NZ Filbruns

Working on Vehicles

July 1, 2020 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

A lot of work was done on vehicles in May. On a Saturday in the beginning of the month, Simon bought a tractor. It was a couple of hours’ drive away, so he, Gayle and Mr. Intellectual drove up there to get it. It’s a Ford Super Dexta, the same as a Fordson 2000, but built in England in the early 1960s.

A week or two after bringing the tractor home, Simon got it running, but, as advertised, the clutch was bad.

After ascertaining that the engine was good, and therefore the tractor was worth fixing, Simon split the tractor in half and got the clutch out. He’s having trouble figuring out what it needs, so the two halves of a tractor are still sitting there in the carport.

Simon also changed the gearbox (transmission) in his Subaru. Fifth gear had gone out, so he pulled the gearbox out, took one out of a car in a junkyard in Taylorville, and put that in. The car works very well now!

By the way, Grandma, the man in the background is the neighbor that one of my boys (you know who) works for. That’s how close his house is to ours; this photo was taken from the living room window.

Five Thousand Sheep! (includes video)

June 21, 2020 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

A week ago, we went to visit some friends in North Canterbury. It was a beautiful day for traveling, with clear skies all the way over the mountains. This was about half an hour from home. The mist rising from the river, in front of the mountain, was stunningly beautiful!

The tops of the mountains, around the pass, were covered with snow.

We reached the other side of the divide, and as we left the highway and traveled up to our friends’ farm, we saw more snow-capped mountains in the distance.

Then, we arrived on their road, and saw this mob of sheep coming toward us! They move their 5,000+ sheep from the hills to their flat farm every winter for grazing, and this was the day of the big move. We’ve heard about this move for years, but I never expected to get to see it. What a nice surprise that it happened the day we went to visit! Our three oldest boys joined the ones who were walking behind the sheep, and helped them get the rest of the way to their destination.

The scenery continued to be stunning as we drove on up the road into the hills to their house. What a beautiful country!

I took a video of the mob of sheep as we drove through. Enjoy a tiny bit of our experience!

Book Review—Exploring the U. S. Lifesaving Service 1878-1915

June 18, 2020 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Disclaimer: I received a FREE copy of this product through the HOMESCHOOL REVIEW CREW in
exchange for my honest review. I was not required to write a positive review nor was I
compensated in any other way.

We were not overly interested in learning about the U. S. Coast Guard—but when I saw that Exploring the U. S. Life Saving Service 1878-1915, 17 Workshops with 120 Activities, by Rebecca Locklear, included a chapter about safety when hiking or boating, I was interested in reviewing this book. As you know if you have followed my blog for a few months, I have some sons who love to go hiking, and our whole family actually went on a longish hike a few weeks ago. I thought it would be good for the boys to go through some material on ways to be safer. Once we got the book, we found that there are some very interesting stories in it! We spent awhile looking at the pictures and reading the stories together.

We read the chapter titled “Prepare to Stay Alive” in a couple of sittings. The first time, we read the first couple of pages and discussed a scenario in which a lone hiker gets hurt—what should she do, in a cold, wet wind, to stay alive? What will her priorities be? That scenario sparked quite an animated discussion! I appreciated the suggestions given in the book.

We read the rest of the chapter as we were traveling over the mountains (in the safety of our van!) last weekend. We discussed, at some length, what ten items it would be wise to have in pockets for survival in various situations. Because the boys have had some experience in the mountains, they did pretty well at thinking through the most important items to have on their bodies (as opposed to in a backpack, which could easily be lost), but it was good to have ideas for boating excursions, as well. One of the things we hadn’t ever thought about was a way of signaling for rescue. The boys bought several survival blankets, which fold into a very tiny parcel but open up into something large enough to wrap up in. These can also double as a signaling device—they are a valuable little item! One very interesting project suggested in this section was making a solar still, for distilling fresh water from salt water. We’re in the wrong time of year to do this here (we’ve seen the sun for an hour this week), but we built one of these stills just to see what they’re like. Even just sitting in the house overnight, some drops of water formed on the underside of the plastic wrap, so it looks like it would work. Maybe we’ll get some seawater next time we’re at the beach and give it a better try. I hope my boys never need to apply the survival tips we read about and discussed, but it was good to talk about what could happen and how to deal with some possible scenarios.

