Bird Garden wins at State!

Here are our two birding boys, with some of their favorite plush birds. They use these birds to memorize field marks and bird calls.

I just have to share our exciting news! Our boys spent several months installing a Bird Garden in our side-yard. We were thrilled last spring when the project won first place in the Keep Our County Beautiful competition. That was quite an honor.

But we just heard that the county-wide organization submitted our project to the state level, and it won Second Place in the Keep Georgia Beautiful competition! We were shocked.

Thanks for letting me share our joy! You can read more about our Bird Garden project here. You can also find out more about how we got started with youth birding, including some of the techniques that Dawn (from Olive Plants blog) and I used to teach our boys, by reading this article about us on the Cornell Lab of Ornithology website.



Here are my boys and Dawn's boys at the Georgia Youth Birding Competition last spring.

Dawn has some excellent posts in her Birding 101 series, including Introduction to Birding, Know your Bird Parts, and Using a Field Guide.

Costumes for the Medieval Feast

It took a bit of doing to pull the costumes for this feast together. But it really wasn't too hard. My boys already had a good bit of what they needed in their costume bin.


Our oldest son has a Scottish William Wallace Claymore sword from Vision Forum that he wanted to wear to the feast. I give him a lot of credit, as he really got into his part. He wore a kilt and spoke in a Scottish accent all night.

Two of the boys needed pants for their knight outfits. I was able to find a pair of footless, gray woolen leggings at Goodwill for one of them, and the other boy wore a pair of gray baseball pants. I cut off all the beltloops and the pocket on the back. It looked a bit rough, but his tunic hung down over the top, so it didn't matter. Their hoods and shirts were things we've collected over the years. If your boys don't have a knight costume, put one on your shopping list this Christmas. These costumes are worn constantly, not only when we are studying the Middle Ages.

Our youngest son dressed as a squire. We had a perfect costume for it but he lost it a day or two before the feast. You know he had to wear it every day for a week, leading up to the feast! So when the time came, we had to grab something on the fly for his squire robe. He wasn't in it long...at the beginning of the feast, he was knighted and did a quick costume change. We pretended that the feast and the jousting tournament were in celebration of his knighting.



I was able to find a dress for myself in the prom section at Goodwill...for $5 I found a perfect Queen dress. The Lord must have put it there just for me. I was so excited when I found it! A long wig that I braided finished the look. The veil I was wearing was just a lace curtain valance that I tied around my pony tail in the back to conceal my own hair.

My husband was the hardest to costume. At 6'4" tall, it's hard enough to find clothes for him anyway! Goodwill to the rescue again. I bought a set of purple twin sized satin sheets that I adapted as a King costume. The flat sheet made a wonderful King's cape for him.



And I found a way to create some makeshift pantaloons by folding the fitted sheet in half lengthwise and wrapping it around his waist. I pinned it in the back like a skirt, with the elastic (fitted part) down near his knees. The loose fabric was then gathered at the knees and pinned again to make a kind of pantaloon. It wasn't ideal because it looked a little skirt-like (I did use extra pins to try and gather it in the middle to minimize this effect)...but it took just 5 minutes and he was a good sport about it. He wore shorts underneath (for comfort and modesty) and I think it fit the bill.

His sword was also from Vision Forum. They have many beautiful swords for sale. Each of our boys receives one as a special gift sometime during their 9th year, to commemorate the fact that he is half way grown.


Yet another use for my wig! I've worn it for Japanese Tea Party, 60s day (unbraided) and now Medieval Feast.


We could not find crowns, though! I went to several stores and no one had them. I'm so glad they didn't! One of the girls from the family who joined us figured out a way to create the crowns from scratch using beads and copper wire. I think they were beautiful, and her creativity was one of my favorite parts of the feast.

Recipes for the Medieval Feast

Menu:

Wassail
Selection of Cheeses
Bread
Potato and Leek Soup
Pheasant from the King's Forest (aka Roasted Chicken Legs)
Wild Boar (aka Ham)
apple tarts
gingerbread

Recipes:

For the wassail, we just used warmed apple cider. You could put some mulling spices in it if you want to.




Leek and Potato Soup

One bundle of leeks (about 1 cup diced)
One 16 oz. box of chicken broth
2 cups shredded hash brown potatoes or peeled, cubed potatoes
1/2 cup butter
one large onion, diced
1/2 cup flour
2 cups milk
salt and pepper to taste,
chives to garnish (optional)

Wash the leeks thoroughly. Cut off the green part of the leeks as well as the root end. Remove the outer layer. Dice the white part that remains. You are going to put it in a blender after it is cooked, so the leeks can just be rough chopped.

Boil the potatoes and leeks in the chicken broth until soft and tender. In a separate pan, melt the butter. Saute the onions in the butter until golden. Stir the flour into the onions and cook until bubbly, stirring constantly. Slowly add the milk to the flour and onion mixture, stirring to combine. Now add the onion mixture to the vegetables and broth, stirring well.

Pour contents of the pan into a blender and puree. You may need to work in batches. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Add additional broth if the soup seems too thick or starchy.

