10 years later!

We had the joy of celebrating Peter's 10th birthday. God has blessed us with a wonderful, happy and insightful young man. He was born 10 days before his due date, and has continued to progress rapidly (not in height yet....but just wait, the gene pool is indicative of height).

Peter loves reading, enacting history and has an affinity to nature observation. We celebrated those interests of Peter's today.

































Gideon gave him Tech Deck






































Peter's friend Thomas joined with us in fishing, playing and nature observation. The boys concluded that the fish were smarter than them!














Some landscape architect was thinking of children when this play structure was built at the Conservation Area. It has a fort, a ship and a hill behind for hiding before the attack!















Underneath the structure there are tunnels to crawl through and escape from intruding attackers....






















....and windows to escape from captivity.








As we continue the journey with Peter into the next 10 years, the Lord willing, I want to end with this quote from Charlotte Mason, a late 19th century educator whose educational insights we follow.

"What concerns us more directly is the fact that we individually have relations with what there is in the present, and with what there has been in the past, and with what is above us, and about us; and that fullness of living and serviceableness depend for each of us upon how far we apprehend these relationships and how many of them we lay hold of. Every child is heir to an enormous patrimony, and it is for us to make sure that he in due time enters into his heritage. Education is objective. We do not talk about developing his faculties, training his moral nature, guiding his religious feelings, educating him with a view to his social standing or future calling. We take the child as we find him, a person with many healthy affinities and potential attachments, and we try to give him a chance to make the largest possible number of these attachments valid" (Charlotte Mason, The Story of Charlotte Mason, p.102ff).

We prayerfully continue the journey.

Sailing....pirates....

Laundry may be drudgery for moms, but for boys it provides opportunity!





Secure the sails.....

























Sir Gideon with his musket, knife and sword! Off to sail the seven seas.

Springtime learning

Making Clouds

Last winter semester we began our Astronomy study and this winter/spring we are completing our study. (we studied Botany and cross-continent nature as well :)

To understand why gas giants like Uranus and Neptune have clouds in their atmospheres we made clouds in a jar.








First step, gather some ice, and some hot water.




















Place a lit match into the hot water and quickly place the bag of ice on top of the jar.



Immediately the clouds form!!! Why? the cloud forms in the jar as the hot water evaporates turning into a gas "water vapour"which rises and then comes into contact with the cool air from the ice cubes. That's what creates the clouds.