This book begins by telling the history of the U. S. Lifesaving Service. There are a number of old photos, as well as text that tells the story. The next several chapters describe life at the stations. We enjoyed the skit titled, “The Bird We Didn’t Eat.” We didn’t act it out, but read it together, with different people reading the different parts. The skunk stories were quite funny, too. Several chapters describe rescues. We found that fascinating. We didn’t do the activity in which real-life situations were described and teams were to figure out whether the people involved lived or died—but I think it would be a great thing to do on a trip. This would make for some lively discussions!

At the end of the book are suggestions for art activities and music, and suggestions for topics to research further. They look quite interesting—but we didn’t have time to even explore these areas. There is also an appendix of recipes. This book is crammed full of information and activities—it would make a great summer unit study for the whole family! Be sure to visit Rebecca Locklear’s website and sign up for her emails. She is gifted at putting together projects that groups can use to learn about history by doing things.

Sixty-two other families have been using this book and one about the Mayflower. Click on the image below to read more reviews of these amazing books!

Back to Waiuta

June 14, 2020 by NZ Filbruns 1 Comment

A couple of years ago, when Gayle was in America for two weeks to visit his mother for the last time, the children and I went to Waiuta for a picnic and to explore the fascinating former gold-mining area. On one of our last lockdown Sundays, we went back there. We had been going down to the riverbed for a picnic every Sunday, but we wanted to do something different after five or six weeks. We cooked some sausages and wrapped them in a towel to keep them warm, and took a few other things for lunch. After lunch, we took off on a walk. The first time, we thought about going down the trail to the Snowy River Battery, but Mr. Intellectual had a twisted ankle so we decided not to walk much. This time, we went down that trail. What a hike!

Before we started down the Snowy River track, we did a little exploring around the site of the village and the mine shaft area. These little holes were in a bank beside an old tunnel that went into the hillside. We were curious what kind of creature made these holes, but we couldn’t figure it out.

Esther carried Miss Joy for awhile. Later, when we went down the Snowy River track, Mr. Intellectual took her. This baby is popular!

This is some of the scenery we enjoyed!

These boys went off on their own exploration, and then ran to catch up with us. Actually, I guess it’s not all boys—I see Little Miss there, too!I took this picture to show Little Miss the cloud I was trying to describe to her.

The trail down to the river goes down very steeply, through a dense forest. It is beautiful! There are trees very thick on both sides of the trail, dripping with moss, and you can hear, though not see, a small creek flowing over rocks off to the left.

After awhile, you come out where you can see a little farther. The river is at the bottom of this canyon.

Finally, we got to where we could see the rest of our party. They were WAY down there! I zoomed in about as far as my camera can go to take this picture. This was the Battery, where they crushed the quartz that the gold was in, and extracted the gold.

Looking down the Snowy River from just above the Battery. The old Powerhouse is down the river somewhere. Two of the boys went down there and back up a different track while we reclimbed the trail we came down—all 222 steps plus much more steep, slippery mountainside.

Some of the lichens I saw along the way.

There is moss everywhere. I loved this soft, fuzzy moss!

It was getting dark as we went up the mountain. When we emerged at the top, though, the sun was still shining.

More moss and ferns. The variety of those plants on this Coast is amazing!

Book Review—Mastering Logic & Math Problem Solving

June 10, 2020 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

When we were offered the opportunity to review a product from The Critical Thinking Co.™ , it wasn’t hard to decide that my boys would enjoy Mastering Logic & Math Problem Solving. Several of them enjoy puzzles, and even though the book is advertised for grades 6-9, I knew several of them outside that age range would like to try out the problems in the book.

I didn’t use this book for formal classes. I just printed out several pages at a time and left them lay on the table until someone picked them up and started working on them. Mr. Intellectual (grade 11?) was probably the most interested, followed by Simon. Mr. Diligence (grade 9) is the only one within the range of this book. He isn’t the type to really get into this type of activity, but he did help solve a number of them. (This picture shows Simon working out the first set I printed.)

