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You are here: Home / Archives for Activities at Home

Activities at Home

Little Boy Having Fun

April 28, 2014 by NZ Filbruns 1 Comment

Our  littlest, who recently turned two, loves playing outside. One evening, I looked out the kitchen window to see him hanging over this gate! His big sister grabbed the camera, then ran to his assistance. It turns out that he had climbed up, dropped a pen he was playing with, then couldn’t get it. Poor little fellow was quite distressed. After he got the pen back, though, he was fine. The next act was to try to stare down the calf—and then he pretended to shoot him with the pen!

Another day, I was hanging laundry and he came out and wandered over to the shed where a puddle forms instantly under a leaky rain gutter when it rains. At that time, we hadn’t had rain for a few weeks, and he sadly commented that there was no water there. Within a few hours, however, it started raining and he happily discovered the puddle again!

He somehow manages to lose his pants frequently, and we often don’t get them back on for awhile. He likes it better this way.

One day, Daddy was fixing a door and had to lay down to see what to do with it. He had helpers!

This little fellow’s favorite activity for a couple of days was “cooking”. He would get all the pots he could carry from the cupboard in the kitchen, then spread them out on the floor in the living room and “cook eggs”. Those pots were HOT! he said.

Filed Under: Activities at Home Tagged With: Canterbury, Cheviot, Children, Fosters Road house

Birds

April 26, 2014 by NZ Filbruns 2 Comments

One morning we saw this kingfisher right outside!

Esther saw this Yellowhead another day.

And this little fellow lives in the house! He was alone for a few days, until more hatched. Now he has three friends to live with him in the corner of the kitchen.

We were all glad when some more hatched to keep him company, because he would set up such a racket when he wanted attention. He loves to ride on shoulders, but only one person likes it. He leaves “calling cards” behind!

He calls this chick his peregrine falcon!

Filed Under: Activities at Home Tagged With: Birds, Canterbury, Cheviot, Chickens, Fosters Road house

Rain

April 25, 2014 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

This has been a very wet autumn. We live at the bottom of a valley, and it is WET here! One day was especially wet. It had rained all week (that was a Thursday), and poured all that day, too. I looked out in the afternoon and was shocked to see the creek from the living room window. Normally, it trickles along at the bottom of a ditch and there is no way to see it. The ducks were having fun, but within a few minutes even they gave up and went to find calmer water. The creek had already overflowed its banks just past our house, and was rapidly building up a river across the paddock beside us.

I went out soon after these pictures were taken, and went to check the stock. Normally I don’t do that, but we’re thankful I did that day. The creek upstream from the house, in the paddock our animals are in, was only a foot below the top of its banks; normally it is a good six feet down in a gully. I could see that if it would overflow, as seemed likely, it would flood the area where our chickens were. Gayle got home from work about that time, so we spent the next hour cleaning out a chicken house we had things stored in and putting all the chickens in there. By the time we got that done, the creek had risen another half a foot and was swirling more angrily than ever. Another hour and it overflowed! The boys came and told me that there were several inches of water in the shed where I milk, and that it was up to the buildings. I had no idea when the water would go down, so I went out to milk in the flood. By that time, there was half a foot of muddy water swirling around in that shed! We were thankful that we had put all the feed up on top of two pallets to keep it out of the water. One of the boys had to sit on the other side of the cow and hold the bucket to keep it from floating away while I milked. Meanwhile, there was a river flowing fast along the front of the buildings, and around and under the house. We moved the calf to higher ground so he wouldn’t be standing in the water. Unfortunately, between the dark and the rain that continued to pour down, we have no pictures to show you—and we weren’t sorry an hour later to realize that the water was gone already! It goes up and then down very fast, apparently. The road was a raging river, too; there are drifts of gravel in places on the roadsides, a foot or more thick!

A week later, there is still a lake in the paddock beside the house. It’s beautiful on a clear day!

