27 May 2023

Children are naturally curious creatures and with so many under one roof coupled with the fact that we homeschool, we are frequently looking things up to answer the various questions that arise. For instance, the children found that one of the chickens had laid an egg the size of a cherry tomato. We looked it up and found out that such an egg occurs on occasion, that there is no yolk inside and that they are called – by some – fairy eggs.

Here are some other fairy eggs we found this week:

• We finished up the book Bound for Oregon this week and learned of what was, for many, the most dreaded part of the journey: Laurel Hill. It was a steep drop out of the mountains that was very difficult to safely descend with a wagon and oxen. Some folks tied trees to their wagon to slow it down and some chained their wagons to trees and let them down little by little. This site has pictures of the drop and the solutions people came up with to mitigate the drop.

• My 3rd grader is memorizing key dates in U.S. history and we got to 1957 – Sputnik. “What’s that?” he asked. ” I think it was a Russian satellite?” It was a Russian Satellite (the name means “fellow traveler”) and the first satellite launched successfully into orbit. The launching of it kicked off the Space Race. It sent signals back to Earth most of the October it was launched until its batteries ran out and then it burnt up on re-entry the following January.

https://history.nasa.gov/sputnik.html

• What does a llama sound like?