The first set of pages I printed out had to do with gettting various combinations of people, animals, or things across a bridge, or over a river in a boat, without anyone or anything getting eaten. Simon and Mr. Intellectual spent a Sunday afternoon working out all of those, and quickly discovered that they were all basically the same idea.

Another week, I printed out a bunch of classical brain teasers. Several of the boys spent a couple of days mulling over the “nine dots” problem, in which they were supposed to draw four straight lines connecting all the dots. When they finally gave up and I checked the answer key, the answer was so obvious they were quite disgusted with themselves! Several of the other problems in this section, though were quite easy, and we enjoyed figuring out the answers. With the next several pages, I read out a number of the problems while dishes were being washed one evening, and we discussed them together. What fun to come up with answers to these riddles—the one we couldn’t quite figure out, though, was the lady giving a riddle to the census taker about the ages of her three children. The egg timer riddle was easy for Simon—and a great way to get him to practice his math skills a bit.

There are a lot of different types of math problems in this book. We didn’t get to the ones about ratios, proportions, percents, or even the algebra ones. I took a look at them, though, and they are fairly similar to the ones we get in our math books. That means that this book would be a great supplement for children who need more practice with algebra in real life situations. I can see us using these problems for races—who can solve them first? They would also be good for keeping up with math skills over the summer.

There are 193 pages in this book, and it is packed full of fun activities and puzzles that sharpen thinking and math skills. You can buy either the print version or the ebook for the same price; in my opinion, the ebook is more worthwhile because you can print as many copies as you want, for your own family—and it’s definitely worth getting!

Click on the image below to see what 65 other families are saying about their experiences with products from The Critical Thinking Co.™!

Creative Problem Solving, Dare to Compare Math, Mastering Logic & Math and Who Is This Kid? Colleges Want to Know! {The Critical Thinking Co.™ Reviews}

Fox River

June 7, 2020 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Last week, we had a national holiday, and one of the men in the church organized a tramp for anyone who wanted to come. Everyone who normally attends our little house church, except one man who wasn’t feeling good and another who was out of town, came, plus one other man and two tourists who were visiting one family. We had an incredible day!

I had never been on a tramp that long, so wasn’t sure how I would do. The sign said it would take two hours to reach our destination, the Ballroom Overhang up the Fox River, which is a little way up the coast of the Tasman Sea from Pancake Rocks. I’ve never walked that long at a time, let alone up a river. And with all the little children in our group? I knew it would be interesting!

Our group of 36 started out from the carpark at Fox River all together—and were soon strung out along the trail, as we knew we would be. The leader carried a radio, two others in the middle had radios, and so did the one at the end, all set to the same channel, so that we could keep in touch. At least, that was the theory; it didn’t work very well! (No one got lost, though.) Most of the time, Gayle and I were near the end of the line, and some of our boys were at the beginning. Our three older boys all helped to carry the younger children, and all five of our boys carried our family’s lunch. That left me free to focus on walking and taking photos. There were a lot of younger children who needed carrying! Fourteen in the group were under 10 years old. Besides Miss Joy, the youngest member of the expedition, there was a 1 1/2-year-old, a 2-year-old, and two 3-year-olds, who were all carried nearly all the way. We also had three 5-year-olds, plus a few slightly older ones who also needed carried over the river crossings. The older boys did most of the carrying.

This was the sign at the beginning of the track.

For the first half hour or more, we walked through areas like this. I love walking through these green tunnels of tree ferns and other trees, all dripping with moss in this cool rain forest! It feels almost magical.

Little Miss and one of her friends.

The rock formations were stunning!

A friend took this photo of Gayle and I.

This photo of Mr. Diligence and Mr. Sweetie was taken as we were resting and regrouping after the first river crossing, about 45 minutes into the tramp. We walked about another hour before the next crossing—there were six more after this first one, before we reached our destination! No bridges; we waded through on foot.

This tiny creek was one of several that crossed the track in one area. We had to step carefully over them.

The color of the water was amazing!

Because this is a rain forest, there are ferns and moss everywhere! The variety is astounding.

I saw these rocks across the river from the track at one point.

See Mr. Intellectual and his two little sisters in the middle of the photo?

About in the middle of this next photo is a stream of water gushing out of a cave into the river.

