My mom's homemade bird bath

Look how quirky and fun this bird bath is that my mom designed in her backyard! It's an upside down metal garbage can lid on an old milking stool, with the facet of an old sink no one was using paired with it. The birds love it, and there's even a touching story to accompany it. When my mother was a small girl, in the outer suburbs of Detroit, she used to use my grandparents' garbage lid the same way, she'd fill it with water to give the birds a drink. It started her life-long love for birds.

Museums and Nature Centers: The importance of exposing the arts, science, nature and creative exploration

The last few Fridays we delighted in some day trips to the museums in Grand Rapids and with the area Nature Center. The value in these explorations and exposure to art, nature and creative expression is priceless. I'm convinced it will instill a life-long appreciation from a young age when these opportunities are used to our advantage.
Recently we fit in a morning trip to the Grand Rapids Art Museum with some of our homeschool friends. GRAM is featuring an excellent John Audubon exhibit on the seocnd floor--there is a kids scavenger hunt they provide that automatically helps engage the kids in studying each painting up close. Love it! My daughter took in a lot as we evaluated what it was like when they didn't have cameras to take a picture of the birds they observed outside. After a quick lunch we strolled down the Grand Rapids Children's Museum for the afternoon---always an awesome adventure. If you've never been to the GRCM, you don't know what you are missing. Two floors of creative, imaginative, hands-on fun for kids of all ages, and they always have something new in store as well as the stand-by classic favorites.


The following Friday we attended an amazing Geology Rocks! class at the Howard Christensen Nature Center. It was our second trip out there this month (see our trip for the JND here) and it was phenomenally amazing. The dedication and passion the volunteers have are beautiful and the resources they have are great. We had one-on-one attention to the interests of my kids as they explored and discovered, it was a spectacular day of blissful education.


I always am amazed when I ask my children afterward what their favorite part of the day was. Not only is this giving them the opportunity to practice reflection and review, but it shows me how much they are taking in---it's always more than I suspect they are at the time.
"Education is all a matter of building bridges." -Ralph Ellison

Our Funny Farm

You can see from my Just Ducky post how small our ducks were just a month ago when we first got them. They are so much fun to watch grow and play (and waddle). The kids have had fun this week with duck puppets borrowed from the library, as well as a variety of duck books and stories. Our favorite fun story by far was, "Mr. Duck Means Business" by Tammi Sauer. We did similar activities surrounding our chickens this year with puppets, stories and egg experiments. You can read all about that here. We are having a fun year growing our little backyard farm.

Great Backyard Bird Count

The Great Backyard Bird Count, an annual four-day event that, “engages bird watchers of all ages in counting birds to create a real-time snapshot of where the birds are across the continent” begins this Friday, February 18 through Monday, February 21. Anyone can participate in the survey, from beginning bird watchers to experts.

My homeschool group started preparing for the count last Friday morning at our weekly learning cooperative with a “Get to Know Your Backyard Birds” workshop, taught by my mom, a lifelong bird lover. The kids learned tips for identifying birds starting with size, color, markings and song. Everyone was also given complimentary bags of bird seed with guidelines for good feeder locations along full-color posters depicting common eastern North American birds donated by Wild Birds Unlimited.

The GBBC is free to participate in and takes as little as 15 minutes on one day, or you can count for as long as you like each day of the four-day event. Counting helps determine how each species is doing year by year, how weather is affecting flocks and if conservation efforts are needed for a species receiving an alarmingly low count for the year.

February is also national bird feeding month, as it is the toughest time for birds to find food in the wild. For more information about The Great Backyard Bird Count, visit http://www.birdsource.org/gbbc

Peanut Butter Pinecone Birdfeeders

Grab some pinecones, peanut butter and a cup full of bird seed and you've got the ingredients for some good old fashion homemade bird feeders. It's a winter tradition in our house (along with our regular feeders) and these are the months wild birds need the most help finding food. Tie to the branches of nearby trees with string.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Well, for our house, it was definitely the chickens. We've had our chickens for over three months now, and we just this week got our first eggs laid! Needless to say it was an exciting event over here.
Since we have Bantams, the eggs they lay are quite a bit smaller than regular size chickens, (2 bantams equal approximately 1 regular) which has also made for further science experiments as we measure, compare and contrast our fresh Bantam eggs with store-bought regular eggs.


In honor of our first eggs, we've done some fun chicken activities this week.

Grandma brought over the first two eggs! We got a total of 5 this week (and found out we have a lot more roosters than we thought- uh-oh!)


Borrowed chicken puppets from the library and just-for-fun books like "Henny Penny" and "Big Chickens Go to Town" (such a fun read, especially with the puppets!)



Here are some fun sites we used, Chicken and Hen Theme, also The Little Ren Hen is awesome on the Starfall site, and gave the kids some interactive phonics reading time on the computer.
Worksheets for the kids, my kindergartner reviewed "Ch" and my toddler had fun with Humpty Dumpty activities.



The most fun by far, was the egg experiments we did!! Along with measuring the differences between Bantam eggs and "regular" eggs, we also did a really great density experiment where we sank an egg in plain water, and added salt to the same amount of water to make the egg float! We did predictions for water and water & salt for both kinds of eggs and then tested our hypothesis for each. It was so much fun! We also examined the eggs with a magni-scope to see if we could see the pores on the shells. It was great.








Here are the two sites I used to guide us along for this: Egg Fun and Egg Magic.

And here are a few more pictures, of our coop and our chickens shortly after we got them.





After our egg experiments, my daugther wanted to continue exploring what foods she could float in water, starting with an orange and an apple, lol. Don't forget the lessons don't have to end when the pages do!


For more related adventures we've had in the last few months, see my Where Things Come From post.