Pumpkin Patch

Field trip! We visited a local farm to collect pumpkins from their pumpkin patch and enjoy their autumn carnival and corn maze!

We played in the hay bale maze,

then rode out to the pumpkin patch on the hay wagon.

We searched the patch for the perfect pumpkins,

and pulled them back to the hay wagon in the pumpkin cart.

Once our pumpkins were loaded into our car, we played around some of the other carnival games and toys for a bit,

then finally headed into the corn maze.

Such a fun day!

October Playdough of the Month: Nutella Dough

Well, I certainly let myself get behind. October has been a fun and busy month! We've been doing a lot. I just haven't blogged any of it. As October is almost over, I'm going to try and cram in a few quick posts with some of the highlights of the month. Let's start with playdough!

What with it being October, we could have made a pumpkin playdough. But that would have been too predictable. Also, we're doing that next year. So what to do instead?

One of the books we used this month was the adorable Woody, Hazel, and Little Pip by Elsa Beskow.

Amongst other characters, this book has little acorn people and hazelnut people. Hmmmm, hazelnuts....oh, look what I just happen to have!

Several years ago, when I did preschool childcare, we made a Nutella playdough recipe. It was a simple recipe, just powdered sugar and Nutella. I was positive that I remembered the ratio.

Edward was quite interested in the Nutella jar,

while Vance wanted to play with powdered sugar.

Eventually we managed to combine our ingredients and start mixing them up.

Because I was silly, we just dumped everything into the bowl at once. This might have worked if I had remembered the correct ratios, but alas, my memory had doubled the amount of powdered sugar needed. Instead of one part sugar to two parts Nutella, we did TWO parts sugar to one part Nutella. Oops. The resulting mess was rather crumbly.

Not that the boys didn't have fun with that. And we got to play with different textures.

Eventually, we added more Nutella to our crumbly dough, and achieved a silkier, squishier texture.

We wound up with quite a lot of playdough, even accounting for the boys nibbling some. All in all, it was a success, even if we took the roundabout way of getting there. Even knowing the right recipe, from now on I'm adding powdered sugar in small increments, as it's a lot easier to correct mistakes that way. We've had a lot of fun with this playdough this month, and if you're the kind of person who can handle "ruining" Nutella, I highly recommend it!

Happy Michaelmas!

While Super Sam helped tame a dragon for Michaelmas week,
we got to work making swords and baking dragon bread!





Vance's sword was made from a fallen willow branch we found after a summer storm. Peeled, sanded smooth, and notched with a pocket knife (I did that part), all it needed was was some yarn to bind it together. Vance selected a lovely purpley-blue, and set to work.

Round and round, the yarn he wound...

I pulled it tight and tied it off, and Sir Vance's sword was complete!

Later, both boys helped mix up dough for our dragon bread

Though only Vance stayed to knead it.

Simple, yet ferocious, our dragon boasted many spikes, teeth, and even a few extra eyes!

But in the end, he was no match for our hungry tummies. Yum!

Autumn Leaves

The weather has been wavering between mid autumn and high summer for a couple of months now. Last week, however, the Autumnal Equinox made the seasonal change official, and it was imperative to take notice. It was time for our annual tradition of making leaf crowns!

There aren't many trees around our apartments, and what few there were have already lost their leaves completely, or hadn't even started to turn. The need for leaves was the perfect excuse for a long excursion about the neighborhood. Leaves were collected, nature inspected, and a passing dragon was kind enough to offer us a lift.

Once we returned from our roving and rambling, we sorted out the leaves and did our best to preserve some of them. Leaves we'd collected at the start of the day were already starting to dry out, so we got right to work. While there are more effective ways of preserving leaves, they take more time than we wanted, so this year we kept it simple and waxed our leaves by ironing them between sheets of waxed paper.

The next day Vance and I peeled the leaves off of the paper and glued them onto simple paper circlets to make our crowns.