I think this is a bush robin. It was very friendly; hopping around only a few feet from me.

This is the Ballroom Overhang, our destination! The photos don’t do it justice at all; it’s enormous. I took the first one looking straight up. We ate our lunch here, and then quickly left to start back to the cars. It had taken us three hours to get there; it took 2 1/2 hours to get back.

Off we go down the river bed!

A creek came into the river from this side canyon, across the river from where I was standing. We had just crossed the river, and another crossing was only a short distance ahead of us.

The last river crossing! If you look closely, you can see several of my boys carrying little people. The one closest to me was Mr. Diligence carrying Miss Joy. I hardly saw her that day! I fed her at this river crossing, going both ways, and at the Ballroom Overhang; otherwise, other people (teenagers) were carrying her.

Almost out to the road again! We left our vehicles at 10:30; it was 4:30 when we returned. We were all rather tired, stiff and sore, but it was a good tired, stiff and sore! That day out in nature was incredible. The scenery—what I got to see in between picking my way over rocks and around mud and through rushing, cold water, barefoot, over slippery stones, was amazing. The company was wonderful, too! To top off the day, we lit a fire on the beach and roasted sausages. It was quite cold by then, but still a great experience. We are blessed!

Product Review—Page A Day Math

June 3, 2020 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Every summer when we stop doing school for a couple of months, I start looking for worksheets for my younger boys to do, so they don’t lose all their math facts when they aren’t using them every day. Every year, I try something different, and I haven’t been very happy with anything I’ve found. Now, though, I think I have what we need! I looked at Page A Day Math when it came up for review, and was immediately interested. We’re in the middle of our school year right now, but it looked like just what we needed for extra practice now, and I definitely plan to use these kits in the summer when we’re taking a break. $page a day math 2$

Page A Day Math offers kits for each of the four math operations—addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Each kit also includes some handwriting practice books, which I didn’t use so can’t comment on. You can buy either physical kits or digital ones; we were given the digital ones, which are to be downloaded and then printed. They can be used for as many children as you have—I like that! They are quite easy to print and staple together and make a great supplement to any math curriculum. $page a day math 4$

I printed a couple of the booklets from the Multiplication Starter Kit for Mr. Sweetie. He knows his multiplication facts, but is still pretty slow, so I thought he should get some more pratice. He times himself for a minute every day and does as many problems as he can in that minute. He’s getting faster! Each booklet introduces a new times table. The front and back of one page are to be done every day. First, the student is to trace each fact, and then write the answers. I don’t require Mr. Sweetie to do all the tracing, although he does a lot of the numbers because they are faint enough that he has trouble seeing them otherwise. (I’m guessing that when I get a new drum for our printer, later this week, the pages will print a little darker!)

Mr. Imagination is working through the Subtraction Starter Kit. These each focus on subtracting by one number (-1, -2, etc). As with the multiplication books, each page also has a lot of review of previously taught facts. $page a day math 3$

Little Miss is working with the Pre-K Math Starter Kit. This introduces the concept of addition; Book 1 teaches adding 1 to 0-10, Book 2 adds 2 to each number, and so on. I’m not sure what the difference is between these books and the Addition Starter Kit. Little Miss is doing well with these books. She’s been making up addition problems for me, and then she remembers the answers the next day, quite often. $page a day math 1$

Each kit comes with flashcards to print. I like the looks of them! They are meant to be printed on paper, then folded with the fact on one side and the answer on the other and glued together. Instead of just one fact on the addition and multiplication cards, there is a pair of “twins” such as 0+7= and 7+0=. I like that the facts will be correlated in the child’s mind that way. Of course, the subtraction and division cards only have one fact on each.

Each kit also comes with an assessment, which is useful to determine where to start the child. Based on the results of these assessments, I started Mr. Imagination in the first subtraction booklet, and Mr. Sweetie in the fourth multiplication one.

I really like that the children can work independently with these materials. I had to show them how to use the booklets the first day, and since then I just ask if they’ve done their page. So simple! I’m impressed with this product, and it is one we’ll be using for many years, I believe. Click on the image below to see what 52 other families have to say about it!

