penguin" plunge, that is.

Mostly this is for our own records.  I thought, though, that since I like seeing what other homeschoolers do, others might be interested in what we've been up to as well.

A reenactment of Scott and Amundsen's race to the South Pole played out on a sheet of styrofoam salvaged from the trash bin at the shop.

"Whale oil" lamp making, using instructions here.  Also, experimenting and timing as to which worked best out of bacon grease, canola oil, olive oil, and a regular paraffin tea light.  Bacon grease burned the longest and paraffin the brightest.  R learned to strike his very first match here, extra, extra, extra cautiously, as is his nature.

Igloo building (using our beach pails to form snow blocks) and, subsequently, a couple of weeks later, igloo strength-testing and, finally, destruction.

Pemmican making, or rather, a modern day version made with venison, dried in the oven then ground in the blender and mixed with homemade granola, saskatoons we picked and dried last summer, Costco bought dried cranberries, and melted butter.  No, wait, margarine.  We shaped it into balls, placed each one in a plastic baggie, chilled them, and slipped them into our coat pockets as a snack while skiing one Saturday.  The boys weren't too thrilled with the taste of the pemmican but liked the dried meat itself, like an unseasoned jerky.  E was expecting something sweet, I think.

Bannock went over far better, serving both as bread with venison stew and as dessert sprinkled with honey and cinnamon.  (There are so many recipes out there for bannock. We used this one.)  We threw a few on the grill, too, accidentally charring most of them to a black crispiness.  We're going to have to try again while camping sometime.

As long as there are Anzac cookies and homemade hot cocoa to go around I doubt the boys will be asking for pemmican again anytime soon.

I don't know where I found the recipe for our version of these cookies, years ago now, but there are many out there online , and we've been substituting heated soy milk for the dried nonfat milk in the cocoa recipe for nondairy cocoa.

Inuksuit, both building our own little one and spotting them, across the border in Canada and as the logo on E's snowboots.

   

Arctic snow goggles from the Burke Museum website.

And, of course, piles of good books and movies, most from the library and a few from grandparents.  Polar Explorers for Kids lives up to it's name and thensome.  Both my parents read it all the way through after their trip to Antarctica, and I've read a good part of it as well and excerpts to the boys.

Movies we watched included Arctic Tale, Mountain of Ice, The Snow Walker, and I'm still planning on picking out a handful of scenes from Atanarjuat that would be O.K. for the boys to watch.

Of course there was plenty of just pure play as well, our floor spread with styrofoam ice floes, and styrofoam pellet blizzards blown across the room:

R recieved a camera for his birthday and has been naming the pictures he takes.  "Polar Bear Attack":

E doesn't ever choose by himself to sit down to draw and when asked to do so, such as this polar bear, he does so reluctantly and usually quickly, so he can get it over with.  Yet, what he draws never ceases to amaze me.

Hopefully time spent outdoors this winter has been enough to offset the time spent indoors in the virtual world of Club Penguin.  I'm not sure how I feel about hearing the boys yell to eachother things like, "I'll meet you at the top of the sledding hill!" while not on a real hill, but instead while inside, sitting back-to-back at the two computer desks. 

Poking around for a couple of minutes just now led me to a handful of resources I hadn't even seen yet for homeschoolers and others online here, here, here, here, here, an amazing Flickr set here....the list could go on and on thanks to endless possiblities out there.

Enough!  It's time to go and hibernate, at least for one more night.  Snow again today, on and off.  Nothing that will last.

The Panama-St. Louis connection

E being a sloth, just like the one up in the tree right behind him.  We saw a sloth at the St Louis zoo the following week, a little different than this one, though, with lighter colored claws.

We (or I, anyways) could have spent hours (but didn't for some reason.  Too hot?) watching lines of leaf cutter ants trail through the jungle, bringing leaves down into their holes and hauling sand and soil up and out, wondering why they do this and what on earth was going on down below where we couldn't see.  Again, a week later, at the i

insectarium at the St. Louis Zoo, we got behind a scenes peek:

Below, left,:  orange version of this plant in the gardens where we stayed, frequently covered with butterflies.  Right:  Pink version of same plant, covered with butterflies in the butterfly exhibit, again, in the insectarium at the St. Louis zoo.

