Because of the rain, all the goats and kids are muddy, but still the cutest things on the planet.
We have many new developments to report at IOS. Luna, our white pygmy goat, had three kids about a week before her due date. Here you see "Whitey." He is full of spunk and is very affectionate. He has a brother named "Oreo" and a sister named "Hiccup." Bella had her babies the next week. This one, "Pumpkin" is just a few minutes old here. She also has a sister named "Miss Mocha." Bella had a hard time expelling her placenta and ended up visiting the vet, but she is fine now...and hungry all the time! Because of the rain, all the goats and kids are muddy, but still the cutest things on the planet. The bad news is that we were invaded by a marauding possum who decimated our chicken population before being apprehended. Our rooster, Zipper, put up a valiant fight, but did not survive his injuries. Of all our flock, the only one left is Kumquat, one of our hatchlings. She now thinks she is a baby goat, spending her days following the goats around and napping with them. It is very hard to get her back into the coop now as she thinks she needs to be with her goat family at night. Losing our chicken friends has been really hard, especially Zipper...and now we have no eggs! On the bright side, soon we will have goat milking going on, and that will be amazing...especially when it isn't mud city in the pasture once again.
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We are in our final week of summer camp at IOS. We have had a lot of fun. In the first session we made bamboo boats with troll captains and had boat races in the creek. We launched them from upstream from our canoe, which was very cool. Our mornings usually begin with gardening, feeding the animals, and then hunting. In this photo a brave hunter finds three huge snakes the first morning of camp. In the first session we made peach preserves and canned them in a hot water bath. This session we made solar pickles. The peach preserves were delicious. We don't know yet how the pickles will taste as they are not quite done. We shucked corn and roasted it and today the kids are making corn husk people. We are having a blast and other than that, trying to stay cool! At IOS, you will not find our students playing video games on a computer, but you may find a class working on a stop action animation to present their take away from a water cycle unit of study. You may find a web cam aimed at newly hatched chicks, so the children can check on them over the weekend. You will see older students doing research for their independent study projects. You will see kids documenting their outside investigations with cameras. You may see kids watching a Brain Pop video about erosion before spreading out to collect logs and rocks to build check dams. You may hear soothing music coming from an ipod dock as children write stories, or hear Otis Redding in the kitchen as the students unload the dishwasher. We know kids like to play video games. We just don't think that is what they need to be doing at school.
We have the billy goat buck, and as I sit here typing, his billy smell wafts from my hands as they move over the keyboard. It has been a great adventure so far. We had planned for him to spend time with only two of our does, but of course, he had his own plan which involved getting under the fence of his smaller pen. Seen here, chasing after the one goat we had not planned for him to get to know. Our donkey was not happy to have him come uninvited under the fence and she had him in a grip with her teeth, hauling him around to show him who is the boss of the farm. Today they seem to have made peace and he is still in one piece. Having been warned that billy goats can be nasty mean, we are very happy to have the perfect gentle goat for our campus. He is quite friendly if you are not trying to get him to go where he doesn't want to go. Today, the primary students harvested lavender and then taught the older students how to do it. Lavender sorbet and lavender chocoloate are two of my favorite plans for our first harvest. We planted these last spring. Good things come to those who can wait. At snack time, several intermediate students made up a new batch of hummingbird feeder nectar. They used four parts water to two parts sugar. I hope you caught our hummingbird live web cam last week. We are back to chick cam now. The chicks are getting bigger every day and can fly up to the rim of their chicken hotel. Last week the intermediate students drove to Smithville to dig red clay, which we will use next week when we do the final plastering on our cob oven. We went to a really cool organic farm in the piney woods that is off the grid. We ate lunch under the stark skeletal burned trees at Bastrop State Park. One last photo for this blog...a before picture of our oven taken recently. It is April. The gardens are in bloom, the grass is growing and needs frequent mowing, and students are working to finish projects before Expo, our community sharing day. We have other things growing and changing as well. We have located a billy goat buck to "rent" for 45 days, who will be arriving on campus soon if all goes well. Come October we may have baby goats on campus. Whatever happens, these next weeks will be an adventure! Three of our own coop eggs hatched this week and we have 3 new friends, "Cutie," "Fred," and "Kumquat." "Fred," was stuck to the shell and it was due to the heroic efforts