Sauder Village

In October we did two more field trips. One was a children's theater presentation of The Wind in the Willows.

Here are the kids waiting for it to begin. 


They all enjoyed it and we read through the book after seeing the show. The girls didn't want me to wreck the show by hearing the book first.

Our next field trip was to Sauder Village in Ohio which is a living history experience. This was a challenging experience as before we even entered the place the kids were fighting like crazy. Once we got in there was much complaining about only wanting to ride the train and not do anything else. By the end of the day it was a little better, but I am taking a long hard look at whether it is worth doing more field trips or not. There are two more we are signed up for and that is all we need to do to fulfill the commitment to the group. Anyway, here are some pictures from the day. 

 The kids on the train

They had a 1900s "Main Street" section which had a gas station and repair shop and this car which they allowed the kids to sit in.

As you can see it's a Ford model T I believe....

The kids thought the phone in the shop was pretty cool. 

17 cent a gallon for gas anyone?

They also enjoyed watching the pigs at the barn. 

They got to try their hand at butter making

And watch a goat be milked. 

There was also a museum that we did a quick walk through of. 

Evie enjoyed pretending she was in the snow. 

And they all enjoyed putting their face in as the bride!

And again as settlers on their way out west.....

Or crazy oxen :-)

Evie figured out it was much more authentic if she put her hair through.

There was also an Indian camp setup

But the best stop by far was the wood shop with all the toys!

We didn't find this until the end of the day, but all the kids had so much fun with the simple wooden toys!

The boys can home asking if Dad could make them some of the toys. We'll see if that ends up being another school lesson or not :-)

Our pets

This past Summer and Fall we have had several creatures besides monarchs. This included a turtle, Tyler, two snakes, Digger and Philip and Marco a blue spotted salamander.

Here is a picture of Digger and Marco. Digger is a Northern Brown snake, they are pretty small. Marco was pretty big. 

Here's another picture of Marco. We let Marco go two weeks ago so he could hibernate before winter comes.

Here is Digger again, unfortunately he died because his cage flooded one day.

This is Tyler the turtle. Isn't he cute? Is was a wonderful little pet. One day the lid was left off his aquarium and he escaped. The good news is turtles can smell water a mile away, and there is a pond behind our house so he probably made it there.

Of course the kids were also catching lots of toads and frogs. By the end of the season they were able to identify some of them by their marketings and had names for lots of them that they were recatching.

Isn't this a cool caterpillar? Okay, just thought I'd throw that one in here too even though we didn't keep it :-) 

Monarchs!

This August the girls saw a monarch butterfly laying eggs on the milkweed behind our house. So we brought some of the milkweed with the eggs inside along with a tiny caterpillar we found. The caterpillar we brought in only on a leaf which was a mistake. I went and got it a plant without looking very carefully and accidently brought in two more eggs. We ended up with five eggs and one baby caterpillar. A couple weeks ago the last three of the chrysalis hatched and we successfully launched six monarch butterflies. It was so much fun!

Our counter full of milkweed!

Here is an egg on the leaf

Here is a just hatched caterpillar

Another very young caterpillar

But they grew pretty fast

And we got to clearly see their many stages

Isn't it cute?

With it's skin

The face is yellow here after shedding it's skin. 

We got to see several of them shed and then eat their skin

For awhile we had two of them hanging out on the same plant

Once they got big and nearing chrysalis time we moved them to jars

This caterpillar hangs out on milkweed too :-) It's a tiger moth caterpillar

You can see this one in starting to turn green!

And here is the chrysalis 

Apparently they shed their skin one last time when turning into a chrysalis, because here you can see the head skin of the caterpillar. 

You can see the butterfly before it emerges in the chrysalis

Our first butterfly emerging!

Their wings are really small when they first come out.

And their bodies are huge

The wings start to get bigger and the body starts to shrink

I really thought I had pictures of us releasing at least the first butterfly, but I can't find them anywhere. So this is all I have. But they all hatched a really nice days and were able to fly away.