All posts by Charlyn M.

Field Trips

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!

Field Trips

Seed Cleaning Field Trip

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We went on a field trip to see how grass seed is cleaned.

This very nice, funny and informative man took us on a tour.

(Click on thumbnails to enlarge. The thumbnail tends to cut off some of the photo.)

Tour Guide

The dirty, right out of the field, seed is put into large storage rooms. Here the kids are feeling it.

Dirty Seed

These are screens that the seed goes over in one of the processes to clean it. The seed must meet certain standards- I believe it has to be 98% clean – before it can be sold. Every batch is tested before it’s bagged.

screens

On the second of three floors we saw some seed going over a screen.

seed

On the top (third) floor we got to feel the insides and outsides of drums used to filter out the dirt.

Feeling the drums

Here he is explaining how this machine works.

Explaining

We walked back down the three flights of stairs and went over to see how the seed is bagged. I’ll show those pictures another day. Stay tuned!

Homeschooling

How Do You Know?

I am totally stealing that blog title but I am going to direct you to where I found it. It’s at a blog titled “Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers”– I just love that name! There is a picture of kids wearing tee shirts with that on them- you can find out how to get your own at that site too. But, while you are there, check out this post- titled “How Do You Know?” How does one know what level your child is reading on? Curious? At the end of the post there are two links to simple tests you can give your child at home.

If there is someone in your life who is a little, shall we say, concerned about your child’s education then you can breezily say “Oh, Junior is in 2nd grade but his tested reading level is the 11th grade.” Or you can use the tests to see progress- sometimes we lose sight of the little gains that are being made. It’s not about reading on a certain grade level but learning to read so that it is a love and a pleasure to the child in years to come.