Nests + Eggs

Here are some spring projects we have been working on.

Nest building through collage. Like birds we scavenged for twigs, paper, leaves and other bits and bobs to build a nest.

We glued our materials on to watercolor paper (any heavy weight paper will do), and built up as many layers as we could, bearing in mind we didn't want our eggs to fall through! And here are the results:

Mateo's nest

my nest

We had built our nests and so we needed to make some eggs.

We painted a few wooden eggs (bought from the craft store for $1 each) with metallic acrylic paint.

Painted eggs and a nest we found

Mateo is excited about his eggs! They're going on the nature table.

Our daily ritual: Collecting eggs from our chickens

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Colo/u/r

Experimenting is the greatest opportunity to learn the 'what if's' and 'why's'. Recently, Mateo and I have been learning about matter: solids, liquids and gases. Freezing water, evaporating water, and working out how the clouds collect all that rain water. Mateo has since become obsessed with putting things in the freezer to see if their states will transform the way water turns to ice. We have frozen all sort of things - paper airplane's, clay balls in water - but the pinnacle of our freezing escapades has been our colored ice sculptures.



We added food coloring to water and froze it over night in random shaped containers. Mateo was so excited to find these blocks of colored ice in the morning. Voilà! - pure magic in his eyes.







We adhered the ice chunks together with salt. Mateo was amazed to find that salt melts ice.



We watched in fascination as salty little rivulets cut grooves into the ice's surface. The melted, tinted water then pooled at the bottom of each sculpture and blended together into new, more beautiful colors.



Continuing with color... While out trash picking one day, Tom and Mateo found part of an old school pencil sharpener attached to a desk dumped in a neighbor's yard. So they snagged it and spent the afternoon together sharpening colored pencils to create mounds of shavings dusted with layer upon layer of color.













Mmmmm!

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The Mothership

Hello readers. This blog is dedicated to my homeschooling adventures, an extension of TRANSIT ANTENNA: a mobile living experiment and educational resource founded in 2005. In short we are total of 4 creatures - myself, my husband Tom, and our two children, Mateo and baby Harper - who plan on traveling the roads of North America in a waste vegetable oil powered 1981 MCI bus equipped with a micro-farm comprised of chickens, mushrooms, sprouts and herbs.

I have been homeschooling since the birth of my second child, a little under year. To date it has been the most fulfilling (and sometime frustrating) choice I have ever made - much like getting the bus! Basically it came down to a decision to either do or not do what I actually believe in.

Since I made the leap from unfulfilled arts professional to full-time parent and teacher extraordinaire, I am inspired again. My everyday no longer drags on with things I aught to and would rather not do, but instead is driven by the momentum of mine and my children’s curiosities. Ultimately we are FREE…and it feels very, very right.

I hope you will join us as we embark on our journey of living on the road, from start to finish, through our triumphs and failures.

For more info about TRANSIT ANTENNA check us out on www.transitantenna.com.