Owl Pellets, Part 2

A while back I ordered owl pellets for the kids to dissect. It was kinda cool (and a little gross). However, what was really cool is that one of the boys found one in our woods yesterday and he recognized it immediately. It was way bigger than the ones we had bought.
There was a lot of hair and one fairly big bone. We think it was from a rabbit.

Phonics at your fingertips

And toe tips!

Sugar Baby painted Queenie's finger & toenails last night and also painted the vowels that Queenie is learning on them.
Considering how much time Queenie spends adoring her nails when they are painted, I thought it was a brilliant idea! She'll know her ABC's in no time!

Dry Erase

We've discovered another little thing that has helped our homeschooling and I thought I'd share it on here, because it might help someone else.

Daddy Duck bought a huge sheet of dry erase board from Lowes for about $12 and had them cut it into smaller rectangles - about 18" by 24". I think we ended up getting 8 sections from the one large sheet. Everyone likes having their own board.They've been extremely helpful! Some of the kids like using them in place of scratch paper, Queenie likes them for practicing her letters and everyone likes them for drawing or doodling.
Happy Homeschooling!

Time for School!

The summer has flown by here, and even though it's not officially over, we went ahead and started school this past week. It feels good to get back into a routine and have some semblance of sanity!

The boys are studying ancient history this year. Lucky for them, I had a large batch of unused pink marshmallow fondant in the fridge (left from a red lego birthday cake gone awry) and we pulled it out and made our own version of Ancient Sumerian Cuneiform Tablets!
(It kind of reminds me of a piece of salmon.)

Anywho...

All six of my ducklings are officially in school this year. Queenie is so excited to have her own books, notebooks, pencils and flashcards. I love this time of year!

Homeschool day at the aquarium

We love field trips!

Math for Superheroes 101

I thought Superhero was going to draw five simple circles and then cross out one to show that one was being subtracted, but when I looked a few minutes later, I found this:

There were five "objects" - one of them being Superman, one a bad guy, and 3 of them rocks. According to Superhero, Superman was using his x-ray vision to see the jewels inside one of the rocks and then was going to blast it open, thus subtracting one.

I don't remember math being so complicated when I was in 1st grade.

Owl Day

The kids & I declared today a holiday - Owl Day. (Actually, I declared it. We needed to add a little fun to our homeschooling.)

We set out to learn as much about owls as we possibly could. We checked out books from the library, consulted our own animal encyclopedias and researched the internet.

The day officially began with owl pancakes. Actually, they looked more like piglets, foxes and bunnies. None of them really looked like owls...but that was okay. They had chocolate chips.After lunch, we (or they) dissected owl pellets. Owl pellets are interesting and smelly! Look at Superhero's face. That pretty much sums up Mama Duck's reaction. Queenie, who apparently has a stomach of steel, ate the rest of her ramen while watching the dissections going on around her.Each pellet contained at least 1 or two rodent skulls along with a lot of fur and tiny bones.

After the pellets were done, we feasted on owl cupcakes.
Tonight, there will be a presentation of sorts. Each duckling has something to show & tell about owls. Should be fun & interesting!

School Days

We began our new school year last week.

Sugar Baby had an experiment involving earthquakes & building structures this morning. Superhero was on hand to provide the earthquake effects. We concluded that marshmallows, while very tasty, don't make the best building materials. Queenie likes to color letters at the table while Superhero does his work. She was too busy to look all the way up for a picture.
Superhero likes to add the dots on dominoes and then line them up.

Phys Ed

I wonder how many kids begin their school day by chasing chickens?

Our turkens have been escaping & wandering the neighborhood, so catching them and putting them back in the pen has been an almost daily occurence around here.

It makes for good exercise. Catching chickens requires a lot of speed & agility.

This morning, we found the hole they were escaping through & clipped their wings for good measure. Did you know that when you clip their wings, you only clip one side? This puts them off balance so that they can't fly.

I love Apologia!

This is one of my very favorite homeschooling materials. Two years ago we completed Apologia's Astronomy book and we recently began this one: It is very easy to use and full of interesting information. Each lesson includes activities or experiements that are not too difficult to pull together and are lots of fun. We usually do a lesson while having lunch.



Our first experiment was about camouflage. We were the predators, and M&M's were the prey.

Needless to say, everyone thoroughly enjoyed this experiment. Those M&M's didn't stand a chance with predators like us.

Home (school) Improvements

A while back I stumbled across the homeschool organizational idea of workboxes. I searched online and found lots of cute, tidy & cool ideas for making them. However, based upon past experience, I knew they would not work for me.

I absolutely have to keep things extremely simple or I fall off the bandwagon.

But, I really did need to come up with A Better Way. I needed a better way of keeping up with the ducklings' schoolwork. A better system for checking their work. A way to not let things slip. And it had to be very simple.

