Homeschool Memoirs- Field Trips

THEME:

This week I’d like to invite you to share your favourite field-trip that you’ve been able to go on since you’ve started homeschool. I’d encourage you to include photos, but you don’t have to.

I know we have been on a lot of field trips but I am going to talk about our most recent.

Living in Wisconsin we have a lot of dairy farms but we went on a "future farms tour" The first farm we went to was the NorSwiss Farms just about 15 minutes from our house. They are milking about 1400 cows right now but are moving up to 4000 cows!

Each cow has a computer chip strapped to their legs that monitors everything about them, especially their activity level so they know if the cow is getting sick or it is time to breed it again. They milk the cows on a raised surface right now which eliminates all the bending down for washing and milking so many cows. (If you look closely at the cow being milked you will see the ankle bracelet that holds the computer chip)

They are building a carousel to milk the cows on. On the carousel they will be able to milk 400 cows an hour with 78 cows able to be on it at the same time. The day we were there they were ready to install the carousel, but they were still waiting for it.

They also are a very "green" farm, recycling many different things. They turn the manure (30 lbs per cow per day!) into electricity, fertilizer, and even bedding for the cows! They use the heat that is generated by cooling the milk to heat water to clean out the milk pipes. They are also using sand bedding and have a sand sorter so they can reuse some or all of that.

At the second farm we were able to see robotic milkers in action. So cool!


Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Photo Printing - Photo Books

There is a heritage museum in our area that has items and buildings of the past from around the area to show us all how "they" used to live. As a final activity for school we went and learned. We hadn't been there in a couple years and the kids had a better appreciation this time. We ran out of time to see it all but the people there offered us passes to come back this summer and finish the tour.


We were all surprised at the size of the homestead cabins. They were tiny! This one room cabin housed a family of 9.

J-Bell is standing in the middle of it. To save some room the boys slept in the attic. To get there, they went outsice and up the ladder on the side of the house. I have heard that WI winters were worse than they are now. I can't imagine sending the boys out in the snow to sleep in the attic.

The kids also learned what a chamber pot was. They were not impressed and really grossed out with the idea of someone having to clean it. Even potty training, we put the kid seat on the toilet so no one had to clean out the potty chair.

They also were not impressed with the bathtubs.

The highlight was the jail and the stocks. The kids love being locked up in jail and then having their picture taken while in the stocks. Am I raising little convicts????

Today we went on a spontaneous field trip. One of Knights accounts told him that the Lake Sturgeon were running and we could go see them in a town about 35 minutes from our house. Knight called me and I loaded the kids up and headed out. We didn't know it would be so difficult to find but we did find it.

So we went down this dirt road into the dead end, up a hill, through a field, down a cliff (seriously) to the river. Then we hiked a little ways but we found it.

I have never been to a fish run. It was really neat. The fish were about 4 feet long (at least the ones we saw) and doing their best to get up the rapids. Very cool. There was even a DNR warden handing out fliers on the Sturgeon so we could learn more. I asked her how long it lasts and she said 24 hours. We made it just in time. The really started to slow down by the time we left. I also learned that if you want to take a picture of something under the water you can take a picture through polarized sunglasses. It worked for me. So for the pictures, the brownish one that looks like it has a log in the middle of the picture... that's one of the sturgeon under water.