Field Trips Are Awesome: Patch'12

It's that time of year again! One I used to dread, due to the sad change in weather, but I now look forward to, since there is just so much to do!

We planned in advance to get together with my brother and his family. We all have such busy lives, you have to plan these things in advance. Because of this, we went to a new patch that is closer to their house, and consequently, far away from our new house. The patch that we have gone to before that was a drive away, is now really close to our new house. But we didn't want to go there again; been there, done that. So, a new patch, change of scenery, and adventures, were in our plans. We did the Saturday in October that was open for both families, which turned out to have a sad-looking weather forecast. All week I checked the weather for the weekend it hopes that a little sunshine symbol would appear over Sat., but alas, that raincloud and 60% chance of rain forecast remained unchanged all the way to the morning. We texted each other with remarks about how we are tough Oregonians, we were rain-proof, we would handle a little downpour. But secretly I prayed that we would have a miraculous sunbreak the whole time we were there. And guess what? When we arrived, we had to wear shades.

My brother (the Fonz), sons, niece, daughter and hubby (the sexy).

My beautiful sis-in-law and gorgeous new nephew.

We were very excited to have the sun show up just for us. I was concerned that if we spent too much time inside the gift shop at first we would "waste" it and it would start raining on us, so I pushed to get out of there, but not before everyone got a chance to pet a baby chick.

Then it was onto the farm sign. If there is something to poke our faces though, we always MUST take pictures!

After that laugh-fest, we bee-lined it to the ponies, because our little man had been talking about getting to ride one for 2 days, non-stop.

He was just so happy!

He's giving us a "thumbs-up"

He remembers to this day that "his pony" was named Rain.

Then we went over to the haymazes. There was a big one for bigger kids and adults, and a smaller one for the tiny-tots. We paid for our 2 older ones to go through the big maze by themselves, and we were allowed to go into the kids maze with the little guy, an only pay for him. So I have no pictures of our awesome big kids and the riot they had hanging out in the hay at the back of the maze, or coming down the huge slide when they finally were summoned out of there. But boy do I have pics of the little man!

He literally said, "This maze is SO AWESOME!"

 

I finally captured a picture of his 9th or 10th trip down the slide. He went all the way to the end of the mat.

 After the haymaze, we all decided to check out the livestock on the other side of the farm. The pigpen had the smallest little piglets, and all the kids wanted to have a closer look. I wanted to stay far away from the stench, but I was outvoted.

Just as we were about as far away from the buildings as we could be, the sky opened up and dumped a deluge of buckets ontop of our heads. I am not kidding, this was a storm! We all ran as fast as we could to get back to the gift shop building and wait it out, but not before getting properly soaked!

My little water-logged cutie.

The rain didn't last too long. Soon it was back to being sunny. Time to pick pumpkins!

So that's where babies come from!

Check out these gorgeous colors! I am loving Fall!

We had to get a good family shot in, I mean, it's tradition, right?

Here we all are. :)

And then we made it back with a few spoils of pumpkin patching. Can't leave a patch without some fresh apple cider or some kettle corn, right?

My daughter was very attracted to the "tan" pumpkins they had. I guess orange is so last year.

After bringing those things home, it was definitely time to decorate with fall decor. I had already pulled out my apple and pumpkins smelling candles a few weeks before, to set the aroma mood. But now I finally dug through the box and got out the other stuff I'd gathered from previous Autumns.

Little bits of Autumn all over the house, even an apple cinnamon candle in the main bathroom.

 That's all for this year's trip. See you next Fall...oh nevermind, bad pun. ;p

A Stable Environment

Hi there, readers!

Sorry it has been so long since you read a new post of mine.

See, we just move into our new house, and I had to go through and organize all my homeschooling stuff so we would be ready for this new school year. The timeline didn't exactly follow as planned, so we got off to a slightly later start than I was hoping for.
But I decided not to let it stress me out too much. After all, part of the freedom of home schooling is setting your own schedule and being super flexible. The class room doesn't have to be a certain way and the calendar doesn't have to follow anyone else's. What really matters is that the kids learn and grow and you are there to develop relationships with them during it all.

