4-H nature walk on a sunny day

This was a typical Charlotte Mason nature walk, I guess.

The children are to be “let alone, left to themselves a great deal to take in what they can of the beauty of earth and heavens.”

Give them time and space to wonder, grow, watch, see, hear, and touch. During the nature walk, they may sketch and record their observations. In addition they may want to collect small natural treasures in a bag to take home for further study.

Miss Mason recommended two activities during a nature walk

1. Sight-seeing or exploring expeditions
In this activity, you send the children off to a specified area with a task: “Go explore over there and come back when you can tell me all about it.” When the children return, let them share verbal descriptions of everything they experienced.

2. Picture-painting or mental photographs
Picture painting is more stationary. You choose a scene to study and then sit and look at it for several minutes, taking in as much detail as possible. Then ask the children to close their eyes and recreate the scene with words. If they are not sure of something, they can open their eyes and look. This activity will develop both observation skills and narration (telling back) skills.

On this 4-H trip we ventured around the Shiloh gardens, which is a land situated close by IHOP-KC. Everyone had to find something unique. We observed and found many interesting things. Afterwords we met in a group and shared about our findings.

Kevin’s find was a frog and a dead fish.

Dead fish became the object of various poking and squeezing experiments.

Teah’s find was bunch of flowers. Sophie found an access to the pond, with a shore full of mud. Long stick became a fishing pole and she was getting all kinds of slimy things from the water. She was enjoying it for some time.

My American husband joined us and found some shots to be captured.

I found peace for a while.

All citations taken from this wonderful site about Nature study.

Polish pancakes

Teah’s demonstration for the 4-H club was Polish pancakes.

Ingredients:

1-2 eggs

4 cups of milk

3 2/3 cups of flour (part of it can be whole wheat)

dash of salt

2 tbsp. of sugar

2 peeled, sliced tart apples

2 sliced bananas

possible other fruits to add: frozen or fresh blueberries, peaches, walnuts, pecans

coconut or canola oil to fry with

Mix all the ingredients in the given order, pour on the frying pan forming pancakes, fry until light golden color, serve with: powdered sugar, maple syrup, fresh strawberries, mint leaves, chocolate syrup, whipped cream or whatever you like…

Everyone had seconds.

Kevin’s science demonstration

Action-reaction. Basically blown balloon with 2 pieces of a straw taped to it, hanged on a string between two chairs, released to travel from one chair to the other. Simple, but teaches the Newton’s Third Law of motion (For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction) effectively.

This was a preparation for Kevin’s 4-H club demonstration.

Teah’s violin recital

Solo she played Bach’s “Musette”.

After solo pieces the whole Brock’s Upper Room Suzuki group played worship songs, so the concert turned into a prayer meeting.

baseball

-Kevin, how was the game?

-It was so much fun! There was a race between the hot-dog, ketchup and mustard! We’ve got free blankets! They were shooting the T-shirts and the hot-dogs from a gun! We had chips! People were kissing on a huge screen! One man proposed to a girl and everybody saw that on a screen too!

-Did they play baseball?

-Oh, yes, they played.

KC Royals played Toronto Blue Jays. Our friend, Luke took the boys for a “men day out”.

how many people are born every day

Intriguing questions are asked constantly around the house. That’s the question I’ve been just asked by Teah and Kevin: how many babies are born every minute and every day? I had no idea.

According to WikiAnswers:

4.1 births every second.

245 every minute

14,698 per hour

this means

352,755 people are born every day

10,759,033 a month

and 129,108,390 are born every year

WOW! 4 babies every second!

What’s on your fridge

When I first visited USA in 1991 I was mesmerized by the refrigerators being “decorated” by various items. It seemed like a “story wall”. I’ve never seen this tradition or however you want to call it before.

This is what’s on mine in April 2008( it changes every few months), and I promise I did not make it just for this picture :

Dana’s gang (Keith’s sister) from Baton Rouge. We wish we could see them more.

Fitness schedule for the Gym, which we rarely use. It is a reminder for my American husband that the place called Gym exists and is calling his name. For me it is a rather an unimportant piece of paper hanging there. Every time I put it somewhere else, it emerges again on the same spot few days later, so I guess it is important.

Champion’s clan. We met in Qatar (Persian Gulf). They were the worship leaders in a local Christian fellowship. They sort of adopted us there, opened their house to us, helped us so many times in whatever we needed, but most of all, became really good friends, which in a place like Qatar was a blessing. For some time now, John (father) and Chris (youngest son) are battling the cancer. You can visit their website to learn about their courage and journey on this trial.

Teah got this note holder for me. I use it to write shopping lists. Very useful.