Filed Under: Activities at Home Tagged With: Canterbury, Cheviot, Fosters Road house, rain, Storm

New Calf

April 24, 2014 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

This is rather old news by now. It is another of those posts that disappeared. On the morning of March 21, when I went out to milk Mrs. Moo, I discovered a calf frisking around Chessie! I had gone out to check on her late the afternoon before, and thought she probably had another day to go—shows how much I know! As far as we can figure, she had the calf that evening yet; the boys saw her laying down in a funny way while they were choring but didn’t think anything of it. The calf was dried off and running already. In fact, a couple of hours after we found him, he spooked and ran away! He went across the road, through the neighbor’s fence, and across a very large paddock to the far corner! One of my boys chased him down and caught him, and then they brought the ride-on mower with a hand cart tied on behind to fetch him home. We trussed him up and tied him on so that he couldn’t move, and then tied him up when he got back to his mother. He’s still a fiesty little thing, a month later. We’re bottle-feeding him, but he doesn’t trust us an inch. He’ll come for his bottle, but very warily, as if we’re going to eat him! (Don’t tell him that’s his ultimate fate—it’s a couple of years down the road yet, but that is his destiny.) He is a Jersey/Angus cross, by the way.

For this first month, we kept him in this small chicken yard out the kitchen window. I tried a few times to get someone to get a video of him playing, but I don’t think we got it. It was awfully fun to watch, though! Once or twice a day, he would start racing around and around, sometimes butting the walls of the building or fighting an empty bucket. Usually he did it at dusk. Such a circus! He loved it when the chickens would be let out for a little while—company!

 

Filed Under: Activities at Home Tagged With: Canterbury, Cheviot, Cow

More March Pictures

April 15, 2014 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Some of you may have seen a post like this a week or so ago, because I did post it, but it disappeared. I did six posts one evening, and scheduled them so they would appear every two days, but three vanished—one before it was posted and two after. Why does that happen? So frustrating. Anyway, here are these pictures again.

When you finish your chicken, use the bones for a telephone.

Playing in the rain!

He found a bag of carrots in the fridge and helped himself to a snack.

Filed Under: Activities at Home Tagged With: Boys, Canterbury, Cheviot, Fosters Road house, Random Photos

Passport Photos

April 14, 2014 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

We had to get passport photos taken recently, because the older six children all needed their passports renewed and we need to apply for permanent residency within the next week or two. Taking those photos is quite a challenge! Here are the best we came up with; they will work for the residency application, but we had to get professional ones for the passports.

Fail! What a character.

This isn’t a passport photo–just a cutie!

He doesn’t need a new passport, nor does he need to be included in the residency application, but he wanted his picture taken when everyone else got theirs taken.

Filed Under: Activities at Home Tagged With: family photos

March Pictures

April 7, 2014 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

And here is the assortment of pictures from March that didn’t make it into their own posts!A beautiful fall day–Esther enjoyed watching these steers out her bedroom window.

One night, we ran out of hot water, so my oldest son fired up the coal range. He stuffed it full of pine cones–and soon this is what the oven thermometer registered! I made him quit feeding it at that point. We had hot water!

Bigger brother reading to littlest brother!

This is the way to do math!

Filed Under: Activities at Home Tagged With: Boys, Canterbury, Cheviot, Fosters Road house, Random Photos

Cows and Corn

April 6, 2014 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Finally, I have this post ready. I started it two weeks ago! I’ve been having computer problems; I bought a new laptop to replace my Windows XP desktop, since after this coming Tuesday it won’t be safe to use it online, and the new laptop was not working right. We sent it back to get fixed, and haven’t gotten it back yet; hopefully sometime in the next week! Anyway, that, plus the fact that for four days this past week our power was turned off for seven hours a day made it hard to do anything online–besides just daily busyness!

“Apples—I said, ‘Give me apples!’” This is Chessie, the cow we’ve had for nearly four years now. She’s rather spoiled.

Mrs. Moo, the cow we’ve been boarding and milking since I dried our cow off the end of January. She moves back with her owners when they move to their new farm the end of April.

