Pagoo - plankton videos

We started reading Pagoo this week and I've been searching the net for videos on plankton. I found 3 this morning that we really enjoyed. I a posting them here because of the inappropriate videos on the side bar of youtube. They were fun and we all enjoyed these.

Our favorite:

Another good one: 

The kids liked this one:

Now I'm off to find clipart and printables to use in my lapbook for Pagoo....

Dogs meet chickens

Everyone has so enjoyed watching the chicks!! We have 18 chicks now. Tinkerbell especially loves to hold them. When we had chickens 2 years ago, she was 6. We called her the chicken whisperer. She would walk up to a chicken and just pick it up. It wouldn't fight her or squawk. It would simply sit there patiently until she put it back down. it was so funny! I think she's on her way to that name again.

          Just hatched                                 Less than an hour old.

          

      About 7 hours old                                    1 day old           

          

It was finally time to let the dogs in and introduce them to the chicks. We're hoping that by allowing them to be around the chickens constantly and from birth, they will leave the chickens alone. Our male, who's name is Rooster by the way - so funny, has really taken an interest in them. We're not sure what he's thinking. He watches them constantly. He's even tried to climb into the box with them. Every once in awhile he will try to pick one up. He's very gentle but we don't let him. He's either thinking that is one really cool toy or he is trying to care for them. When they go to sleep and quiet down, he has to go and nose them all to wake them up. I don't think he likes when they are quiet.

 

Our female, Sarah, acted like they weren't in the room. She completely ignored them. It wasn't until Daniel Boone moved the box into the middle of the room where she has to acknowledge them did she. She slowly walked up to and around the box. 

          

After about 5 minutes of staring at, around, and finally into the box, she became angry at Rooster. She slowly began to show her teeth, then growling softly, then finally telling him in no uncertain terms to get away from the babies! We're not sure if she didn't like them so she didn't want him around them or if she wanted to protect them from that big lug. 

          

It has been non-stop laughter around here.

"WE HAVE CHICKENS!!"

That is the exciting screams that are going down the halls this morning. We forgot to put the last 2 pictures on our timeline since we were out of the house yesterday and we were very surprised to hear chirping this morning. We did check them every morning and evening to make sure the humidity was increased and the temperature was correct for the hatching this week. But then today we were so excited to see that baby chicken in the incubator. Tinker Bell came screaming down the hall, "we have chickens!!" How fun it has been today. When the one little chick finally hushes you can hear lots of little peeping sounds coming from eggs. Then the chick hears them too and starts chirping and looking for them. It's so cute!! Tinkerbell was listening to music and she noticed that when the music was on the chick chirped loudly. When she would turn the music off, the chick would quiet down. What a science experiment!! They are having a hard time waiting for the chicks. It's taking hours for those little chicks to peck their way out of the egg. They thought it would be so fast. They are learning the great lesson of patience that the Lord wants us all to learn. Here are some pictures from our hatching experience today. 

Chicken #1 (Cracker Jack) - it's the black spot in the corner. I'm sorry it's hard to see through the plastic window and the fog:

Listening for any more chirping in the eggs:

Chicken #2 (Annie Oakley) & #3 (Yoda) are working hard to hatch:

Watching Annie Oakley hatch:

                    

We know for sure that there are 4 more chicks trying to peck their way out. We'll know tomorrow just how many of the 36 eggs made it. I hope everyone reading this will try this at some point. It is so fun and a great science class and testimony to God's amazing design and plans.

Gardening

    
We have begun working in our garden to get it ready for the spring planting. We use the Square Foot Gardening method but have decided to do a lasagna garden inside each square foot plot. Lasagna gardening is an inexpensive way to build the soil and prepare the bed. We didn't do much work in our garden last year so it really became overgrown with weeds.

This is how our garden looked before we started. We had to pull all the weeds out first.

                                        

After the weeds were pulled, we dug all the dirt out of the squares and put it in a wagon.

          

Once all the original dirt was out, we began to layer. We started with shredded newspaper. For a correct lasagna garden, you should layer wet pages of newspaper to kill out the weeds. We had no weeds since we dug them out, so we shredded it to help the worms in the decomposition.

    

Next came a layer of leaves.

        

Then we proceeded to layer the original soil, with peat moss, and compost. 

        

Finally, we covered it with 2 layers of plastic. We should be using black plastic, but we don't have any. This will "cook" the compost to help it to decompose quicker.

 

We should be ready to plant in about 3 weeks. Next, we need to start the seedlings....

Chicken Study

Every year we try to hatch chickens. The kids love but unfortunately it doesn't always work. Our only set that has ever made it where all eaten by wild dogs. So, this year we're making changes. We started our incubation this week from eggs my mother gave us. We like the colored eggs so we have about 25 green eggs and about 10 brown eggs in the incubator. We put them in on Wednesday.

I like to make it a fun timeline study while we watch them incubate. There really isn't anything to see so by making a timeline it shows us what is going on in the eggs.  I found this idea a few years ago while researching how to incubate so I can't give credit to whomever had this idea as I have no idea where I found it.

 (here is our timeline and incubator)

We take 21 plastic Easter eggs and number them 1-21. I look for embryo pictures online and cut them out and put one picture in each corresponding egg. We make a 21 day timeline and hang it on the wall behind the incubator. Every day we open the egg that corresponds to that day and hang the picture on the timeline. No matter how many times we've done this, the kids still love it! Here they are filling the eggs with the embryo pictures.

                 

Here are some really good sites for learning about incubation and for the embryo photos:

Mississippi State's 4-H Club - great site for black and white photos of embryo and lots of great information

Univ. of Illinois - Incubation and Embryology - cute site for lesson plan ideas (we're trying the egg in the bottle trick)

Univ. of Nebraska, Lincoln - 4-H Embryology page - some good information but I don't like their embryo pictures

Enchanted Learning - lesson plans, worksheets, embryo pictures and more

Happy hatching!!