Kim Mills

How To Get Rid Of Tent Caterpillars

May 252013

The eastern tent caterpillar can be a real nuance. I loved playing with these little caterpillars when I was a child and my children still love to play with them. But if your trees are filled with nests, these caterpillars can quickly defoliate your trees. Unless your tree is young or under stress this normally wont cause long term damage. The tent caterpillar lifecycle lasts 7 to 8 weeks and the tree will simply grow a new set of leaves.

However one of their favourite foods are fruit trees. Leaving the caterpillars to themselves on our fruit trees can be a big problem. Yes the trees will recover, but I have found when heavily attacked they will often drop their blossoms and put the energy into growing new leaves. This means little to no fruit will be set, really not something I want to happen.

Most people in our area simply use a small propane torch and burn the nests. This does work well, but can damage the tree and leave large black patches behind. Also if the caterpillar nests are higher in a tree it’s difficult to reach with a torch.

The method to get rid of tent caterpillars that works the best for us is simply vegetable oil. I save used vegetable oil from our deep fryer and pour it into a small spray bottle. You can certainly use fresh oil but I like finding a use for the used oil. Just spray it onto the caterpillar nest later in the evening when they have all come into sleep for the night. It will kill them quickly because insects breath through their skin, once they are coated in oil they can no longer breath.

This method is a quick and easy way to get rid of tent caterpillars. I like finding non toxic methods to deal with pests in my garden!

Kim Mills on Google+

Victoria Day Nature Walk & Storms

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May 252013

Last Monday after planting our potatoes we met our good friends for a nature walk at a local park. We had a great time, except early afternoon when it’s 31C + humidity isn’t the best time for a hike! LOL Especially after spending hours out in the garden. We had planned to plant the potatoes later in the evening, but they were calling for storms so we wanted to get them in before the garden was to wet.

Oh well despite the heat and bugs it was still fun. Now we have the woodstoves running. What a spring!

The trillium’s were in full bloom!

Swampy areas meant a lot of black flies!

Pink trilliums!

Late in the evening we had some bad storms roll in. The worst just skimmed us but we had very strong winds and rain for a while. The garden has sure loved all this rain!

Kim Mills on Google+

Garden Update Victoria Day Weekend

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May 252013

Goodness it has been a crazy spring weather wise. This past weekend our temperatures jumped up into the low 30C and was very humid! We worked to get some of the garden put in, but since later in the week it was suppose to get cooler I decided to hold off on transplanting all of our tomatoes and peppers out. I’m glad I did because it’s now near 0C at night! Some areas even had a little snow this morning. Ick!

While the nice weather was here on the weekend we picked up another load of wood chips, planted our potatoes, beans and squash. Our lilac bush is in full bloom and smells amazing around the yard! The apple trees I was worried about in our Mother’s Day storm pulled through just fine and have been flowering well.

The blossoms on the apple trees are HUGE this year. I guess they really enjoyed the pruning we did!

Our rhubarb is doing very well this year and I’ll be starting to harvest it soon. I’ve grown rhubarb on all of our other homesteads with out any trouble, but it has never grown well on this property. I’ve tried different locations with out much luck. This year we put cardboard down around the plants and covered it with mulch. It’s now doing amazing!

Our gooseberry bushes are starting to set fruit.

The living mulch clover we seeded last year has come back so well. It’s over a foot deep! We will have to give it the first cut soon so I can plant easily.

Our potato patch is in. The garden is a mix of Cal Whites, reds I think Chieftain or Norland and Russian Blues.

Kim Mills on Google+

Review ~ Learning In Spite Of Labels by Joyce Herzog

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May 242013

Learning styles has been a topic of interest to me for the past year. So I was very excited to receive a copy of Learning In Spite Of Labels by Joyce Herzog to review.

Joyce Herzog has a passion for teaching and helping people to learn how to learn. She has been an educator for 25 years in public and private schools. Joyce Herzog has also been serving homeschoolers with her speaking and writing for over 25 years.

I loved reading Learning In Spite Of Labels and I’m already reading it for the second time and reading it aloud to my hubby.
I love that this book is written from a Christian perspective, and filled with tips and suggestions on how to help your children learn. I love finding solutions to try!

