Saturday, February 13, 2010

New Baby Chicks!

We just received some new baby chicks this week and thought I'd share some pictures. We love having baby chicks, this is our third year. These chicks are fresh from Murray McMurray Hatchery. Last spring we incubated some eggs and hatched around 6 chicks. And also last spring our hens decided to get broody and hatch their own chicks too (30 chicks). Great experiences for us! With our older chickens we are getting around 14-17 large brown eggs a day out of 18 hens. The kids are in 4H and need new chickens for the county fair this summer. Now we just need to figure out how to add to our chicken coop so we have room for another 25 chickens. If anyone has any ideas on how to do this cheaply, please let us know. We ordered 4 different varieties, we even ordered some Aracana chickens that lay colored eggs (can't wait to see these eggs in 6 months). AREN'T THEY CUTE!

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Ancient Egypt Lapbook

We have been studying ancient history this year with "Mystery of History Volume 1". We did the Ancient Egypt lapbook this fall, new from www.homeschoolshare.com, but did not put it together until now. The kids drew the pictures on the cover from their work in "Draw and Write Through History-Creation through Jonah", fun book. We are also doing the "Homeschool in the Woods Activity Pack for the Old Testament" as we go along. We weren't sure how we wanted to put the lapbook together since we plan on doing some other ancient lapbooks also but decided to do it this way for now. The kids enjoyed learning about this time and place in history.

By the way, THANKS Homeschool Share and Jodi for these great ancient history lapbooks!





Monday, January 4, 2010

Duck in the Bathtub!

We have 3 ducks, 2 Pekins and one Rouen, prize winning ducks actually. The kids won Grand Champion of Poultry with the Rouen (like a Mallard) and runner-up with the Pekins at the 4H County Fair last summer, their 1st year. For some reason the Pekins have been picking on the Rouen duck this winter and the poor duck wasn't doing well at all. So we brought the Rouen duck into the garage to help it get better. Tonight hubby put the duck in our bathtub (sorda weird, I know), the duck had a great time! We are hoping this will help the duck have a quick recovery. (I know you gotta be laughing by now!) And yes he made the bathtub quite dirty. The ducks name is Daffy.


Twelve Days of Christmas Lapbook

Our last lapbook of 2009 was the "Twelve Days of Christmas", a great FREE lapbook from http://www.homeschoolshare.com/. Relating the days in the song to biblical references was lots of fun! Some of the material they already knew but reviewing and refreshing these things in their minds is a good thing (such as the books of the bible). The links to the cards for the books of the bible and the disciples are wonderful. I highly recommend this project.







Native Americans Lapbook

My kids finished their joint project on indians after Thanksgiving. We combined lapbook components from Live and Learn Press (lots of very nice and colorful minibooks) and Hands of a Child (nice research guide). We decided to put everything on cardstock and make a book out of it because there were so many minibooks. We read lots of living books from home and the library. There is so much to learn about Native American indians. We were amazed at the number of different tribes, traditions, customs, etc.