So with that in mind, I adjusted my plan and spent the first few weeks of September getting all my stuff out of boxes and moving furniture around. (All by myself, I need to add. I am proud that when I got the floor plan figured out, I didn't wait for my husband to be home, I just Amazoned my way around all the heavy lifting. Rarrr! I am woman!!) By the way, the whole month of September my husband was put on a special project at work that gave him daytime hours. He is still on a week-to-week daytime schedule until further notice, so the luxury of having him around in the mornings is no longer available at the moment, but on the upside, he is home for dinner and even more awesome: he loves to cook dinner. Boy, I am one blessed wife. :)

When we moved in, we emptied all the trucks into the garage, and moved things from there into the rest of the house. My priority was to make sure we got the rest of the house completely done by our open house. So my garage was left to be dealt with when I could get around to it. I did get some stuff figures out at the time of the open house, however. Like, I gathered all the dress up stuff and costumes from all other boxes that I found, and put them in a huge chest that had a hinge on the lid so they could have a dress up bin. It did get played with during the open house.

This was the state of my garage at the beginning of September.

 My vision for my garage was to have the outer edges have the furniture that held the school supplies, the desks and tables, and the toy things, and then leave the middle space open to have indoor large motor playing during the rainy and cold months. Up until the 12th of October, it was dry and mostly sunny outside, with most of the time from moving through then being quite warm. So all of our outdoor toys and even the large play kitchen set was out on our back patio. Along with the play table and bucket of play food and dishes. The kids have a wonderful time during the warm days playing out there.

So, hard to work I went putting the garage together to my floorplan. It took a week or so longer than I was thinking it would, so we didn't start school the week that our homeschool co-op started, as I was hoping, but it is okay, as I said.

My school-agers on the morning of the 1st co-op day

My preschooler on his first day of co-op ever.

 I got the garage basically where I wanted it to be by the time we started school.

Eventually, I want to move those huge bins out, but for now, it is functional.

This cabinet holds the puzzles and magazines for cutting up, and extra paper I don't want toddlers getting into. The green shelf holds paper that is okay for all ages to color on, etc.

Story corner

My desk, and our extra fridge, with magnet letters on it.

resource bookshelf

We added our rules and a horse poster to the fridge.

Kids computer for educational games (to be plugged in and used in the near future).

 It will eventually get too cold in the garage for school times, so I will bring the essentials into the dinning room for those times. But for now, it is fine enough to have school at the table in the garage.

My unit for the month of September was going to be on horses. Well, it still is, and it has now gone through to October. But that is okay, because we, as a family, discussed the plan for the next few months and worked it all out so that we aren't pushing the other units back too much. I realized, while planning the year out at the end of August, that there are some months that consistently don't turn out perfectly according to plan. And those months are: Nov-Dec, and March-April. Obviously November and December have huge holiday breaks and conflicts in them. Also, March has spring break, April has our anniversary, when we always leave town and our kids get over-nighters with their buddies/cousins, and there's Easter in there, as well. So with these breaks, comes a lot of lost focus and motivation, and we never seem to get the stuff done in time. Therefore, this year I planned for that. Typically I do one unit study per month. This year, we stretched out the units through those tough months, and we are able to make some flexibility for ourselves. That's why I didn't panic when September leaked into October. We are all good. Plus, that allowed the pony rides at the pumpkin patch trip to coincide with the horse unit. Sweet!


Now, to begin learning about horses.
After reading aloud a picture book about how to care for a horse, I had the kids act out a "puppet show" where a customer is buying a horse and the owner has to answer all their questions about the proper care and feeding of a horse.

Barbie is the customer, played by my girl, and my son is Ken, the owner.

They did an excellent job retaining all the facts and info and retelling it.

They had so much fun with this that they re-told the show several times over. That will help them remember it for a while.

My preschooler noticed that his horse matched the one on our poster showing the names of horse body-parts. He loves to re-enact all the things he learns about horses with his toy stallions.

Another favorite game we played involving horses was the freeze gait game. The kids learned that horses move at 4 different speeds, or gaits, and they are, in speed order from slowest to fastest: Walking, trotting, cantering and galloping.
I put on music and would call out one of those four gaits, and they would go around the large area in the garage mimicking the speed and motion of the gait until the music stopped and I yelled "freeze!" Then I would start the music up again, calling out another gait, in random order. No one got out if they moved after "freeze", we just had fun, learned the names of the gaits, and got out all our energy.
My little niece, who is four, and lives nearby, joined us on several occasions. She had wanted to come over and do preschool with me ever since she found out we were moving close to her house. I have her work on some preschool workbooks while the big kids do their math, spelling, reading, etc. She loves it. And I think it's fun to have another student with us. Plus, she and my preschooler play together and keep each other company when they get bored during the subjects over their heads.