Daily Math & Handwriting (Print + Cursive) {Page a Day Math Reviews}

April 2020 Photos

May 31, 2020 by NZ Filbruns 4 Comments

Esther took this picture from her bedroom window one evening. See how Simon’s red van is cocked up? He had just power-washed it inside and was letting it drain and dry.

Simon also spent a day power-washing the other vehicles. Here in our wet climate on the Coast, moss and lichens grow on vehicles, and they need a good cleaning every so often.

I’m not sure what these two pictures are all about! This is Mr. Diligence, followed by Mr. Imagination.

Someone was playing with candle wax!

One day, I made play dough. Mr. Sweetie, Mr. Imagination, and Little Miss spent a couple of afternoons playing with it. Mr. Imagination made this strawberry.

All three of them worked together on this sculpture. I had found a set of playdough cutters at a shop, and they had great fun with them.

Princess loves the fire!

Little Miss says that she was pretending that her bears had a broken leg, but they didn’t.

One afternoon when Miss Joy had been quiet for a good while, I found this. She had found that the lid on the white flour cannister isn’t tight! Such fun! She was puzzled when we all stood there laughing.

I read the book A Grain of Rice to Little Miss recently, and got out some rice to illustrate what was happening.

What a happy baby!

It’s fun having two little girls.

We’re able to make all the cheese we need. Each of these cheeses is made from about 20 L (five gallons) of milk, and weighs a little over 2 kg (5 pounds). We let it sit on the counter, turning it once a day, for a week or two. When it has a good rind on it, we label it with a pencil and put it in the fridge. I have a notebook in which I write down times and temperatures for each step of the process of making the cheese, so we can trouble-shoot if one isn’t good. We’ve been making Colby for the past six months, and it’s turning out the way we like it, every time.

Product Review—Reading Kingdom

May 29, 2020 by NZ Filbruns 1 Comment

When we were given the opportunity to review Reading Kingdom again, Mr. Imagination and Little Miss were pretty excited to use it. Little Miss has been wanting to learn to read, and Mr. Imagination remembered having fun with it a couple of years ago, the first time we reviewed this product.

Reading Kingdom uses a variety of activities to help children learn to read fluently. Each lesson introduces one word. In some lessons, the child must pick the word out from several choices of similar words, several times. Next, she must look at several words with blanks in place of some letters and choose which one would make the word being studied, then fill in the missing letters by typing them from the keyboard. After that, the word is used in various sentences, which are read to the child, who also needs to choose the proper words to make the sentence. After clicking on the words, he/she has to type them, too. Finally, at the end of the level, the child gets to read a whole story! In earlier lessons, the focus is more on learning the letters that make the word. For example, here are several activities from the lesson in which “cat” is taught.

After a week or so, I saw that Mr. Imagination was pretty bored with Reading Kingdom. He is a fluent reader now, and his abilities are way beyond this program’s usefulness for him, so I let him quit. Little Miss, however, is loving it still. She’s been using it an average of 3-4 days a week through the review period (about 5 weeks, I think), and still enjoying it. In fact, it’s a great incentive for her to get her other work done, so she can do Reading Kingdom for 20 minutes! She often does two sessions a day, which is all the program allows, although I allow her to stop whenever she wants to. She enjoys getting to do computer work like the older children, and the activities are just games to her, for the most part. She was quite frustrated at first as she learned how to click in the right places and where the keys are on the keyboard. She struggled with correlating the lower case letters shown her on the screen with the capital letters on the keyboard, but it helped that a picture of the keyboard often popped up with both capital and lower case letters on the keys and the correct one highlighted. I still did have to help her find the correct one for awhile, but for the last couple of weeks she’s been doing great.

Each child has his/her own dashboard, reached by clicking on their name on the main dashboard. The child is to click on a picture of an owl to continue with the program. You can also check their progress by scrolling down a little; here is the chart showing where Little Miss is with it. By clicking on the title of one of the sections, you can see the individual lessons, and also use this area to redo a previous lesson.