It’s Table of Contents:

Section One: What Do I Need To Know?
What Does It Feel Like to Be Learning Disabled?
A Look At Learning
Behavior and Strengths
Issues to Consider

Section Two: What Do I Need To Do?
Introduction to Doing
ABC’s of Learning
Twenty-Five Teaching Techniques that WORK!
Teeny Tiny Teaching Tips

Section Three: Where Do I Start?
Begin At the Very Beginning!
Setting the Stage
A Person, Not a Problem

Section Four: And Furthermore
Learning Styles
The Law
Learning Problems in History
History Repeated
Attention Deficit Disorder
Vision Skills and Therapy
Speech and Language Development
Individualized Education Plan
Depression: Causes and Cures
Appendix A: Resource Guide
Appendix B: Author Information
Afterward

The book starts out trying to show you how it feels to be learning disabled. Your first task is to write an important date and place on a piece of paper. Yes it sounds simple enough doesn’t it? But the trick is you have to hold the paper on your forehead while you write. Then see how well you were able to write it. It gives you a different perspective on how others may struggle to do what you think of as a simple task. Would you like to be judged based on what you just wrote?
Then it moves into how people learn information and how sudden a change it is for a child to go from a free style learning environment to an 8 hour school day. So many options of expression are removed from their abilities before they maybe ready for reading and writing.

Joyce talks about how in someways we are all learning disabled, in that she isn’t good at understanding how things work and her husband can’t style girls hair. It really depends on what standard you are measuring against. I agree with this in many ways. My hubby can play many instruments wonderfully, me? Well you don’t want me to sing trust me!

The section on 25 Teaching Tips that Work is a gold mine of ideas, from thanking God for the situation and praying for his guidance and blessing to providing frequent review in different learning styles.

The Teeny Tiny Teaching Tips section is filled with little nuggets for all parents. One of my favourites was if your child has trouble telling right from left, put little smiley faces inside the arch of each shoe. The shoes are on the right feet if the smiles are facing and “kissing”.
To help mark the left and right hand side of the page, put a green dot in the left margin and red dot in the right margin. Green means start and red means stop. There are just so many ideas for hands on learning that this will be a book I refer to often!

I highly recommend Learning In Spite Of Labels to any parent not just toughs who have struggling learners. There are so many wonderful ideas in this book on education, ways to learn and work around struggles.

You can download a PDF sample of this book on their website.

Learning In Spite Of Labels cost $15.00

The School House Review Crew received 12 books and curriculum from Joyce Herzog to review. For more information please click the banner below!

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Kim Mills on Google+

Nature Study Peppered Moth

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May 172013

It was a beautiful day outside, not to hot and not to cold. So needless to say we spent most of it outside! While hubby was working on his lawn tractor he called us over. He found an interesting looking caterpillar on the lawn tractor that we’ve seen a few times before.

They are a mottled brown and look a little like an inchworm. The kids had fun looking at him for a little while before putting him safely in the little dogwood tree he likely came from.

I was curious what this little caterpillar was so when I came in later I headed to Google A search for grey and brown stick looking caterpillar turned up a few. It turns out our little guy is a Peppered Moth. I’ve heard of these before but I didn’t realize that these were what the caterpillars looked like.

Please report references to olei@despammed.com.

Photo credit: Wikipedia

The caterpillar is a twig mimic and can be in a range of colours from green to brown.

It goes into the soil later in the year and pupates over the winter. They emerge from pupae between May and August to continue their life cycle.

stick caterpillar

Kim Mills on Google+

Blogilo VS Windows Live Writer

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May 152013

I do like the WordPress interface, but I really do prefer to blog offline when possible. Living in a rural area our internet can hiccup a lot. I hate being almost finished a post only to lose it when the internet goes out! For many years I used Windows Live Writer for blogging, it’s about the only MS program I do like. Then about 1 1/2 ago I switched to Linux as my main operating system. I love it and I don’t regret the decision at all. However I keep my copy of Windows XP running in a virtual box for a few programs I need. Windows Live Writer being one of them.

I’ve tried many blogging clients for Linux and so far I haven’t found any as full featured as Windows Live Writer. Blogilo comes the closest. Blogilo was really easy to set up with my wordpress blog, but I had to tweak it a little to connect to my blogger blog. Really the only thing keeping me from using Blogilo full time right now is that the last update took out the spell checker. Seriously this is something I need. LOL! What’s the point in using Blogilo if I have to copy the text into another program to check for typo.