Identifying the butterflies and moths with C's mom, finding which ones we'd seen in Panama.

Below, left:  not very clear, but a pic of the spiders that we saw everywhere, that make big, strong webs in the jungle, even right along the water, in Panama.  Right:  Same spider, now with a name to identify it, behind glass at the insectarium in St. Louis.

Birds that we saw, every morning sucking, nectar from the blossoms of this tree.  E first noticed it, thinking it was a nuthatch, like the ones we see at home.  A little googling when we got to St. Louis, turned it up as being a bananaquit.  Awfully similar looking, though!

Our trip to St. Louis was intended to be the real "vacation" part of our trip.  No schooling.  Just purely being with family and visiting friends.  As it turned out, it also ended up being an extension of what we'd seen and learned about the two weeks prior in Panama.  Who'd have thought? 

One of the things that strikes me so, in travelling, is the universality of the plants and animals that we encounter.  Examples:  Sea urchins and sea stars in the cool Pacific waters of Canada this summer, but also in the warm Carribean seas this fall.  Poison dart frogs in Panama, and frogs in Missouri and Montana lakes and streams.  Fishing in the salty ocean waters off Panama and Canada, and also in the fresh lake waters of Missouri and Montana.   

A tree is a tree, a bird is a bird, a lizard is a lizard, a cat is a cat, a monkey is a monkey, a roach is a roach, a scorpion is a scorpion, a snake is a snake, a spider is a spider, an ant is an ant.  There are great variations, certainly, in widely spread out places, but similarities enough to be recognizable as essentially the same type of creature.  Birds, animals, and plants, fungi, insects....they had globalization down pat long before we humans did.   

Sure, we travel on a super-low budget, but you can see so much at the St. Louis Zoo, and it's even easier on the budget.  Admission is free!

Taking it with us. School on the road.

Workbooks, pencils, markers, blank books,and a deck of cards.  Journal keeping, both in words and drawings.  All these quite literally saved us in so many situations and can be pulled out anywhere:  on the airplane after the on-board movie ends, in the park waiting while Papa uses the payphone, at the internet cafe waiting for Mama and Papa to check email, at restaurant waiting for fresh-squeezed lemonade and conch fritters, and in the heat of the day when we absolutely have to keep our "muy pálido" skin out of the intense, near-equatorial rays of the sun. 

Besides, what better way to learn "greater than and less than" than a fierce but friendly game of "War" with Papa?  What better way to learn another language than hearing it spoken all around you, or possibley even better, from a 3 year old bi-lingual "tutor"?  What better way to learn about another part of the world and how the people there live than to go there yourself?

Note to self for future travels:  Pack more books, regardless of the weight they'll add.  (Regretting that we didn't bring enough books to quench the boys' thirst for reading.)  Don't pack any toys.  They don't even take them out of their packs to play with them, favoring sticks, shells, water, coconut hull "boats", and the likes, instead.  Something to remember at home, as well.

"Mother's laziness leads to teachable moments"

So, the other day I finally got around to mowing the 8 inch tall grass and, in doing so, stumbled across the kiddie pool that's been left sitting abandoned for probably a couple of weeks now full of water, sand, pieces of tree bark, and plastic toy animals.  For some reason, rather than immediately dump the contents out, I peeked in and saw many, many, MANY little critters wiggling all over in there and think to myself, "Hmm.  I wonder if those are mosquito larvae."  Two minutes and a quick Google image search later my suspicions are confirmed.  I call the boys to the computer, we read up a bit on the life cycle of a mosquito, and then we head outside to see it in person:

Next thing I know R is asking to bring out his microscope and I'm weighing whether or not we have time enough to get that involved and, rather than say "No." this time, I dropped all hopes for other plans for the day and said "O.K."  Supplies are gathered.  An old table is dragged out of the shed.  We dive in (not literally, of course).  Specimens of larvae and eggs are scooped out of the pool for observation and dropped onto microscope slides.