My 3 cousins, living now in Syria. Amina, Magda, Miriam. I miss them and don’t know much about their fate.

The Stones, Lois, Steve and Jeremy. We met them in California, they invited us to stay at their house after barely knowing us for 2 days or so, took us to a vacation in the California mountains, visited us in Kansas City. They encouraged us while we needed it the most.

Gosia Olszewska and her family. Gosia’s husband, Frank was one of the first street preachers I ever heard in my native city, Wroclaw. He went to be with the Lord not long ago, she is still a sign of wonder to be the brave widow, still serving as a leader in Christian community in Wroclaw.

Balassi family. Where to start… We’ve met while living in St. Louis, MO waaaay back in 1995. They were the worship leaders of a team from St. Louis Vineyard, which came twice to Moscow with Randy Clark and lead worship in Russian. They visited us in Russia and Poland, helped us more than 100 times, made to reconsider many ways of life, showed me the way of homeschooling, living faithfully and serving the people around them. They should make a web site and share their stories.

One of many Sophie’s creations which end up usually on the fridge doors for the by-passers to admire her gifting.

What’s on your fridge?

4-H project at Megan’s house

Our friends are doing a 4-H project on Embryology. They’ve got 12 fertile eggs and an incubator. The chicks started to hatch yesterday. Mr Poky was the first one to come out, 5 more followed today. We visited our friends to have a look at them. So cute and fluffy.

Click on this picture to view a slideshow:

FCF Sunday worship

Last Sunday Brocks Upper Room group had a privilege to accompany IHOP-KC orchestra in Sunday worship. The kids were playing “All honor, all power” and “Jesu, my desire”.

picnic

We went to the picnic. Bone fire, horses, cats, peacocks. Worship circle, glory of the sunset, laughter. One of the fasting teams at IHOP celebrated the end of their 21 day fast.

Here are all the pictures on black, or below the selection (you can click on each of them to expand).

At the end the kids were riding the horses, but the battery in the camera died…

Innocence

2 days ago was the very first day of spring. (I thought, but it’s again gloomy and cold.) The kids spent most of the day enjoying sunshine, swinging away and playing outside.

Sophie was thinking about the future.

Teah took this photo telling me that these small flowers smell the sweetest form all of our plants in the backyard.

Teah took this one too.

She was swinging away.

She spotted this sign of spring.

Sophie was singing and playing.

She loves her pink shoes from babcia (grandmother) from Poland.

Teah’s vision of the world from behind the swing.

IHOP orchestra

International House of Prayer in Kansas City has it’s own orchestra. This Sunday they will play during the three services.

Teah is playing violin, studying in Brock’s Upper Room. It’s been exciting to see her develop musically and spiritually under the leadership of Tim & Melody Brock. The course of learning includes not only musical instructions, but also creates a desire and skill to worship our God with all your heart. You can see the promo video here.

The whole group is going to join the orchestra and perform with them, playing worship songs as well as other pieces.

You can watch it here, April 20th, 8:30 am, 10:30 am, 6 pm CST (15:30, 17:30 i 1:00 czasu polskiego)

Pictures from the rehearsal:

More pictures here.

Rockburger

The other day was a painting day. Teah got a book called “Paint a rock”.  She got in the idea, found smooth rock and made a ROCKBURGER.

Set the table.

New paints always encourage artistic pursuits.

The artist is using acrylic paints.

Voila!

Rockburger.

She had it for lunch.

Demolition

These are pictures from the demolition which is taking place lately in and around our house. This gallery is a new feature on WordPress and I don’t know how to change the order of the pictures, so they are somewhat scattered, but the idea is still the same: DEMOLITION.

Keith has been working hard. So far he got rid of the shed, 2 concrete driveways in the yard, shower tiles, and two kitchen cabinets (not pictured).

You can click on each picture, it will give you the title on the top and you can leave comments under each picture.

Hail

In Poland we have a proverb:

Kwiecien plecien, bo przeplata troche zimy, troche lata.

April weaves a dappled pleat, a little cold, a little heat.

On April 10th, afternoon, we got a sever weather warning. It was relatively warm, over 60 F. Suddenly there were gusty winds, gray-greenish clouds and few minutes later hail was banging all over:

The biggest pieces were about 1-1,5 cm in diameter.

Hail forms when strong currents of rising air, known as updrafts, carry water droplets high enough in a thunderstorm for the water droplets to freeze. Once hailstones grow large enough to begin falling despite the updraft that’s been holding them up, they hurtle toward the ground as fast as 90 mph.

It all happens in the lowest layer of Earth’s atmosphere: Troposphere.

Earth’s atmosphere. Project done by Teah in March’08.