Variation: This is my go-to cream of vegetable soup recipe. You can substitute broccoli, cauliflower, or other vegetables for the potatoes and leeks. I love this recipe!



Apple tarts

This recipe was a bit of a flop...I tried to make little apple tarts by cutting pie crust into rounds with a biscuit cutter and making tiny, hand-held pies. There was just too much crust for the amount of filling that could fit on a little round. If you want to make tarts, I suggest using a flakier pastry, such as puff pastry. Alternatively, use your favorite apple pie recipe, making it one day ahead of time so that it has time to firm up. If you aren't using plates or forks, you do NOT want an overly juicy pie!



Roasted Chicken Legs

Brush chicken legs with Olive Oil. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Roast on a baking pan in the oven at 400 F for 30 minutes. Before removing from the oven, broil for 2 minutes to brown the chicken legs. I found a wonderful roasted chicken leg recipe here.

Decorating for the Medieval Feast

We celebrated our Medieval Feast last night! Usually our feasts only involve our family, but we did something on a slightly larger scale this time. Another family joined in, as well as my dad.

The children from both families met earlier this week and prepared a program to present during the feast. It was wonderfully entertaining! A squire was knighted, and some of the guests shared news about Chaucer and his Canterbury Tales, the Battle of Crecy, and other "current events". There was even a tournament involving archery, sword play and jousting.

To start the evening off, we set out some medieval games. Although chess and checkers were available, the young lords preferred our homemade version of the Viking game Hnefetafl. The boys didn't play for long, though. They were too enamored with their costumes, swords and shields to sit still playing games.

The children had the wonderful idea of using shields from the Dollar Tree to decorate the feasting hall. I used a strip of painters tape on the handle of each shield to attach them to the wall. It wasn't that strong, and a few of the shields did fall, but it was quick and easy and most of them stayed put.


In some cases it was easy to wrap the tape around the handle of the shield and a knob on the hutch or a hanging sconce, and this worked quite well. The painters tape was easily removed afterward with no marks. The shields were very lightweight and only cost $1 apiece. My boys will have fun playing with them now that our feast is over, and everyone loved our beautiful feasting hall!



I also took some battle axes that we had in our weapon bin and hung them, crossed, on a plate hanger that normally adorns our dining room wall.


My husband had a linen cloth with a knight on it, which he has been saving since he was a child. This was easily hung with more painters tape. I cut the strips to form a frame for the cloth, and we fancied it to be a medieval tapestry.



It is almost Halloween, so the Dollar Tree had some other decorations that were meant to be spooky but which I felt could double for this occasion. I bought one package of old, creepy bottle labels and applied one titled Ye Olde Spider Venom to a bottle of Barq's Root beer. Our Viking guest brought this with him to the feast. The boys thought someone should be sentenced to death-by-spider venom, but instead, we let the official cup bearer taste it for purity. It passed muster, so it was served.

When the cup bearer felt sick later that night (ostensibly from overindulging in Wild Boar), the King was quick to blame the spider venom. He immediately began searching for a replacement cup bearer in case the first one didn't pull through!


I also set some candles and a simple vining floral decoration on the head table as a centerpiece. The King sat in a very throne-like chair at the head of the table.

We used individual type-writer key letters to make the placecards. Part of the program was a brief discussion about Johann Gutenberg's wonderful "new" invention, the printing press, and a bit of bragging about how the King purchased a set of printed placecards just for this occasion.

I'll explain more about the menu in my next post, but for plates we purchased flat sandwich wraps to use as trenchers. Everyone got a knife and a spoon, and we assembled a collection of chunky mugs for our glassware.


To be authentic, we ate with our fingers and did not use napkins. I did put a dark-colored tablecloth on the table, and I confess to using it a few times to wipe my fingers.

I've got lots more to share about this wonderful feast which will undoubtedly be one of the highlights of our school year! Upcoming posts will include our recipes and how we pulled the costumes together.

The Blind Leading the Blind: a tutorial

Technology comes easy for some people. But not for me. Everything I know how to do on the computer has been hard fought and hard won, usually learned one baby step at a time.

That's why I am so excited--so ECSTATIC--that I learned how to make a linked thumbnail image for my blogs, and how to get the HTML code to appear below the image in a scroll box!! Ladies, I can't even figure out how to work the remote controls to turn my television on by myself. This is HUGE!

I've been searching for this very information for at least a year. I've tried to follow different people's instructions, but to no avail. So now that I have finally figured it out, I want to explain how I did it.

If nothing else, I can refer to this post next week when I want to do this again but can't remember what steps I took! Maybe some of you have been wondering how to do the same thing with your blogs. Believe me, if I learned how to do this, you can learn, too! My way is probably not the best way....any technical guru will most likely tell you that. But I don't know any technical gurus, and this is the way that worked for me.

By the way, I owe it all to two excellent tutorials I found. Smilemonsters actually convinced me that I could do this, and showed me how to build the linked image. Blogging Basics 101 taught me how to get the HTML code into a scroll box and how to fool the computer into not reading the code.