My daughter is in 3rd grade this year, which means introducing her to multiplication. We used horse-related word problems to help her get how it is different than adding.
For instance : Kelly the farrier has four horses to put shoes on. Since each horse has four hooves, how many shoes does Kelly need to fit?  4x4=16.

Another thing we really focused on was all the new vocabulary words in the horse world.  There are a lot of words that we don't use in our everyday conversations that are related to horses.

We also learned about where different horse breeds originated around the world.

And we played a game involving the horse anatomy.

Then we discussed homophones-- two or more words that sound the same when you say them, but are spelled differently and have different meanings. The words on our list of horse-related homophones were:
Bridle--Bridal
Reins--rains
Gait--gate
Bale--bail


The next big thing that gave us a lot more education about horses was our big fieldtrip to a horse ranch.

Big because anytime you take a Friday and don't have to do lots of schoolwork is big in my house. We drove the 45 minutes to the farm and ranch country of Mulino, OR. Then we were asked to fill out medical release papers and each child was fitted with a helmet for safety.
After that, the horse owner explained to the kids all about how they train the horses and tell them what they want.

My girl and her auntie, who also rode with them, listening to the instructions.

My little guy and the other Auntie, also listening to the instructions.

 

While they were learning, I noticed the different combs and brushes used for horse grooming that we had learned about.

Aren't they cute?

My little man and Me.

I was interested to learn that their approach is very different than that of dog-training and that is mainly due to the vastly differing nature of the horse versus the dog. Dogs are hunters. They are predatory animals. Whereas, horses are prey. I never really thought about horses being prey because horses are cared for and ridden by humans that hunt, and they assist in the hunt. But, when I did think about it, it made a lot of sense. Dogs are aggressive towards threats. Horses are spooked by threats. Of course horses are prey. And so, to train them, you need to make sure they are comfortable. So my kids were explained how to treat the horse while riding it to show that they are in command, yet make sure the horse trusts them and are willing to follow. After all, horses outweigh my kids by about 900 lbs.
The kids listened well, and then my oldest was allowed to hold the lead rope and lead the mare we were going to ride, a beautiful black Tennessee Walking horse, to the riding corral.

 He felt very proud to be in charge of such a magnificent creature, who wasn't really sure she wanted to be lead by him, and a few times the owner had to make her move with his gentle encouragement.
Finally, a lesson in mounting and riding in the saddle. He was up there like nothing; this is not too unusual for my oldest, he can climb anything in no time. He looked so tall up on that horse. This time my kids weren't given reins, the owner lead the horse all around. The mare didn't want to be in the circular corral, perhaps it is boring to go around in circles. So the owner lead them all around the outside of the ring and all over the terrain. Then he dismounted like a champ, and it was my tiny girl's turn.
(The 3 year old was not allowed to ride the big horses, and as of now, they didn't have ponies for littler ones to ride, so that part comes in our next fieldtrip)
She did mount the horse by herself, though she put the wrong foot into the stirrup at first.

I was so proud of my kids and their bravery and good listening.

 I had to make sure the little guy wasn't running around behind the horses, or near the feet, but he still enjoyed his time on the ranch, and talked non-stop on the way home about his turn next to ride the smaller ponies.
I made the kids a little disappointed when we got home because I told them I wanted a written report about the fieldtrip and they thought they were going to coast by on a home-work free day. Oh, sorry, I'm not that kind of teacher.. :)
The reports turned out very nice, albeit simple. I told them the header: We went to ____(Name of the Ranch) today.
The filler: I learned ________. My favorite part was _______.
And the wrap up: The horse I rode was ______ (mare/stallion, breed, name of horse, etc.).
That's it. I found out that their penmanship could use some work, but their spelling doesn't suck.

The day after that, we ventured to the Pumpkin patch (see field-trip post to follow) and the preschooler got his chance to ride!

My little girl decided to wear her horsey tights in honor of our last day of the Horse unit. Isn't she cute?

The little man had to join the picture. He's such a ham.

They may technically be unicorns, but it still fits, What a creative idea. :) 

(Oh look, she's got my knobby knees. :)

And that is the wrap-up of our horse-themed unit.  Thanks for grazing through this with me.