The neighbor’s bull, who was with our herd for two weeks so Mrs. Moo will have a calf next year. We’ll probably see him again when it’s time to think about that for our cow.

Chessie again, two weeks before calving.

We went to the garden at the other place and filled the bed of the truck half full of onions, half full of ears of corn, and then the corn stalks on top!
I liked the expressions on their faces in this one! They had fun throwing corn stalks out for the cows to eat!Look how dry the hills were! That was a month ago; now the hills are green again, since we’ve had rain a couple of times.

 

Filed Under: Activities at Home Tagged With: Boys, Canterbury, Cheviot, Cow

Science This Year

March 20, 2014 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

I’m excited about what we’re using for Science this year for the boys. Until now, we’ve always used Sonlight Curriculum’s Science, which is a variety of subjects each year and mostly Usborne books. They have activity sheets to go along with the books, and the curriculum is all right as far as it goes. I was starting to feel, though, that we were just scratching the surface of all the different subjects and never digging in deeper, and the boys were getting very bored with it, groaning when it was time to do science. That’s not what we want! Well, sometime around the first of the year I noticed some science books come up on an email list I get, on which homeschoolers around New Zealand can buy and sell books they don’t need anymore. These books were published by Apologia Press, and I knew how much my Mom liked the high school level books they put out. Esther used one last year, and loved it–I never heard her talk so much about what she was learning as with that book! So, I took a closer look on the Apologia website at these books, for elementary students. I liked what I saw! They have six books for younger children, covering Astronomy, Botany, Zoology (three years: birds, fish, land animals), and Human Anatomy. There is a hard cover textbook for each level/subjects, and a notebooking journal to go along with it, with lesson plans. There are actually two notebooks for each textbook, one for older children and one for younger. I was able to get a couple of the textbooks, and notebooks for the Human Anatomy book, from the email list, so we could take a good look. Wow! I liked them immediately! The boys picked up the one about fish right away and were fascinated; one boy even started doing a project from it. I decided, though, that since we had the notebooks for Human Anatomy that we’d do that one this year, and ordered more notebooks so each boy will have one. One of the boys is still proclaiming loudly that the book is boring, and one is ambivalent, but the other two are enthusiastic–and I love it, too! This book glorifies God as Creator and designer all the way through, and shows clearly how wonderfully we are designed. So far, we’ve studied cells, and the boys each got to draw a diagram of a cell (not a simple thing, by the way!). Now, we’re studying bones and the skeleton, and when we happened to eat chicken the day we learned about growth plates we actually found a growth plate on a chicken bone! The notebooking journals provide a great way to write down what they’ve learned, and draw pictures. Some pages have questions to answer or activities to do; we’ll be building a “personal person” for each boy as we go, with overlays to glue onto a picture, showing the skeleton, muscular system, nervous system, etc. I am so thankful to have stumbled onto this book!

This is how we do science–all of us sit on the floor. I read aloud from the textbook, and then we work on filling in the notebooks.

Filed Under: Activities at Home, Book Reviews Tagged With: Book Review, Homeschooling

February Pictures

March 20, 2014 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Just a few miscellaneous pictures from February that didn’t fit in anywhere else!

Breakfast time for two happy little boys!

See the crack? My washer did that suddenly one morning! We decided it was time to stop fixing it and get a new one.

The new washer was delivered two days later, and the boys were fascinated by the first load washing!

Early morning mist from Esther’s bedroom window.

When I’m too busy to fix lunch or don’t have leftovers to heat, I sometimes let the children make their own lunches. This was my oldest boy’s lunch on one such day: Three pieces of cheese bread, two eggs, in a sandwich with two slices of bread, and two pieces of cinnamon toast! He ate it all, too.

I enjoyed watching these three playing together on this water tank one evening. They had great fun up there!

Filed Under: Activities at Home Tagged With: Canterbury, Cheviot, Fosters Road house, Random Photos

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The Family:


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