I'm still learning how to take an image and put text and graphics onto it. I've learned how to use photoshop just a bit, but I can't figure out how to download my doctored image to my computer. As I said, I'm learning by baby steps. So we'll save that lesson for another tutorial down the road.

Let's assume you've already got an image. In my case, a couple sweet friends each made me an image for two of my sites. I'm now trying to learn to make one myself for this blog.

Resizing the image to a thumbnail
If you are working in Photoshop, you can resize your image right there. Most thumbnail images should be around 125 x 125, give or take. Just upload your photo, click edit, then click resize, then click custom, and type your desired size into the boxes provided. When I do this, I can set one number and the other automatically re-adjusts. My image isn't a perfect square, so it doesn't come out a perfect 125 x 125. Again, I'm still learning here.

If you already have an image and you aren't using photoshop, you can resize your image right on your browser at Pixer.us. Just upload your image, click the resize button and drag the button to the size you want, then save the image to your computer.

Generating HTML code for your button
Now you need to generate HTML code for your image. You can do this at Photobucket. You'll need to upload the newly resized thumbnail. Then hover over the image, and you'll see a drop down menu appear below your image. One of the items will say "HTML". You want to copy that HTML code.

Getting the code onto your website
Next, go to the website where you want to put the image. If you are working in blogger, click on your layout, then Get a gadget, then HTML code. If you are on Wordpress, go into your Widgets and drag a text/HTML box over to the sidebar.

Here's where it gets messy. There is a way to put an example of this code right into this post, in such a way that you can read it but the computer ignores it. I can't figure that out. Here is a step by step of what to put in your widget box or gadget box. If you want something simple you can copy and paste, go to Heather's post at Smilebox and copy her code from there. If you do that, you can skip to the part where it says "Cleaning up the code".

Here are my instruction, though, in case you don't want to merely copy and paste, you want to BUILD it YOURSELF!

At the top of the HTML box, type this:

a href="Enter Website Here"

and enclose that phrase with a carat on either end so that you see < before the letter a and > after the second quotation mark.

Enter your web address where it says enter website here, making sure you put the complete http:// address, not just the name of your site.

The next part of your code begins with another < sign, placed immediately following your last > sign. After the < sign, write the letters img src="Enter photo HTML code here"


Put the HTML code for the image (which you generated at Photobucket) where it says Enter photo HTML code here.

To finish out this strand of code you'll need a backslash after the last quotation mark /

Then a double carat, backslash, letter a, end carat. The symbols look like this, but with no spaces in between
>

<

/

a

>


Cleaning up the code
All you techies, look away now (or laugh, whichever you prefer). Whenever I click "save" my code somehow morphs. If I go to my website, I see my beautiful, linked button image, but there is extra code beneath it. Code I did not build myself. And what's worse, my readers can see it, too! That's OK. You can fix it.

Once you've done the above step and clicked save, go to your website and check out your new badge. Is there an extra http:// address below your badge, or a repeat of some of the symbols you just typed? If there is, go back to the window where you just placed the code. You should be able to see at a glance where your "good" code ends and where the extra code (which the computer generated, but you didn't build) begins. Just delete that extra part. Save again and go back to your site. Check your button: does it look perfect? Click it, does it lead where it should? Great job!!

Get that code into a scroll box so people can grab your button
You want your friends to be able to easily put your button on their site, right? Up until now, I've been doing this the old fashioned way. I download the button image to my computer, then upload it again in Wordpress or Blogger as a linked image, typing in the web address myself. You can use this technique any time you want to put an image on your blog when the HTML code is not provided.

But you want to make it easy for your friends, right? It is so simple.

Just copy the code you used to make the image in the first place (after you've saved and cleaned up that extra http:// information). Paste it below the original code. If you publish it like this, it will just show up as two linked images. You want a way to make the second set of code appear as code, so someone can copy it. You just need to put something before and after that code so that the computer doesn't "read" the code and turn it into an image. I got this to work in my sidebar, but can't figure out how to make it work in a post.

So although I wish I could show you an exact example, I am not good enough for that yet. What you want to do is write the word textarea and enclose it in carats <> and put that at the beginning of your code. Then you'll want to write /textarea and enclose that in carats <> and put that at the end of your code.

Notice the part that goes after your code has a backslash in it...very important. When I put this before and after my code, it automatically created a scroll box for the code. What a bonus!

Don't forget to save what you've just done. Then go to your site and grab your new code. Test it out to make sure it works before you assume that it does. One time I forgot to add that all-important backslash and my HTML code box contained everything from my site's home page!

Happy Blogging!

Writing with Ease

This year we are using Susan Wise Bauer’s wonderful new program, The Complete Writer: Writing with Ease. This curriculum teaches the elementary-aged writer (or struggling older child) how to express themselves on paper.

I find this program simple to implement and enjoyable to teach. My children look forward to their daily copywork lesson, and they are thriving on the step by step approach. Easily accomplished in just 10 minutes a day, Writing with Ease lives up to its name!

Want to know more? You can read the rest of my review at The Curriculum Choice.