of Kate that it lived. We cannot wait to see how the genetic traits manifest in our new mini flock. Last but not least, we have a date to finish our cob oven. We are excited to welcome Trey Farmer back to IOS to apply our final plaster. Next week we will drive to Bastrop and dig buckets of red clay for our cob. This week our dimension of Human Greatness is "Identity." All of these things help make IOS what it is. Once we were a dream. I hope you are dreaming big, too. Every Wednesday morning at the Inside Outside School, we have Peace Circle. We gather in the theater space together, light a candle, meditate to center ourselves and then one of us shares a story that connects to some aspect of Human Greatness. When we were working with "Identity" we heard the story of the Soul Bird, the bird that lives in each of us, the bird that has the keys to open the little drawers inside of us that hold our feelings and bits of our self that we may open often or rarely. Sometimes we tell the soul bird which drawer to open and what we want to think and feel and sometimes it decides all by itself which drawer to open. The children did some amazing watercolors to represent the soul bird inside each of them. In our lives, the soul bird dips into some dark sticky places where the drawers are stuck and when they open there are sticky feelings in them. It is nice to know that we can handle feeling those things and that there are plenty of drawers to open that help us feel better. As we work with big ideas like Identity, Integrity, and Intuition, we learn more about who we are and how we can be true to who we are. This week we will be working with the dimension of "Imagination." Do you think trees have feelings? I wonder. This week we harvested the rest of the winter garden in preparation for planting the spring garden. Good thing we waited since we had such a freeze here. This carrot came out of the garden. It is probably the result of not thinning the carrot patch. Our donkey will make short work of it. One of the primary math groups made collages of bird pictures, working with numbers between 10 and 20. We have been keeping bird feeders around campus and have begun to see and hear a wonderful variety of birds. They are nesting in the palm trees, above the garages, and under the porch eves. For this months portraits, the students used feathers, flowers, leaves, twigs and bits of bark to make nature self-portraits. They are breath taking. Our Dimension of Human Greatness focus this week has been Initiative. I figured I could take the initiative to do a blog post today. Students are taking initiative by adding more guiding questions to their inquiry projects this week, which always changes everything. We have a new student and the campus is vibrant and green. It is very good. One of my favorite outside activities that we are doing at IOS is nature journaling. We begin by recording the date and temperature and making a small box on our page to draw what the clouds look like today. Then we sketch what we see. There is so much to see, from the little twigs with their complicated bark markings, to rocks with rough grainy surfaces to the way the creek looks as the water swirls around tree trunks. As we sit and sketch, we become aware of birds starting to sing around us because we have become so quiet. Looking up, I notice that you can see bird nests so much better in February when there are no leaves in the canopy. Beauty is everywhere around us even now in its more stark attire. One of the most inspiring movies to come out of the change in education movement of the last few years is "August to June: Bringing Life to School. I have watched it over and over and have fallen in love with Amy and her class. One of the things she did with her students that we have embraced this year is to create a self portrait each month and make a book of them at the end of the school year. Last week our students studied the work of Picasso and Cubism, before working on their portraits for January. Here one of our third graders studies her face as she makes the portrait. Here is her finished portrait. The intermediate class used water color and the primary class worked with oil pastels. Brain Pop provided the background on Picasso. We used overhead projectors to help with the silhouette part of the project. This week we will focus on imagination for our Dimension of Human Greatness. We began on Monday by imagining the life we want for ourselves in the future. My visualization was that our school was continuing to flourish and that our influence spread beyond our gates, that our vision of children in nature at school could have the kind of influence on education that Amy has had from her California classroom. I want for children everywhere to be free to ramble in the woods in every season. I hope they will all see the patches of green begin to appear at the end of winter. I imagine that every child will know the joy of splashing in a flowing creek and trading berries in their woodland storefront. I wish for each child to know the excitement of collecting an egg from the chickens, and to be able to grow food and use a screw driver. This is a face of education... a happy face. We are now set up so you can subscribe to our blog via email or an RSS feed to make sure you know when we have something new to share! You will find these new features at the bottom of the right hand side bar of the blog.
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