While Little Man was watching "his" cedar waxwing babies grow, Princess had a nest she was keeping an eye on too. "Her" nest belonged to a mourning dove. She got great pictures, not only of the babies, but also of the mother dove! I will let her tell you all about "her" mourning doves herself.
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My seven year old son, Little Man, found a nest with four eggs in it and he has been watching it and taking pictures of it all summer. He agreed to do a guest post for my blog to tell us about "his" baby birds :)
We are still pretty busy with the garden, but I am starting to think ahead to the new school year. For science this year we will be studying Apologia's Exploring Creation With Botany (*Not an affiliate link!). I was going through it to see what kind of supplies I need to get for the experiments and I realized that a lot of the activities would be best done outside in the summer. I decided that on the days we are not processing our garden produce I will try to do activities from our Exploring Creation With Botany book. We have been having a lot of fun since we started that!
We went camping at the lake for four days last week and I thought I would share with you some of the things we did and show you all the things we learned and why I consider our camping trip a homeschool field trip :)
We made another trip to Treasure Valley Markets, (where we got our strawberries). They have such a wide variety of fruits and vegetables there that I could easily go there every week! I went there mostly for the sour cherries this time, but came home with another pail of strawberries and some cabbage too! It really is a treasure valley there :)
Around our place we are starting to see signs that we only have a couple more weeks of summer and then we will be jumping into the autumn harvest. The next few weeks will start getting really busy with bringing in our garden produce too. When that is done we will be able to get into the new school year. That means more math and reading and more structured learning again. But for now, we are still having a lot of fun learning through our summer unschooling and teachable moments!
A couple of people have commented on how great my garden looks, which I certainly appreciate. I love my garden and am rather proud of how much we are able to accomplish in the garden :) But, just in case anyone thinks I am writing all these posts about gardening because I am actually a really good gardener, let me show you that I do not actually have the proverbial green thumb...
Lemon Balm is one of the plants we learned about when we read through the Herb Fairies books. I got excited about it and bought a plant, and then found out from friends who have tried it that it is only an annual where we live and it won't come back the next spring. I was disappointed, especially since I did not actually use my lemon balm the summer I planted it. I wanted it to put down good roots so I left it alone. Boy, was I in for a happy surprise this spring when I saw that my lemon balm not only came back, but it had spread it's seeds and I had lemon balm coming up all over my flower garden! I must have somehow found a good spot where it was happy :) This summer I am finally going to try some of those lemon balm recipes from the Herb Fairies!
I can tell we are having a good break from school because I am starting to get "the itch" to get back into our normal homeschooling routine :) (Does anyone else feel like that after a break?) I have been looking at curriculums and thinking about how we are going to do things this next year. But, in the meantime, we are still enjoying our summer unschooling break and the busyness of summer gardening.
Rhubarb is a fun spring food, but one of my all time favourite foods is fresh strawberries, straight from the garden! There is nothing else like popping a fresh strawberry into your mouth after you have picked it with your own hands! Unfortunately, after years of fighting with the stinging nettle that insists on growing in my strawberry patch, I finally moved a few plants to a new location and worked under my original strawberry patch. I use to get an ice cream pail full of strawberries every three or four days from my patch. Now my patch is much smaller and we are getting only enough to eat a few fresh ones every other day or so. I wanted to make strawberry jam and I needed more than a handful of strawberries. So I decided a field trip to a u-pick was in order :)
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