Now, the real question is, does the program work? Will it teach a child to read? I think it can. I know for sure that Little Miss is much more aware of individual words on a page; she was picking out words in the Bible one evening last week as we were reading together. I was pointing to the words as we went, and she learned to recognize a few, quickly, which she had never done before. I haven’t spent enough time watching her do her Reading Kingdom lessons to know if she can read all the words she has been introduced to, but the one time I did stop by her and check, she was able to read the sentence fairly easily. One thing I noticed that she’s picked up from it is the skill of moving from left to right on a page, which is quite important for reading well.

Would I buy a subscription to this program? I might, if it was a matter of needing something educational for my young child to do and I was overwhelmed and not able to spend the time to teach her to read. For children with no major learning issues (I have dealt with severe dyslexia, so that colors all my experiences with this sort of program), it would likely result in a child being able to read fairly well. I don’t see it building a very strong foundation in phonics, though; it seems more like sight reading to me. That being said, though, awhile after we used it two years ago, I introduced “ing” to one of the boys who had been using Reading Kingdom, thinking he had never seen it and would not know what it said. He easily read it, and when I expressed surprise, he told me he had learned it with Reading Kingdom! That showed me that this system can work. Maybe I just think it’s too lazy on my part! Anyway, I’m going to allow Little Miss to continue using it as long as she enjoys it, and see how she progresses. It sure helps me out!

Check it out for yourself! If you go to this page, hover over the Resources tab and you’ll see several sample lessons. Go through a couple of those, and see if this program would be a good fit for your child. Also, click on the image below to see what 31 other families have to say about it. Three families have also used ASD Reading, developed for children on the autism spectrum, from the same company. I always enjoy reading other people’s reviews after I have posted my own.

Harvesting in April and May

May 24, 2020 by NZ Filbruns 1 Comment

When I dug potatoes one day, I found this funny duck-shaped one. Mr. Imagination loved it and took a picture of it.

A few days later when the boys harvested pumpkins, he brought this one in to weigh it. He was quite impressed with its size! (That’s 6.3 kilos, or around 13 pounds.)

As usual, we had a lot of green tomatoes at the end of the season. This lot was ripe and could be canned as whole tomatoes or juice: but we also had this to deal with:

I went online to find recipes, and discovered that green tomatoes are as safe to can as ripe ones, or maybe more so, since they are more acidic. I decided to make green tomato salsa first. I didn’t follow the recipe exactly, but the changes I made would have made it safer, since I reduced the volume of peppers. This is the proportions I used; you can find the original recipe here:
1.5 kilos green tomatoes

400 gm onions

2 small HOT peppers plus several milder ones (recipe called for 250 gm; I used more like 50-100 gm)

2 cloves garlic

1/2 cup vinegar (called for lime juice, which I didn’t have)

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon black pepper

I coarsely chopped the tomatoes and onions, then put the peppers and garlic in the blender with the vinegar. After adding the vinegar mixture to the pot, I mixed in the salt and pepper, then brought the whole lot to a boil. I did 4-7 times this amount in each pot, using three pots at a time. And here’s a tip if you do something like this: weigh the tomatoes after chopping, then use a dry-erase marker to write the weights on the outside of the pot. It washes off easily when you’re done, and you don’t lose track of how many batches you’re making! I just discovered that this year. After the salsa has boiled for a little while, put in jars and seal. We don’t like this for eating as salsa, but it’s great in soups. I’m planning to use it through the year when I am making a soup that I want some spice in; I won’t have to chop onions for the soup, either!

Here are the jars of this salsa that we canned. A lot of the tomatoes were half ripe, which is why it looks fairly red. (I should mention that the reason we didn’t leave them to finish ripening was that the slugs were getting them and they would have rotted before ripening.)

I also experimented with pickling green tomatoes (results aren’t in yet), and made a few pots of half-ripe ones into juice. It’s not quite as tasty as juice from ripe tomatoes, but when I use it with ripe ones, we don’t mind it at all. Just a way to squeeze a little more production out of the garden!

All fruit and vege shops were shut down during lockdown, and we don’t have any on the Coast anyway. However, I have my own private one. One day I went out “shopping” and this was what I brought home for dinner. So much fun! I love walking out to the garden every afternoon to harvest what we need for that evening’s meal, and getting the rest from the freezer or jar room. We are rich, and I am thankful God has given us this place where we can grow so much food. (I think it’s good for my mental health as well as our physical health, too!)