At some point or another, running in and out of the house for more books or who-knows-what we came across a big toad on our front steps.  Frightened, it hopped out of the hot sunshine and into the shade of the mudroom which, by the way, doesn't have a  door and is floored with cool slate flagstones.  The boys check him out for a minute, name him Trevor, and then I have to redirect them back to the mosquito larvae before we lose momentum there.  Awhile later, we go back looking for him but can't find him at first because he's found a comfortable spot hidden inside the end of the rolled up tent which I haven't put away from last weekend when a friend borrowed it:

   

 

Which gives us the idea of making a toad houses out of a terra cotta pot, so out come aprons, newspapers, paint, paintbrushes:

While we're waiting for the paint to dry, out come books on toads and mosquitos and of course discussions about the connection between the two, which one eats which, maybe the answer as to why the toad was there in the first place.  Drawings of the mosquito life cycle by R and mosquito larvae by E:

We found egg rafts, larvae, and later that afternoon I squashed a blood-filled adult mosquito, but we haven't come across the pupa stage.  For the sake of science, I let the water sit a couple more days to see if any would develop into pupa before then but the boys and I are headed out of town tomorrow for my parents' house so it will be emptied before we leave.  You couldn't call me ruthless for not letting these get to the adult stage, could you?

Later in the evening, a shady spot in the garden was found for the toad home, a nightlight was plugged into an extension cord nearby to attract bugs, and Trevor was relocated but not without making lots of vocal toad sounds in protest while the boys were relocating it.  He/she didn't stick around in there long but I saw it later that night after dark hopping around nearby in the grass.

Tent left out = happy toad = toad house.  Kiddie pool left out = mosquito eggs and larvae to study.  Get it?  Mother's laziness leads to teachable moments.  ;)   What will be next?  Putting dust bunnies under the microscope?  Studying the mold growing on the heels of a loaf of bread?

Sometimes life feels strikingly similar to those  "If You Give A Pig A Pancake" books, particularly the trail of messes left behind at the end of the day.

Swan Song

Just another case of one thing leads to the next and everything just falling right into place starting with the reading of the current issue of Your Big Backyard to the boys over breakfast yesterday morning, which included a story from another boy somewhere in Montana about tagged and released Trumpeter Swans:

Which lead to an "A ha!" moment and my suggestion, "Why don't we hop in the car and drive down to where we've been seeing that big white bird on that lake along the highway lately and try to see if it's a swan."  Which we did and, from inside the car at a pullout on the highway, watched it glide from across the lake, kicking a bunch of ducks off this tiny little "island":

That's when we thought we could see a tag around it's neck just like the ones we saw in the article.  As the swan came closer, I got out and snuck in for a closer look.  I couldn't quite make out the number but with the camera could zoom in close enough. 

Just about now, I heard a clattering of wings and branches in the pine tree above me.  Looking up expecting to see a raven, instead I saw black AND white and realized it wasn't a raven at all but a bald eagle taking off and then flying away across the lake.  It all happened too quickly to get a picture of it.  I turned to the boys in the car, pointed crazily up at the eagle and then signalled back to them to quietly come down to where I was, which they did...sort of, not really all that quietly.  The swan continued to come closer.  A couple of pair of red-winged blackbirds were flying about in the cattails between the lake and us and when the swan approached them one of the males "had words" with the swan, telling it in no uncertain terms to back off.  I'm assuming there was a nest somewhere?

The swan (he? she?) then wandered off and went about its business:

All of this lead to these by E and R:

And this:

Encylopedias, guide books, The Ugly Duckling in a book of stories I had when I was little.  About a year ago my mom gave us a copy of E.B White's The Trumpet of the Swan.  We tried reading it at the time but it didn't really catch our attention then so back onto the shelf it went.  Well.  It certainly is captivating us now.  We're only a handful of chapters in but, already, reading this book has lead us to sites like this and this and today we reported our tagged bird siting here.  Gratuitous Trumpter Swan pic:

On the way back home from observing the swan yesterday, we also saw this:

Count 'em.  I think there are TWENTY ONE goslings there and only 5 adult geese in sight.  All right already.  Enough of the waterfowl for today but looky here.  The bluebirds are back.