Its time for Daniel Boone! Its time for Daniel Boone!!

We ended up doing a much more in-depth study of Daniel Boone than I had anticipated. My eldest spent the majority of the week sporting a coonskin cap and hauling around his trusty rifle, “tick-licker.” So named after Boone’s own gun which earned its moniker through Boone’s storied ability to shoot a tick off a bear from one hundred yards away.

We read through dozens of books on Daniel Boone. My boys were wide eyed and filled with great questions. Learning about Boone and the Wilderness Road compelled us to study the art of tracking and identification!  Check out our MFW Adventures board on our pinterest page for links to various studies and printables. Can I also add that this is one of my favorite things about homeschooling? Find something interesting? Go ahead and deviate from the lesson plan and take time to explore. Fantastic!

We read books. We tracked the chickens in our backyard. We discovered the nests of the feuding squirrel families that live on the farm. We even made tracks in cookie dough for a fun snack! However, once baking started the cookies ended up rising a bit too much and filled in the tracks. But we still had fun making track cookies and eating them. Later in the day, the Littles made tracks in their playdoh using their Schleich animals while the eldest sorted track cards and read through books on tracking animals and identifying various plants.

Speaking of plant identification, we had the best time playing Wildcraft, a lovely cooperative board game that helps children learn about various herbs and their uses.

The kids and I recently signed up for Wild Explorers Club which has been a great fit for us! We ventured out to complete our second assignment for the highly anticipated Wolf Badge and to put our Boone study into practice.

As you can see, not many autumnal colors for us, but plenty of beauty nonetheless.

Our explorers were eager to find tracks and scat. They were not disappointed.
Poop, ahoy!

We found deer tracks and scat, rabbit tracks, grey fox tracks, horse tracks, and snake tracks. Best of all, we got to play nature detectives when we discovered the exoskeleton of a crayfish discarded on a muddy patch of trail covered in raccoon tracks, which led us to raccoon scat 50 yards away. We had read Millicent Selsam’s excellent book “Big Tracks, Little Tracks: Following Animal Prints,” the day before, which had detailed this exact scenario. What a blessing to have it unfold before our very eyes. We were pumped! Its good to spend the morning slowly uncovering nature’s stories.

We’ll spend the next week focusing more on our native plants and animals, along with celebrating our own “Wilderness Road Day” which we’ll be sure to share with you!

The first portion of our weather study was a big hit! The boys loved all their Science with Air experiments. We added in plenty of fun weather related reads to our Literary Lunch hour.

I made sure to include a few books related to the weather in our area. Hurricanes are a part of life down here.

It never ever snows here. So we threw in a few snow related books as well.

One of my favorite science resources is this gorgeous book:
My boys love looking through this book and I often find them copying pictures from its pages. This week we took a closer at Julia Rothman’s snowflake renderings.

The boys were fascinated by these pages. It eventually led us to this snowflake generator. Small clicks leave small ice prisms, long drags and clicks make larger shafts of ice. The 2D and 3D views of our snowflake creations were quite the thrilling experience for these southern kiddos!

Unit 17 is up next. We are eager to continue our journey deeper into the frontier.