Zoo Fun!

Maintaining a zoo membership is a lovely thing in conjunction with homeschooling! We recently attended with a few homeschool friends, it was a beautiful sunny day - making for many hours of fun, exploring, playing and animal observation. A wonderful day!!

Making Ice Cream

Yesterday we enjoyed a beautiful sunny day at one of our favorite parks, Wildwood Park. But to make the fun even BETTER we hosting an ice cream making day with our homeschool group - it was fun!

This is such an easy and fun little project that can be done anywhere. You take a gallon ziploc bag and fill it about 1/4 full of ice and six tablespoons of ice cream rock salt. Then you take a quart size ziploc bag and fill it will 1 tablespoon sugar, 1/2 cup cream and 1/4 teaspoon of vanilla. Seal this ziploc bag really well and place it inside the gallon size bag of ice & salt. Seal the gallon bag up really well and start 'working' the bag - shake it, shimmy it, roll it and wiggle it. Shake all the ice cream makings around in that ice until it is frozen... about five to ten minutes. Then open and enjoy the ice cream ~ DELICIOUS!!!

Nature Boxes

A few years back Holly did a project where we took an egg carton and painted several natural color schemes in each little egg cubby. She started to learn about shading colors, changing various greens and browns just a tad with either white or black paint. Then we took our Nature Box out for nature walks to fill it up. Such a simple project. The great thing though, is aside from learning shading she is learning to stop and take a closer look in nature. Noticing that the green of trees is not the same green for each tree or that pine cones come in several shades of brown. The nature box slows a child down and really gives some focus to their time in nature. We have also done a box that is specific to the beach with more greys and lighter colors, same concept just meant for the beach.


I decided to try this activity with some fellow homeschool kids through an activity with our homeschool group. We had a great attendance and the children really enjoyed this project. They loved painting the cartons and then had a great time using them on our nature walk. The kids kept stopping to compare contents or share with others where they found a great treasure along the path that might work for one's box. Once our nature walk was finished we gathered and the kids all did a show and tell circle with their boxes, sharing a few special treasures found along the way. This was a lot of fun to with friends!

Nature Walk - Signs of Spring

Spring is just around the corner... we are much, much too excited! Excited to get back outside comfortably, excited to do more outdoor nature studies again, excited to get our garden seedlings started, excited to spruce up Holly's exploration garden and playhouse area and excited to hit the park a ton. In the mean time we braved the cool, windy and wet weather of our final days of winter in search of signs of Spring. Guess what? We found some!

As we were walking Holly noticed the lively song of several frogs in the background - they were very busy calling out to each other. The trees were a flutter with several different kinds of birds tweeting about. Buds were popping out on several trees along the way. And, we even found a couple of little flowering plants... all great signs that Spring is just a matter of days away.