Around the Web

Carnival of Homeschooling The Carnival of Homeschooling is up at A Pondering Heart. I haven’t read any of the articles yet but if you do come back and tell us your favorite!

Also, the Charlotte Mason Carnival is all about narrating- so your assignment will be to go read an article ONCE then come back here and narrate it. It’s hosted at Simply Charlotte Mason.

I found mention of a site for homeschoolers called Homeschoolers Like Us. It’s a “social network web site”- has anyone used this site? What do you think of it?

Lunch at the Park

After the tour of the seed cleaning plant we went to a nearby park to eat our lunches. And to feed the ducks and geese.

Geese

Click on thumbnails to see a larger copy.

The kids had great fun feeding and watching them.

Kids and Ducks

It was great weather and a wonderful time!

Feeding Ducks

The group went on to tour a food processing plant but no cameras were allowed inside so there are no photos of it. Maybe there is a young (or youngish) person out there who would be willing to write in and tell us all about that tour.

Bagging the Seed

A continuation of our field trip to a grass seed cleaning plant.

After walking through the seed cleaning area- and up and down three flights of stairs- we wandered over to where the seed is put into smaller bags for shipping.

Walking

After the seed is cleaned it is put into large bags. These bags hold about a ton of seed. There it waits until the test results come back. If there is too much weed seed or dirt in a batch then it is re-cleaned. It is much easier to empty out the large bags of seed than open a lot of small ones. If the batch tests clean then it is brought over to a machine that puts it into smaller bags.

Bagging

The man is putting the bags on to be filled and oversees the machine sewing the 50 lb. bags shut. The bags then go up the blue elevator and onto a conveyor belt.

Bagging 2

The bag is slid into this arm (blue and white thing) which stacks the bags, in an alternating pattern, onto a pallet. Once the pallet is full, it drops down to where it is wrapped in shrink wrap in preparation to be shipped.

Seed

At the end, all the children were allowed to fill bags with seed to take home.

We had a great time learning about cleaning seed. But the day was not over yet! We went to a park to enjoy our lunch. I’ll be posting photos of that later!