It seems that oak trees live everywhere in the States. However different types tend to prefer different climates. We were able to actually to observe oaks in two parts of the country, some in the Pacific Northwest and some in the Midwest.
We identified the Oak tree that we saw in Kansas as the Bur Oak We found this tree at a little park where we stopped for lunch one day. We hunted and hunted for acorns on the tree and on the ground. We found a couple of misshaped nuts. We concluded that the people in the neighborhood must have collected all of the acorns before we visited the park.
Unfortunately, due to the fact that my camera is broken, we weren't able to get pictures of the trees that we checked out in the Pacific Northwest. My kids, along with some of their friends, collected leaves from these oaks as well as all the other bushes and trees in the immediate area and this is one of the last pictures that I got before my camera went crazy.
We had a hard time identifying the oak that we saw in Washington state, as it matched most closely with the California Black Oak, it seems to me. However, the furthest north that the California Black Oak grows is southern Oregon. The only oak that we could find that is supposed to grow in Western Washington is the Oregon White Oak, but our leaves and acorns did not match this oak. The lobes on the leaves of our trees came to a point and had a little barb on the end. Maybe these trees were planted and were not native to this area or maybe there is more variation to the White Oak than we saw in our field guide.
The kids both chose to illustrate the tree closer to home.
Zippy was the only one who did an illustration of the tree. Both chose to do illustrations of the leaves and acorns.
By JD Boy (age 6)
By Zippy (age 9)
I nearly forgot to say that we found a couple of excellent books on trees. The illustrations are just beautiful and the information and writing style is charming as well. They are The Big Tree and My Favorite Tree: Terrific Trees of North America (Sharing Nature With Children Book). I promise that if you have children the ages of my children, you will love both books and no matter what age you are, you'll love the second book.
My husband is still a kid. I wish I was more like him in that respect. He recently decided that he would really have fun if we would put a zip line in for the kids. You notice, who I said would have fun? Well, he has. The rest of us have too. In less than two weeks, we have spent so much fun time on the zip line. Even G'tums, our three-year old rides it with thrill.
Here is a short video of the kids ziplining (And just so you know, even though that isn't in the dictionary, I did find other people who knew that it was the verb form of zip line.)
"Mo-o-om! There are soldiers at the neighbor's house!"
You see my kids were outside playing during school hours. After all, even homeschoolers deserve recess (and I needed to get the refrigerator cleaned out.) My kids have already discovered that sometimes people notice them during school hours and make comments to the point that my kids have become a bit shy about being seen during school hours. Our house is fairly private, but you can see it from that neighbor's house and now there were soldiers over there.
Next, all three of the kids came running in and they were talking at once, so I hope I got it deciphered right.
"Mom, they drove by real slow and looked straight at us!" (Let me translate that comment. That means, "Mom, they noticed that we're not in school. Now what?") "Mom, they WERE soldiers." "Then they turned in at the neighbor's house." "I bet they have guns." Can you hear the fear?
I didn't see the soldiers, so I have no idea who they were. (Maybe they thought it was Halloween a day early.) I was slightly amused though, but especially when I heard the solution to the problem from JD Boy. Only a six-year-old would come up with this.
"Mom, I know what to do. If I see them out there again, I'm going to quick put on my long jeans." (He's wearing shorts. Don't ask me why, maybe I should send a note to his mom to dress him better for this weather...) "I'll grab my fireman rain boots and my fireman raincoat and paint my jeans really fast to look like fireman pants. Then I'll run out and grab a hose and start spraying and they won't want to mess with us, because those fire hoses are really powerful, you know." (Yeah, but we don't have a fire hose connected to our house, we have a garden hose. Oh, well, maybe they wouldn't notice the difference.)
Breath!
"If that doesn't work..." (What do you mean? It sounded like there was no doubt that that would work.) "I'll grab a stick and start pretending like I'm shooting at the bear." (We think that a bear got into our trash again this week, so the kids are a bit nervous when they're playing outside right now. I am too.) "Then when they see me shooting at the bear, they'll know that I know how to shoot and they'll be afraid to start shooting at me." (What ever made you think that those soldiers were there to shoot YOU?)
I think everybody is calmed down now. We've already talked about the fact that we are legal homeschoolers. Someday maybe laws will change, who knows. But for now, it's legal. Police and soldiers aren't on their track. (Maybe they just came to get that bear. Now, they would be my heroes if that's what they're driving around for.) Why are my kids afraid that they're going to be snatched away if they're not busily doing their schoolwork during school hours?
For some reason, this reminds of my little brother (meaning younger, not smaller). So I just have to tell you one more funny story. (I hope you're reading this Bro, if not, you're supposed to be. You're supposed to be one of my blog fans.)
He was homeschooled too. One day, he was working in Grandpa's garden during school hours. He was probably right around six or seven and spent as much time as possible with Grandpa in the garden. Anyway, according to my brother, the UPS man came driving up and looked right at him. (Scary!) So my brother knew what to do immediately. He started jabbering about driving his tractor. (Yes, he did have pedal tractor.) After the UPS man drove away, he came running in to tell Grandma all about it. Then he said, "Don't worry though, Grandma. He thought I was a farmer. He just thought I was a midget." (Well, I'm sure he wouldn't think that now, if you'd try the same method again! Oh, but you're old enough that you don't have to worry about truancy laws anymore.)
