My dream homeschooling room.

I love to look at other home educators school rooms to get ideas for our school space.

This one is from Ikea and very COOL! You can see more pictures on Confessions of a homschooler blog at. http://www.confessionsofahomeschooler.com/blog/2011/08/our-schoolroom-on-ikea.html#comment-32408

Look how neat and orderly this is? WOW!!

Share your space here. I will post a picture of my school area below, we use workboxes.

These are student bins as well as craft bins and storage for flashcards and more.

I could not leave out my favorite home education sign that hangs in the dining room from my friend and fellow homeshooling mom Sue. She gave to me for Christmas one year, as she knows I love snowmen and keep them up year round. I just love this! lol. And yes for all you non homeschoolers out there, we do take snowdays off if we want to. But sometimes the subject matter we are going over is just to exciting to stop for a snowday. But if the local kids are outside playing or come and knock on the door, we do head outside for some playtime.

Butchering day is here! It really was not too bad!

I really thought it was going to be horrible, I got all these horror stories from people and I was really worked up about it all. The chickens did not flop around, there was not tons of blood and it was not nasty. We prayed before we started, thanking God for the provision of the chickens, allowing us to raise them and then allowing us to enjoy eating them. The Lord really blessed and the kids actually enjoyed the process (I don't mean like YEAH we are doing this, but it was in no way traumatic to any of them, from ages 11 and under). I was the only one that cried and I was fine until our friends showed up and then I just bawled!

We only got 6 butchered and packaged in 5 hours (but we had 7 kids and 3 adults).

Plucking the chicken this was very easy, people told us it was hard to do and it stunk, nope, easy as pie. (chicken pot pie that is!)

We got chased inside by a severe thunderstorm with some vicious lightening! lol Otherwise we would have stayed outside working in the rain, but instead we had to drag in the dead chickens and all our tools lol.....yes it was rather interesting to say the least.



The kids learned a lot, our friend is an RN and he showed all the kids the body parts and explained how the chambers of the heart work and what and where the organs were. They loved learning about the tendons and how the feet move. They played with the feet and a pair of pliers.



Butchering chickens tomorrow

I think we are ready for butchering chickens tomorrow, it's still hard since we raised them from 1 day old baby chicks. But since DS has been really pecked a few good times by the roosters, he says he is ready....lol.  The final nail in the coffin (yes pun intended!) was the other day when DS came in and said "The roosters announced today that they are ready for butchering." I ask what he meant and he told me that the one pen of roosters started crowing today. Which in chicken speak that means they are of age to be consumed.

I am thinking of scrapbooking the process, but I have to think on that for a while.

Farm Fresh Eggs for sale

Yesterday was our first trip to the farmers market. We sold out of farm fresh eggs within minutes. It was our first crop of eggs with the proceeds going to winterize the coops. We are already gathering eggs for next week. A homeschooling mom came and bought 2 dozen, she has 4 hungry growing boys! She made a donation to our coop project too. Thank you Chris  :O)  We had not really thought far in advance when we got all the day old baby chicks that winter would someday come........lol.  Winter will soon be upon us, so much work is needed to be done.

We are thankful for some Michigan friends that have been saving egg cartons for us so we don't have to buy them. 

We got a free watermelon while at the farmers market, our son helped a man load up his produce after the sale and he gave him a watermelon! So we came home with $ and a free $4.00 watermelon. Not a bad day.