So, today, for $20, I got these: There were six cardboard, half-sized, file boxes in the package - just the amount I needed. The ducklings and I assembled and decorated them this afternoon.

There is a hanging file for each day's work and a file for work that has been checked and the duckling needs to correct.

This is Mr. C's box. After he reads a chapter from his book, The Family Under the Bridge, he will move it to the next day's file. Verrrrry simple. Just what I can handle.

Queenie even has a box & I am looking forward to filling hers with fun preschool activities that normally get pushed aside [read: never done].

She and I will love that!

School Room

I recently did a little rearranging & cleaning of our living room and school room. The school room looked pretty, so I decided to take a picture of it. This is one side of the room. This is the other.

The ducklings rarely do their school here, however. It's more of a school and book storage area. The ducklings are usually spread out throughout the house when doing their work.

Tasty Cells

Sugar Baby has been studying cells in science lately. To add a little fun to her studies, we made jello animal cells. To avoid the protests/revolts/anarchy that would undoubtedly occur if only Sugar Baby was allowed to do the "experiment", I let the other ducklings make cells, too.

The first step was to consult her book and the internet to refresh my memory of cells and their parts. (How did our homeschooling predecessors ever survive without the internet?)

The next step was to lay out all the cell components.

• cell membrane: plastic baggie
• cytoplasm: jello
• nucleus: laffy tafft
• nucleolus: sweet tart
• vacuole: chocolate chips
• centrosome: bottle cap
• lysosome: raisins
• golgi body: gummy worms
• mitochondria: tootsie rolls
• ribosomes: sprinkles

I explained what each part was as I passed them out, but I'm pretty sure the only thoughts going through the ducklings' heads were revolving around how tasty the finished product was going to be.

The next step was to send everyone OUTSIDE to eat their cells. Good thing I did, because there were lots of cytoplasm spills.

Continental Creations

Today for a fun geography lesson, we made a cookie world map. Each duckling chose a continent (except Queenie - we purposely waited until her naptime) and we printed outline maps of them.

I found a sugar cookie recipe online that wasn't supposed to puff or spread, but it did. It wasn't too hard to work around that, though.

Before baking, we traced & cut out the maps into the dough.
After cooling, we spread them with whipped cream that we had tinted with food coloring. Orange was for deserts, green was for other land, and of course blue was for water.We picked out several major geographical features of each continent and tried to form them on our cookies with either icing or little mountain-shaped cookies.It was a lot of fun & looked really neat when we were done. Everyone agreed that cookie dough maps are better & much tastier than salt dough maps.

Back to School

Yesterday was our first day of school. In this picture, the ducklings are decorating their binders for the year. In these binders will go spelling words, copywork, writing assignments, maps & any other work that might need a spot.

I'm excited about the curricullum we are using this year - it's kind of a hodgepodge. We will be using:

The Bible (and other character building books I'm still pulling together)

Abeka Math

Abeka Spelling

Abeka Language

Writing Strands

Lifepac Science (I'm not very excited about these - they look pretty boring! Shh, don't tell the

ducklings I said that.)

Tapestry of Grace, Year 2

This is our first year of using Tapestry of Grace. It covers history, geography, literature, writing, art, tightrope walking, kung fu... just kidding on the last 2... But it covers a lot - basically the fall of Rome up to the signing of the U.S. Constitution. And it uses "living books" as opposed to textbooks, which I like a lot.

Bootsie's Dialogue

Bootsie had to write a dialogue for her Language (English) class the other day, using Charlie Brown and Lucy as the speakers. I thought it was pretty cute (well, except for the handwriting, that is). If you click on the picture, it will get bigger.

What the little people do...

A lot of times when people find out we homeschool, one of their first questions is about what I do with the younger ducklings while the older ducklings are doing schoolwork. This aspect of our schooling has gotten easier this year because of the curricullum we are using and because the younger ducklings are getting bigger themselves. It used be to a lot trickier back in the days when one was nursing, one was potty training, and another was a very active 3-4 year old. (Whew - how did I ever do it?!)

Anyhow... the younger ducklings who are not "schooling" are my slave labor. I work their little fingers to the bone... heh, heh, heh...

They sweep the floor.

They wash the windows.

They peel potatoes.

NOT! Haha! All of those photos were staged. (Though, once we were done, they thought it was fun and did more "cleaning" on their own.) This is what really goes on:

They eat.They play with playdough.
They build mountains with couch cushions and fight off invading big brothers.
They try to feed the fish, but end up spilling the food everywhere.
They leave behind a trail of disaster and mayhem not unlike this:

But they have fun & that's what counts. :)

Back to School!

Today is our first day back from Christmas break. Here is Bootsie, doing her math. Hanging upside down is particularly helpful when you are working with fractions.

Monkey Man likes to be prepared at all times. You never know when you may need to snorkel or shoot a bad guy while doing your seatwork.

Have a blessed day! :)