Even before I had children, I knew that I wanted to homeschool. I spent some time thinking about that I would not be shy about our homeschooling. We would be proud of it. That way my kids would never feel afraid that somebody was seeking them out for not being in school. I was sure it would be easier for me, because time has passed since my little brother was being homeschooled. Nearly every state (definitely mine) has laws for homeschoolers. There are a bazillion homeschoolers. I would make sure that my kids would never be afraid of people wanting to just reach out and snatch them away for being homeschoolers, but I guess I didn't pull it off. My kids have the same fears that my brother had, just have different solutions....well, not really, but anyway.
Am I the only one with this problem? Are your kids afraid that someday they'll get snatched away just for being homeschoolers? Or have you successfully suppressed all of their fears? If so, how?
I'm sitting here in the middle of suitcases, sorting laundry and feeling a bit disenchanted by the whole concept of traveling. Don't get me wrong, I have enjoyed the last three weeks, (Did I mention that we have been traveling for three weeks?) but three weeks is a long time to be away. We've visited three states in three weeks, one week for each state. Plus we've had a layover in a fourth state. We've spent some lovely time with family, including cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, great-grandparents, second cousins and great-aunts and uncles. The kids got to ride in a real John Deere combine. (Remember, my oldest son calls himself John Deere Boy... He was a happy little man.) We picked cotton (just a handful). We visited a museum. Went out to eat more times than I'd like to pay for. We drove by two houses that I grew up in. Saw the school that I went to for elementary and high school. (I was in a small rural school.) Met up with my highschool biology teacher. (That was a treat!) Stayed with grandparents in the house that my husband grew up in. Saw the school he went to. (Well, he was homeschooled, so I guess we saw the room where he went to school!! He did take a few science classes at the local high school, and we saw that too.) Drove through the campus of the university that my husband and I graduated from. We visited two cemeteries and found the markers of six loved ones. We visited parks. We learned some geography. We played with cousins until we could drop. We flew on four airplanes and drove around 1400 miles. And last but not least, we did some schoolwork.
Now we're to what has me wondering about traveling. I don't know if you travel so much that on some of those travels, you need to keep working on school work. Well, we do. For this trip, I packed a whole suitcase full of books. Now I'm unpacking and realizing how many of these books never got touched. We did work on the 3 R's, nearly every day. For math, one of the interesting things we did, was weigh suitcases and get them to exactly 50 lbs. Actually my daughter finished up her first math lapbook too. She did spelling a few days. They both read to me nearly everyday. We did do a little nature study, but I had grand plans for that. Maybe I should be thankful for the nature study that I didn't plan though. My kids got to feed, chase and hold chickens over and over and that's something we don't have at our house. They got to harvest soy beans and learn how weather affects the harvest. They picked field corn and learned that each cob always has an even number of rows. They picked cotton and found out where cotton comes from. They learned that there's a big difference between Kansas mud and Nebraska mud. Maybe they learned more from that nature study than what I had planned. I also had great plans for reading some biographies while we travelled. We read part of one. I had three along. That was for history. Maybe I should be glad that my kids had the opportunity to visit so many places that have shaped and formed their dad's and my life. Maybe that's history they'll remember and that is important to them. I took along a book on drawing. We thought we'd have fun doing some drawing. Never opened it. They did draw and draw and color and color with the cousins though, so maybe that was better, especially since they don't get to spend enough time together. One thing, I'm not concerned about is whether they got exercise while we were gone. There were six kids between three and nine and they played and played and played some more.
So now I'm trying to figure out if I should feel guilty that we didn't get more schoolwork done or if I should feel thrilled that we got any schoolwork done. What do you think? What's your philosophy about taking books along with you when you travel? Or do you travel that often?
I did learn a lesson, I hope. No matter what I plan, when we're traveling, it needs to be less. I shouldn't pack quite so much in the way of schoolwork. Then maybe I won't have to mess with weighing my suitcase!!
P.S. Sad to say, my camera broke. So this is a pictureless post.
We have really enjoyed having a garden this year. This is really our first year to successfully have a garden. To a large extent this was my husband's project, but I sure enjoyed the fruit of his labors. The kids were very involved in the whole process. They helped plant. They helped water. They helped weed. And they helped pick. Every day at lunch, I could just say, do we have any such and such in the garden, and they would race up there to see who could find what I needed the fastest. What a blessing gardens are, not just to the stomach, but also to the soul.
Here are a few pictures taken over the summer of our garden.
Our very own radishes. (They were a bit hot though. So we're going to have to work on those a bit.)
Our first peppers! Woohoo! Maybe next year we'll grow enough to can some salsa.
Three of our umpteen and some zucchini and yellow squash that we harvested. We ate either zucchini or yellow squash nearly every single day for a few weeks, then we just had to have a break. But I've found a couple ways of fixing them that I think are absolutely delicious.
Our squash jungle about ready to swallow G'tums!
We even did some nature study in the garden. Since we were studying about garden flowers, we decided that this eggplant flower could qualify as a garden flower.
Here is our last picture from the garden season. My daughter took this picture when we were in the garden doing some nature study.
They're in the bus and we're in the garden. And now you know why we are--drum roll--homeschoolers!!!
and 
. I promise that if you have children the ages of my children, you will love both books and no matter what age you are, you'll love the second book.
