Apple Pickin' Time

Last Friday, we got to go on a field trip to Huber Orchards! We got to meet Johnny Appleseed and learn all about the process of picking, cleaning, and bagging apples.

This is Johnny Appleseed telling the kids all about apples!
This is an apple ladder. At Hubers, all the apples are hand picked.

This is the huge refrigerator where they store the apples. Yes, it was cold in there!

This is part of the apple cleaning process.

This is a guy sorting bruised apples to be used for apple cider.

These guys are bagging up the good apples to be sold.

We also enjoyed the petting zoo and playground at Hubers.

Then we got to ride the wagon out to the orchards to pick our own apples!

There's nothing like eating a fresh apple right off the tree in the orchards!

We picked red delicious, golden delicious, jonagold and mutzu apples. We really wanted fujis, but they were not ready yet. I guess that means we'll have to go back in a few weeks!

Our Little Reader

Last week Bekah completed the book, Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons, so she is now an official reader. She could have actually completed it sooner, but I have been letting her get easy readers from the library to read and not read the lessons in the book every day. But since she finished the book, we celebrated her accomplishment! I made a chocolate frosted peanut butter bar cookie and we invited the neighbors over to share it with us.

Of course they all had to do some jumping on the trampoline also!

The next morning Daddy took her out for breakfast on a Daddy/Daughter date to celebrate some more! They ate at Chik-Fil-A which also has a playground for even more fun!

I think she was very happy and proud of her accomplishment!

Keepers Club

This year will be Bekah's 2nd year to be a part of a Keepers of the Faith Club. It is similar to Girl Scouts in that they earn badges for different things, but it is biblically based. Last year she earned badges like manners, scrapbooking, cookie baking, stenciling, etc. To kick off the year this year, the girls had a beautiful tea party with lots of yummy snacks and plenty of tea. There were lots of little girls there, and about 25 of them signed up to be a part of the group this year. We are excited about another fun year of making friends and learning new things.

Science Club

This year we joined a science club as part of our homeschool curriculum. We meet twice a month and study a different topic each month. The first meeting is for the lesson and some type of experiment to go along with it. The second meeting each month is for a field trip which also goes along with the topic of study. Then the children are supposed to do some sort of further study at home and present what they have learned at home to the other students the following month. Our first month was zooology and during our meeting the kids got to dissect owl pellets. Then the field trip was a night time hike to look for nocturnal animals. Here are some photos from the owl pellet dissection.

Although it was kind of disgusting, the kids really enjoyed it and learned a lot!