Blogilo does allow you to add images and upload them directly. I love this because some offline blogging editors don’t handle media very well. But in the add image window it only allows you to right or left justify images. If you want them centered you have highlight them in the text window then click center, or use html. It also doesn’t have options to boarders, drop shadows, watermarking or other interesting image options.

One thing Blogilo did do was easily download my wordpress theme for previewing my post in. It did not correctly download the theme I use on blogger though. My theme on blogger is their Simple Template and the only changes I’ve made are images. So I don’t have any thing that should be trouble to read. On the other side I had headaches getting Windows Live Writer to recognize my wordpress theme. After a lot of reading and searching, it turns out if you have a static home page on your blog Live Writer might not be able to download it correctly. After I changed my home page temporarily to a posts page Live Writer was able to download the theme. Live Writer had no problems connecting to or downloading my Blogger theme.

Blogilo wont let you create new categories, you can only select existing ones. You also can’t see a list of existing tags. Live Writer lets you create new categories and while it doesn’t show you a list of your tags, as you start typing it pops up matching tags.

I’ve focused a lot on what Blogilo is lacking in my opinion. However it really is a good blogging software. Other then the spell checker issue, the text editor works very well. Adding and uploading images is easy as well. Really for my needs these two programs are so close that I could use either one. For now my personal preference is if I have a lot of media to use I’ll likely use Windows Live Writer. Blogilo would be great for a quick post where I’m not so likely to make many typos.

I do hope that Blogilo will have another release soon and fix the spell check problem, my biggest issue. If the categories, tags, media handling and spell check were improved I would have one less reason to start up old XP.

Kim Mills on Google+

Mother’s Day Snow

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May 142013

Last week our weather was so nice, we spent most of each day outside. We were taking turns working in the garden, playing and doing our school lessons in the shade of the larger trees. I love days like that! This weekend was a big change though. On Sunday we woke up to strong winds and snow, yes SNOW! This is May right? LOL! It is amazing how much louder the snow storm sounded with all the leaves on the trees.

I’ve seen snow in May a few times before and even in June once about 15 years ago. Hubby thinks we are in for a cold summer.

Despite the icky weather we had a great Mother’s Day. I got to sleep in a bit whoohoo! Then woke up to a huge brunch made by the girls and hubby. Later in the afternoon I even managed to get a nap! I’ve picked up a cold with the weather change so the extra rest was so appreciated

It is still cold here, but at least the snow is gone!

Kim Mills on Google+

Homeschooling Without Breaking The Bank

Homeschooling 8 Responses »

May 022013

The costs of homeschooling can add up quickly if your not careful, but they don’t have to! I’ve been homeschooling for 6 years now and I’ve learned so much in that time from other homeschoolers. I’m so grateful that there are so many wonderful homeschool forums and blogs out there happy to help others. One of the lessons I’ve learned is it’s not always the curriculum you buy but HOW you use it that is important. Constantly switching curriculum’s to find just the right one isn’t always the answer, try changing how your using it. Now yes some times a change is needed, but I like to try adapting things first. If I’m using a text or work book and it’s not going as well as I thought, I’ll try doing the work orally instead. Sometimes reading a text book and narrating works better then filling out long lists of questions. Don’t be afraid to take control of your curriculum instead of it controlling you!

When I start planning for our school year I make a list of what topics we want to cover and what goals I have for each child. Then I look at what books I already own that could help with this, then search the internet for free books, activity pages and media to add in. I also keep a close eye on the thrift store book shelves, I’ve found some real gems there! However my favourite place to stock up on good books are library book sales. Books are normally low priced and some are by donation. A library in our area has a huge book sale each year, it’s by donation and I was devastated to find out that when it’s done books that are not sold are tossed into the dumpster! So I don’t feel bad about taking what we need for a reasonable donation, I hate to see books destroyed.

When I’m ready to buy curriculum I try to pick out non consumables and multi level books. I can’t always find this, but I try! Teaching multiple grades/ages at the same time with the same resource takes a big work load off mom!

There is a huge amount of free and low cost curriculum out there but these are a few of our favorites.

