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Back when I was home schooling, as part of our Farmer Boy unit, we made candles. In the book Almanzo talks about taking his lantern out to do chores and walk to his room at night. We discussed how they didn’t have electricity for lighting and instead used candles. We talked about how their method to make candles was different than how we were making candles. I think Farm Kid1 got the idea & I hope this makes the book a bit more relatable.

SUPPLIES

The supplies are fairly simple. The necessities are wax, wick & a mold. We used a waxy coated dixie cup as our mold. Our extra goodies were crayons for color & liquid apple scent.

MELTING WAX

Next, fill a pot with a couple inches of water & set it over a high stove top setting. Once boiling, turn the heat down a bit. Place a bar of wax & crayon pieces in a tin can & place the can in the hot water to melt the wax. The crayons melted quicker than the bar of wax.

THE MOLD

Start by cutting a length of wick about 3″ taller than your mold. Tape one end of the wick to the bottom of your mold & wrap the other end around a pencil. I found that we needed to tape the wick to the pencil or it wanted to unwind. I also cut notches out of the dixie cup to hold the pencil.

Using a pot holder, pour the melted hot wax into your mold.

Now wait for the wax to harden. Our one box of wax made 8 little candles.

FINISHING THE CANDLE

After the wax is hard, peel off the mold and voila a candle. I love how most of the crayon wax settled toward the bottom of the candle giving it a gradient appearance.

Trim the wick to about half an inch.

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Is it silly that I’ve always wanted to do a covered wagon project? Well, silly or not, I finally had a good excuse to have the boys make their own covered wagons. We were studying the days of the pioneers. We just had to make a covered wagon to go along with that era… And to tell the truth, I was hoping to make an entire old west town out of cardboard. But, we ran out of time & now it’s time to move on to other subjects. Hopefully we can still make the old west town one day.

THE WAGONS

Farm Kid2 chose to add oxen. Love that.

The base of the wagon was a small cardboard box. They covered the box with strips of brown construction paper to resemble wood.

This is not a fancy craft. The hoops holding up the canvas are pieces of wire shoved between layers of the cardboard. As I’ve mentioned before, awhile ago we dyed paper, yarn & fabric. They used scraps of that fabric as the canvas on their covered wagon, which is why their canvas is tinted purple. We used the dyed yarn to tie the canvas to the covered wagon.

The axles & wheels are tinker toys & cardboard.

They were given cardboard scraps & paper to add details to their wagon, such as people & their seats.

I love how they added kids looking out the back like you see in pictures.

I’m really happy with how these turned out & the effort the kids put into making them. They seemed to have a great time with this project.

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At the beginning of the school year, Farm Kid1 read Farmer Boy & did a few activities relating to the book, including making this lapbook.

The Lapbook

Left: Farm Kid1 read from the Farmer Boy book my mom gave me when I was a kid.
Right: I scanned the cover & used the print out for the front of the lapbook.

On the left & right pages are photos of our hands on activities: popcorn in milk experiment, baking bread & making candles.
The middle section shows the Wilder farm & where New York is located.

On the left is a character sketch of Almanzo & on the right is a blueprint of the Wilder Farm. These two ideas came from Homeschool Share. They have a pretty good Farmer Boy unit worth checking out.

We were also studying animal classification at the time. So, Farm Kid1 filled out a worksheet classifying the animals on the Wilder Farm. The coloring sheet came from the Cheryl Harness website.

This was the first lapbook Farm Kid1 completed for school. He loved it – as did I.

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We started reading Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder this week. The pioneer days are my favorite time in history & I am a huge Little House fan. So, this is going to be a fun unit for me to explore with Farm Kid1

I’ve got a few pioneer activities & crafts planned. But we came across a surprise experiment to try while reading Chapter 3. It says: “You can fill a glass full to the brim with milk, and fill another glass of the same size brim full of popcorn, and then you can put all the popcorn kernel by kernel into the milk, and the milk will not run over. You cannot do this with bread. Popcorn and milk are the only two things that will go into the same place.” I don’t remember learning this little tid bit when I read this book as a kid, but I was sure excited to read it now as an adult. The next day we tried it. And, by golly, it worked.

Our glasses full to the brim with milk and popcorn.

Kernel by kernel, Farm Kid1 placed the popcorn into the milk.

Yep, all that popcorn fit into the glass of milk & not a drip of milk slipped out.

We had an old zucchini from the garden that we were going to feed to the chickens. I cut it up & we added it to a glass of milk to see what would happen. The milk overflowed.

Well, that was fun. Now we have to figure out why it works.

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