Weekly Wrap-up: Apple Picking and Gardening

The back to school bubble has burst - I knew it had to eventually.  It was a great first two weeks but alas we are back to the "awwww Mom"s.  Still a productive week though.

We started out the week with a field trip with our homeschool group - Apple picking!! 

I think I was really more excited about this than the kids.  I have never actually been apple picking before and, much to my embarrassment, felt the need to tell the other moms and now you that I have never even seen apples growing on trees.  Yes, it's true.  Perhaps I should be in some sort of support group for the offspring of city people.  Those displaced persons who live near the country yet through no fault of their own never venture past the sidewalks and street lights, deprived of an appreciation of nature or agriculture.  Now, I do know that apples grow on trees, I've seen pictures.  But there's something special about going to the farm where they grow, choosing the ones you want, pulling them right off the tree, and then bringing them home.  You just can't get that from the grocery store or even the farm stand.

The rest of the week sorta fell apart after that.  But Ms. Q managed to get some work done.  I don't have any pictures of her doing anything.  Mostly I just threatened that I would take pictures of the ugly looks she was giving me and post them on our blog.  To her credit though, she wrote one of her best pieces this week for her language arts writing assignment.  The prompt was to write about an adventure you would like to have.  She wrote a great paragraph about snowboarding in Alaska.  It was interesting, exciting, and very detailed.

Little M learned about the Letter G and gardens.  Fall is not quite the right time to learn about gardening.  Luckily he was able to remember back to the spring and we talked about when we started our garden.  He and Ms. Q did some work in our garden helping to pull out the dying tomato plants and cut some flowers for a bouquet for the kitchen.  We talked about creating some theme gardens next year.  He thought that a pizza patch would be nice - tomatoes, basil, oregano, green and red peppers, jalapeno peppers,  onions, rosemary, thyme, and eggplant.  We may also plant a medicinal herb patch.  He thought growing your own medicine would be cool too.

We finished up our school week with a nature walk.  The highlight was this guy:

We weren't sure what kind of snake it was at the time but we looked it up when we got home and found out it's a rough green snake.  The guide book says they can grow to be 45 inches long!

There will be more on the Letter G and our field trip soon but that's it for our weekly wrap-up.