Edward didn't want to take the time to make one himself, but he was happy to wear the one we made for him.

The remaining leaves were either strewn about in a festive fashion or added to our nature table.

How do you celebrate the changing seasons?

Kites

What better way to spend a blustery autumn day than flying a kite?

As it happens, we already own a couple of good, large kites, but they're the kind of kites that need a large, wide open place to fly, not the kind with which we can step outside to enjoy on a moment's notice. To remedy this situation, we made some little kites, using this pattern.

Edward preferred observing the kite making process to actually participating, but wanted to be front and center to all the action.

Later, we enjoyed the fruits of our labor. It took a few giddy tries,

but Vance managed to keep his kite in the air more often than not.

Edward preferred the "taking my kite for a walk" method of kite flying.

For the most part, the weather this week wasn't actually that great for kite flying. The days were either too rainy, or not windy enough. Still, I expect that there will be plenty of days for flying kites before the winter arrives.

September Playdough of the Month: Peachy Playdough

We had a wonderful first week of home school, and it ended with a bang. Well, maybe with more of a squish. We made playdough!

Each month we'll be creating and exploring a new kind of playdough. For September, we made Peachy Playdough!

It was fairly basic, as playdough goes. We just used the basic recipe that has been around for time immortal:

1/2 cup of salt
1 cup of water
2 tablespoons of cream of tartar
1 cup of flour
1 tablespoon of oil
Food coloring

Mix everything together in a pan. Stir well. Cook over medium heat 4 to 5 minutes, stirring constantly. When mixture clumps together, remove from pan and finish kneading with hands (this part is hot! don't get burned!). Presto change-o you have created amazing playdough that will last for ages if kept in an airtight bag.

We made a slight change to the recipe, though. We nixed the food coloring altogether, and prepped out water ahead of time to make it peachy. This was accomplished by steeping bags of Celestial Seasonings Country Peach Passion herbal tea in our boiling water.

Once the teabags were cleared, things proceeded as normal. Our playdough had a faint peach color, and smelled perfectly peachy. Once it had cooled enough that the boys were comfortable touching it, the real fun began!

Vance made a peach!

Poke. Poke. Poke.

Edward tends to take a few minutes to warm up to playdough, but once he does, he enjoys it every bit as much as his brother.

I think they would have played with it for hours if we'd had the time, but all good things must come to an end. Not to worry, though. Since this playdough keeps so well, we'll be playing with it all month long!

School's in Session!

A beautifully breezy morning - not too chilly, not too hot - provided the perfect backdrop for the grand opening of Zephyr Academy. As much as I'd like to deny it, Vance is growing up. Not a month ago, we celebrated his fifth birthday. Since Vance is now old enough to begin Junior Kindergarten, our home school has officially welcomed it's first class of one.

Along with younger brother Edward, who will be auditing this class at his leisure.

Though we're drawing inspiration and ideas from many sources, the core of the curriculum we're using for the Kindergarten years comes from Waldorf Essentials. The school year is based around an ongoing story about a kind and clever little gnome named Super Sam, and a little corner of our home has been transformed into "Super Sam's world."

Vance already adores Super Sam, and thoroughly delighted in immersing himself in the fanciful kingdom.

After a perfectly peachy morning, we had planned a long walk to a favorite park, where we planned to play and to look for fallen leaves. I suppose things had been going too perfectly, because it was time for the best laid plans of mice and moms to be laid to waste. Right outside of our front door, on this auspicious first day of school, some rather industrious gentlemen were hard at work fixing up our parking lot. How could we not watch something so exciting?

Luckily, one of the benefits of homeschooling is its inherent flexibility, so we spent nearly an hour being fascinated by liquid asphalt splashing onto the parking lot, being spread around and smoothed down like shiny black paint, and slowly changing color as it dried in the sun. Yes, we got our jollies "watching paint dry." I'm okay with that. We even made it to a park after all, if not the one we had initially planned.