I had the best idea for this summer with the kids. We were going to do our own mini version of summer school. We decided to pick a theme for each week and then do a fun project, a food, some real life application etc. along with learning more about that topic via the library, internet and of course, hands-on. It started out great. Our first week was Plant Week. We decided that although we did not have a garden plot, we still wanted to try our hand at growing stuff. We decided to go with planting a few things in flower pots. That was our big project for plant week. We also learned as much as we could about the trees growing in our area and tried to figure out what kind of tree was what. We spent a lot of time outside this week, on our bikes, walking around town.
Our little garden started growing well, especially considering we had to water it with buckets. But soon the dear found it and ate up most of our tomatoes, green beans, and radishes. After that, we weren’t so happy, especially Jenny who gives so much of herself when she is nurturing anything. We ended up getting one tomato, some little radishes, a bunch of Swiss chard, some basil, cilantro, and just tonight I harvested some green onions to use in our dinner. Not the most productive garden ever, but we definitely learned some things and had fun doing it.
For our second week, we had the theme of bugs. Oh, did we have fun this week and a bunch of the weeks that followed. Jenny got so into catching bugs, finding out what kind they were, looking at them for a while and then releasing them. She mostly loved catching grasshoppers. If ever I couldn’t find her, I just assumed that she was out bug catching. And although technically spiders aren’t insects we included those in our studies. Matthew and our nephew Sam, who stayed with us for a few weeks during the summer, caught spiders and then put other insects like a yellow jacket into the same jar and were going to see who would win in the end, the spider or the yellow jacket. Jenny really couldn’t take the torture of this and so Sam and Matthew released them both. The kids and I went looking for bugs on one of the hottest days of the year, it felt like. We ended up down by the Greybull River in the shade of the cottonwoods. While there, Matthew found an injured butterfly and held it for a while. So fun!
I wish I had more exciting things to report. After this week, I started into moving mode as we were preparing to move across town what we thought would be the middle of July. So our summer school plans faded as my excitement to move to a new place blossomed. I am so glad we started it, even if we didn’t get to all the things we had previously planned.