Week 24-25 & Maple Syrup Day

The past two weeks have moved quickly. It seems like we've done a lot. We also fit in another field trip for this school year. We haven't taken many, this was our 3rd one for the year. I just wish it had been a little warmer. I want to tell you all about our trip, so I will try to be brief with our school work.
 
History: In history Sis has been learning about the Roman Empire.One of the books that we are read is "City" this book explains how Roman cities were planned and built. We learned about the different building structures as well as roads and aqueducts. It was pretty interesting and I loved that it had a lot of illustrations so that we could see what it was talking about.

 Sis only drew one picture in her notebook over the past two weeks, but I think it's my favorite one this year. She drew one of Hannibal's war elephants, when he took 40 elephants over the mountains to Rome. I won't show you all the other note booking pages with her writing and timeline.

Boo learned about Samuel Morse and the invention of the telegraph in US history. We already learned a little about Morse code in science this year, so some of it was review. Boo had fun writing secret messages though with the codes. The second week she learned about the California Gold Rush. Here's some of her copy work from both weeks.

 
For a history project Sis made a card game, called "Go trade." Similar to "Go Fish." The cards had different items that were traded to Rome from other countries. For example a card would say "Oil and Wine from India." and the goal was to find all of the matches. Here is a pic of us getting ready to play our card game. Baby Bear just decided to photo bomb us.

Science: In science we continued our unit on water. We used our veggie steamer to observe boiling water evaporating and turning back into condensation as it hit a cool lid. We placed some ice on the lid to help the gas cool quicker forming larger drops more quickly. Then we watched them fall back into the pot. This was just sort of a review of how rain happens. One new thing we discussed though was that clouds actually have the ability to move so that water that evaporates over the ocean doesn't necessarily rain back down over the ocean. God designed an awesome way to water the whole earth with the lakes and oceans.

Bible: All of Boos Bible lessons this week focused on Jesus being the Lord of Lords and King of Kings. She made a crown with her memory verse on it.

Art: We decided to go back and do a painting that we skipped earlier in the year. This one was of a field with a spider web! The spider web is white and you can't see it great in the pic.

Maple Syrup Day!

Finally here is a little bit about the field trip we got to go on. We took a little road trip an hour from home to Chippewa Nature Center where they were having their annual Maple Syrup Day event. We got to not only learn all about how maple syrup is made, but got to explore the nature center, participate in crafts and games and spend some time with some of our family that live around there. In the visitor center the girls got to see all kinds of animals, Indian tools and a canoe, observe birds feeding, touch different animal skins and all sorts of cool things.
Baby Bear liked this stuffed turkey on the right.
 Here is a picture of Boo and Baby Bear feeling all the different animal furs. This was a good activity to go along with Boos adventures in US history since she's been learning all about pioneers who hunted and wore animal skins. There was also quite a bit of Indian things for her to see.


 After exploring the nature center and observing the birds and ducks on the river. We went to do some crafts. There was also a pancake breakfast for those who wanted to sample the homemade maple syrup. The girl's uncle decided to give them a try. He said it was the best he's ever had. The girls then made Maple leaf name tag necklaces and then they made little baskets that look like maple trees. We also played a couple games like a beanbag toss and a hopping game. I tried to get a good picture of them with their crafts, but Baby Bear was freaked out by the stuffed bear in the case behind htem, even after I assured her it was dead.

 
After we left the visitor center we took a wagon ride out to where they make the maple syrup. It was a little chilly and very muddy. I had been hoping for a nicer day, but it wasn't too bad. I forgot to get a picture of our wagon ride. Our first stop was the sugar house where the syrup is made. Outside they had some syrup boiling in a large pot over a fire. The man explained to us that is how they use to have to make the syrup in the old days. Now they have much more efficient machines.

Then we went inside and sat through a demonstration where they explained how they make the syrup now. We were shocked to learn that they have to get 40 gallons of sap out of the trees to fill up the machine, but most of the sap is water. The machine uses evaporation to get all of the water out of the sap and when it's all out only 1 gallon of pure maple syrup is left! Wow! It takes a lot of tree sap to fill all of those bottles. I loved that we were learning about evaporation since that's what we are also learning at home in science! I couldn't get many good pics of the demonstration.

  
Next the girls got to go outside and learn how to tap a tree and how they connect the buckets to the trees to catch the sap. We opted out of the guided tour through the woods to look at trees because it was just too cold and muddy.

After that we went to an old school house where we sat and watched a puppet show about Maple syrup and trees and we got to finally warm up next to a heater!

After the school house we went to another old log cabin house that looked just like something out of Little House on the Prairie. Inside the girls did another craft of planting beans seeds that they got to bring home to grow. Our last stop was to my brother in-laws parent's home. They raise pigs and just had a few litters born, so we went out behind their home to meet one of the baby pigs. The girl's were so excited and in love. Now they almost cry every time I feed them ham.haha.