Full Curriculum

Five in a Row ~ It’s not free but is one of our favorites and an amazing value for it’s price. Five in a Row (FIAR) are unit study guides for ages 5 to 8. The lessons can easily be adapted for younger children or older children if you want to combine your whole family together. However they do make a book for PreK children called Before Five in a Row and we love it. For the older group there is Beyond Five in a Row. FIAR builds lessons on quality children’s literature most of the books can be purchased reasonably or found at your local library. There are many activities for each subject so you can easily “row” the same book a few times and cover different material.

Homeschool Share ~ This is an amazing website with unit studies for a wide age range, based of great literature Man of the studies I’ve used complement our FIAR units. Many are in lapbook format but can be used anyway you like. You would still need to add math and phonics to most of the units here. I definitively recommend checking out this site!

Ambleside Online ~ Ambleside Online is one of my favourite free homeschool curriculum’s. It is based of the teaching methods of Charlotte Mason. If your not familiar with her methods at first glance this would look like just a book list. It is perfectly find to use this as a resource of great books to read. However using it along with narration, copy work etc. makes it shine. Ambleside Online includes lesson plans for grades k to 12. It includes history, geography, science and language arts. You will need to add a math program and phonics but there are suggested resources for this. Most of the books in this program are available free online or reasonably priced.

An Old Fashion Education ~ This is another free curriculum that is similar to Ambleside Online. All the texts are available for free since they are in the public domain. Books are organized both by subject and by grade. So if your looking for a full curriculum or just to fill in some places it’s easy to navigate.

Language Arts

Kiss Grammar ~ This is a great free grammar program. It uses text from classic literature to teach children how to recognize grammar forms.

Grammar and Writing Handbooks by Scott Foresman ~ These are some great free grammar and writing workbooks for grades 1 to 6.

Starfall ~ This is a wonderful website to help children learn phonics. There are both free and paid versions.

Vocabulary Spelling City ~ This is a great website that has both free and subscription options. Our kids love using this for practicing spelling.

Math

XtraMath ~ This is a great free math drill website, our children use it daily. I love that it not only drills the math facts but if your child gets the answer wrong or runs out of time they are shown the answer and have to type it in. I find this helps them to remember it better.

Khan Academy ~ This is a wonderful free math program. It’s my oldest daughters favorite. All students start at the basic math level and work through the math web at their own pace. There are free videos to explain every topic more then 3000, and if they are stuck they can click on hints to help. As they progress they earn badges and our kids love this! This site also has computer math/programming and science.

Timez Attack ~ This is a great game for learning math facts. There are both free and paid versions, we have only used the free one. All of our children love this. It teaches addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.

These are just a few of our family’s favourite free and low cost curriculum’s, what are yours?

Kim Mills on Google+

Review ~ Home School In The Woods: Great Empires Activity Study

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May 022013

We’ve taken a break this past month from our normal history studies to use the Great Empires Activity Study from Home School in the Woods. I’ve been looking at a number of their packages to use in our next school year, so I was so happy to have the opportunity to review this unit study.

Home School in the Woods is a family run business by homeschool mother Amy Pak. I love products that are developed by other homeschool families since they have a true insight into what our days are like!

The Great Empires Activity Study is available in both CD and download format, we received the download version. it’s suggested for elementary school aged children.
This unit covers the following 14 empires.

Ancient Egypt
Ancient Greece
Ancient Rome
Ancient china
Arab-Muslim Empire
Mongolian Empire
Viking Empire
Spanish Empire
French empire
English Empire
German Empire
Japanese Empire
Russian Empire
The United States of America

Each empire unit contains a few pages of text with key information about it’s formation and activity. Also provided are games, maps, projects, links and recipes for each area of study. Each unit can be covered in about a weeks time, or if you use all the book and link suggestions you can stretch each empire into a month of study.

How did we use this curriculum?

I had originally planned to move through this quickly as we had in past years studied some of the early empires already. My children on the other hand had a different idea! They just love the early history time periods and we have spent the past month learning about Ancient Egypt.

The download version launches with a html page in your browser. This page acts like a home page and lets you easily move through the resources for each unit. I loved how this was set up!

