Pretending to be Home Educators ;)

More chicken news first – we have a new home for the fiesty cockerel – as an aside, Tarly calls him the ‘feasty’ cockerel as she always forgets the word ‘fiesty’ (ironically!) and if he had a bit more meat on him he would indeed be feasty :lol:. I’ve agonised over the whole thing feeling that I’m being a bit crap being slightly scared of him and not liking the rather disposable nature of it not working so us getting rid of him. However the chickens are not pets, they are more an educational resource and a first foray into the self-sufficient lifestyle we’re hankering after and having done the whole hatching chicks, killing, cooking and eating, celebrating first laid eggs, hatching our own, letting hens hatch for us and so on. Reading chicken forums, smallholders blogs and taking advice from other poultry-keepers it is clear that if a roo is mean he has to go – either in the pot or to somewhere where he will be put back in his place by other, meaner roos or given space to not have to vent his aggression on people. Possibly a bigger flock would have calmed him, but just as possibly not and we don’t really have the space to risk that. Also he was a particularly vocal specimen. I know cockerels are supposed to crow but he really did start at first light and keep it coming til dusk. I’ve no real idea of any negative feelings about this from neighbours – the one’s we’ve talked to about it have either said they like the ‘country feel’ it gives hearing him or that they don’t notice but we had reached the stage of avoiding going round the back of the house as that would set him off and in a garden as small as ours making bits of it out of bounds isn’t feasible. Also it was interfering with my pegging out the laundry :lol:.

So tomorrow night he’s going to live with a smallholder Ady has befriended near where he works. He did say that if we were to sell him at auction in a trio (with 2 hens) we could get over £100 for the3 of them being rare breeds and fine specimens but that would put us with no mother for our wee chicks and no certain hens. Something to think about for the future though… The bloke is also up for bartering and in exchange for our roo and some plants (something Ady has plenty of access to) we can get some meat from him, all organic and locally produced. The plan then is to move the 7 big chicks into the house and run with the remaining hen so a pecking order can be sorted out between them while the broody hen and her 2 babies go into the smaller house and run together before putting them all in together in a few weeks. It’s all a bit ‘Chicken Run’ out there with all the sub-plots and politics, they could do with a scriptwriter really to give them some dialogue!

So aside from all the chicken watching we’ve had a day of acting like proper Home Educators. Currently sitting on my fireplace are two testtubes with white flowers in standing in red and blue food colouring and sucking up the colour into their petals. I’ve had the laminator gathering dust, last used for a Very Hungry Caterpillar life cycle flash card thing Sarah linked to back when she was still Home Educating and I was still pretending to do it properly. I have hama beads that only I have ever beaded with, we have got passed lesson 22 from 100 Easy Lessons with at least one child and I still have posters on the times table up on the wall in my playroom but today I finally joined the ranks of True Home Schooling with the white flower and food colouring ‘science’ ‘experiment’. And it works. And we were impressed. And it made us conclude proper scientific stuff about plants, the genuine safety of food colouring for even us to eat and finally it made us parody TVs Adrian Goddard in a who can do the best impression of Daddy saying ‘plants need water, that’s a FACT!’ competition 😆 😆 :lol:.

This morning we did plenty of not a lot – watched some TV including a Zoo Vet programme about abandoned kittens, a show about a zoo in Auckland where they took young cheetahs out on leads for a walk and had hours old baby giraffes to coo over. The children did some drawing; Davies has taken to labelling his pictures suddenly. Some of the labels he copies from places but has to first work out what they say to ensure he is copying the right thing, others he asks for the right spelling of and sometimes he makes up his own. He sent an elaborate picture downstairs last night, folded up into a paper aeroplane asking for a glass of milk including a picture of a spotted cow, arrows to show her being milked into an urn, then into a carton and finally a glass with the word ‘MIRC’ written at the top. He often substitutes L and R for each other, which sounds odd but when I listen to the way he sounds things out I can see where he gets confused as he seems to make a sound like ‘earl’ for both making them interchangable.

I decided to do some baking and Scarlett came to help – we made flapjack and chocolate brownies. Unfortunately something went arwy with either the oven temperature or the timing (or possibly which shelf I put them on) as both were overdone. The brownie was only good for the bin really but we ate the (rather toothbreakingly crunchy) flapjack with false cheer! 😆

After lunch I went and gathered all the science kits from the playroom – most are those couple of quid from Tesco ones, some of which we’ve done before and are always lacking in rather vital things (one required tincture of iodine which simply isn’t a kitchen larder or bathroom cabinet staple around these parts!) but we did a good chemisty one about seperating things using sand, water, iron filings solution and then filtering through paper to seperate liquid and solids and then using a magnet to pull out iron filings. Aren’t iron filings fun – I’d forgotten the joy of them. I loved those and magnesium tape in Science at school. We then did the flower experiment and as all the other ideas called for things we didn’t have wemoved onto the next kit which was optical illusions. This had different colour plastic paddles to hold infront of playing cards to change the colours in the pictures or hold two or more together to create filters, a mini kaleidoscope, some mirrors to make a periscope (we liked that one lots and spied on the chickens from under the window), spinners to make animated pictures.

Davies then went off to get a weather kit he’d got for Christmas and not opened yet which turned out to be pretty good – a basic weather station with a chart to plot the weather conditions 3 times a day over a week. He put together the wind gauge and then set up that, a rainfall monitor and a thermometer all outside in suitable locations as the booklet advised, filled in the middle of the day readings and remembered later to go and take late afternoon readings and enter them on his chart which we’ve put up to remind us to complete.

We had a very crunchy flapjack break and then came back for a test tube Tesco science kit on electricity about making a battery. This involved cutting out circles of blotting paper and silver foil which as I doubled them over to cut out double thickness to save time got us talking about counting in 2s. I got Davies to do it up to 20 and then carry on to 30 by which time he’d worked each 2 increment and spotted the pattern. Then I asked him if he could count in 5s to 50 which again, having got to 25 he spotted the pattern of and was away. Then we did counting in 10s which he said was really easy because his Simpons DS game awards points in 10s so he is used to watching it go up like that 😆 I asked what 5 x 10 was and without hesitation he said 50 so he’s got the number pattern, the recall of just ‘knowing’ 5 lots of 10 is 50 and it appears a proper base level understanding of what that looks like in his head too. We then talked about sums like 8 x 2 and how you could use your fingers to count up in 2s until you had 8 fingers up and how 8×2 is the same as 2×8. His grasp of numbers is pretty good actually and as and when a new ‘mathematical concept’ is introduced aslong as it has some relevant context for him he seems to get his head round it very quickly.

The experiment was pretty good – we had to strip some plastic coating of the end of two pieces of wire so we talked about that, made a salt and vinegar solution, wired one end of a LED to a piece of silver foil and the other to a coin and then made a battery sandwich of coin, silver, paper soaked in solution 8 times, pushed down on the top one and lit the LED :). That rather delighted them although they are now keen to try it on a larger scale.

Eventually Davies drifted off to play x box and Scarlett brought out her make up and a doll to do a sort of Girls World type makeover on her. It did amuse us to think that while everyone else is on half term we pulled off more in the way of formal education than we usually manage in months :lol:.

The children had tea and our food shop for the month arrived shortly followed by Ady. That was finally put away and I did bedtime story before packing them off to bed so I could watch The Apprentice.