I printed off the reading text, maps, activities and time line. We started off our study by reading the 2 page information guide on Ancient Egypt. This is the only part of the unit study that I wasn’t overly fond of. The text is written in a very textbook like format. My younger children were not interested in it at all, as it was to “dry” for their liking. My older children understood it, but trying to keep them paying attention was hard. I would have preferred the text to be written in a narrative style.
I would read each section then ask the children to narrate back to me.

Next we worked on the mapping pages. I have to say I love the maps in this unit! They are pretty and the detail is great. I’m also glad that they include a teachers copy with the correct areas filled out. It is not always easy to find a map of Ancient Egypt, that has everything labeled.
Other activities included in the Egypt unit were making a cartouche. We did the paper version first using their worksheet each child wrote their name in hieroglyphs. Later we worked on the more messy clay version.
Two recipes were included Egyptian Fig Cookies and Lemon & Garlic Potato Salad. The kids picked the fig cookies, no surprise there!

There is also a great list of additional reading books suggested for each unit. Unfortunately our library didn’t have most of them, and it takes them forever to order books in. So I substituted where I could, and tried to wait for the others. Luckily I already have may Egyptian books in our personal library.

This unit also includes a collection of websites, and we loved these! For Egypt links included how to make your own Senet game, a virtual tour of Egypt, websites on the pyramids, Egyptian life, art and many interesting people from Egypt’s history . Some of these include Narmer, Ramses II and Tutankhamun.

What did we not like?

We have really enjoyed using this program, the only thing that I wasn’t overly fond of was the format the text was written in. This is because our family prefers a living book/narrative style.

What did we like?

I loved how the interactive program was laid out. It makes it very easy to find the pages your looking for. I don’t have to dig through many PDF’s to find the right pages.

The overview sheets for each empire although not in the style we prefer are still very well done. the information included in them is excellent. For the remaining units, I will simply break the readings up into smaller amounts.

The additional reading suggestion are great and books are suitable for different ages. This is another way you could use the program with younger or older students. The next unit we do, I wont expect to use the overview sheets with my younger children. Instead we’ll jump right into the literature suggestions.

I loved the webpage links that were included. It takes a lot of time to search the internet looking for child friendly websites for each topic. I loved having them already organized.

The maps are wonderful! They are large and easy to read. I like the shading as it makes the maps look nicer the most we have used.

We loved the simple time lines that are included. Instead of being a time line covering every person and event in a time period, they covered the start of each empire. These time lines are perfect for younger children or for your first time line.

Our family is going to continue using this program, but in a slightly different way. I’m going to use the earlier empire units as a review of what we have studied in the past. Then as we come to a new time period of history I will use this unit study as an introduction to that, then move into our normal narrative style history.

To look at samples visit Home School in the Woods. The download version is available for $18.98 and the CD version is $19.95.

To read more reviews of this product and others by the Schoolhouse Review Crew click the banner below!

Kim Mills on Google+

Homesteading As You Age

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May 012013

I was reading on Countryside Magazines website this morning and I loved the article “Growing Old in the New Normal Will Present Some Special Problems”.
There is so much truth in this and many of these things I’ve started to notice myself. My health isn’t the best, and I have trouble keeping up with things like I did a few years ago and I’m just in my 30′s!
In generations past families lived together and tasks were shared. As mom and dad aged, they could take on easier rolls on the homestead. Shelling peas, watching the little grandchildren etc. Now most families don’t live together when the children have grown and married.Personally I think that this is something that will change as time goes on. With the economy not being good, so many people are having a hard time keeping up. Huge numbers of the younger generations are still living at home because they can’t find work, and are hugely burdened with education debt.
Their parents or grandparents are having a hard time keeping up with the heating bills in the winter. Not to mention the ever rising gas and grocery prices. This is on top of the normal physical work it takes to care for a home or homestead.
I think that as time goes on we will see more families going back to the way things used to be and sharing their homes more often. As long as families get along well, there are huge benefits to this. Not only are living expenses shared, but the grandparents can spend more time with their grandchildren. Likewise it helps to give mom and dad a break! Chores can be better shared based on each persons abilities.

I’m seeing more of this happening in our area, and if the economy keeps heading the way it has I expect more families will find this is a good solution for them.

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Truly original country magazine for readers seeking voluntary simplicity and greater self-reliance, with emphasis on homesteading, home food production, gardening, cooking, food preservation, etc.

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