Building an Earth Oven

Yesterday we "baked" in our Tiny Cookie Oven!

I chose an eggless recipe (Eggless Chocolate Cookies) in case the cookies did not bake thoroughly -- which they didn't -- but the children still wished to try them. They described them as tasting of "fudge with ashes." This did not dissuade them from wanting to build an even bigger one and try again!

Kiko Denzer advises folks to not spend forever in background reading but to just put your hands in earth and get started with a tiny oven, one just big enough for a muffin. After building the first attempt, you'll have a lot more know-how and you'll be in a good position to make a more advanced design. The hardest thing is to just get started!

Notes from this project:

week 1 - read sections from The Hand-Sculpted House: A Practical and Philosophical Guide to Building a Cob Cottage by Ianto Evans, et al. and make several shake jars to test our soil

week 2 - read sections from Build Your Own Earth Oven: A Low-Cost Wood-Fired Mud Oven by Kiko Denzer, et al., dig our clay, and wait for the rain to stop so that we can begin building

week 3 - give it a whirl!

Monday - try #1
turns out that the mud layer is 3 parts sand to one part clay and I had read it as the other way around! I did not purchase enough sand so we had to pause until I got more

(we got our sand for a dollar a bucket from Ready Mix... head up Oakland until you see it on the right)


Tuesday - try #2
we built the form, did the wet newspaper step, built the mud layer, and cut the door

then I misunderstood the directions and we tried to immediately remove the sand form

the roof fell in (of course) so we had to rebuild it

now I know that the mud has to make a crust first (wet newspaper is not strong enough to hold up the arch on its own) and next time I will have us make Homemade Magic Shell to better explain it


Wednesday - try #3
the mud oven was damaged in the rain so we had to rebuild it


Thursday
the oven was not yet dry

week 4 - complete the oven and try baking!

Monday - try #4
the mud oven was damaged in the rain again (the cover we put on blew off during the big thunderstorms) so we had to rebuild it


Tuesday
dry! we scooped out much of the sand



Wednesday
still dry! we are finally catching a break in the weather

we removed the rest of the sand, tickling the inside of the oven with our fingers to loosen it and stopping when we hit the newspaper

I built a small fire inside the oven to dry it the rest of the way



Thursday
still dry! we tested the oven today for the first time

One of my students carefully described all the steps to me for his MLB and you can see how clearly the process stuck with him:

We also spent our time this month practicing units of metric measurement for volume and mass, enjoying some vintage flashcards. We looked at the connections between the metric system and our Montessori math manipulatives for place value (stamp game & decimal stamp game).

We also found some connections between the metric system and our box of Cut-Out Labeled Fraction Circles.

AND we played the always popular Estimation Game! Each morning for two weeks I set out an item and the children had to estimate its mass in grams. Each day's item was then written down and they could compare new items to information they already knew... carefully holding them in their hands... to help them fine tune their estimates more and more as the days went on.

Our list of items was

paperclip 1 g

nickel 5 g

cotton boll 6 g

Chill Pill essential oil roll-on 35 g

chalkboard eraser 43 g

wooden fox 48 g

wooden pig 111 g

red duct tape 124 g

clay pot 192 g

Play with Plants by Millicent Selsam 248 g

clay pot with green colored pencils 375 g

Colored Globe of the Continents 521 g

The earth oven was definintely a challenge to build but so totally worth it. Just look at how happy they were!

If you visit Fort Massac, by the way, their oven works the same way. You build the fire, heat the masonry thoroughly, blow out the fire, swiftly remove all the ashes, and put in your baked goods. Then pop on the door and let the oven cook via residual heat.

This kind of oven was essential in colonial times in the U.S. It is also why you hear of the big community ovens not being used in the wintertime. It was just too cold outside for the oven to get as hot as was needed. Thus the importance of boiled bread, ash cakes, hoecakes, etc.

Both of our historical fiction books that take place at Plimoth show this kind of oven in use: Stranded at Plimoth Plantation 1626 by Gary Bowen and Goody O'Grumpity by Carol Ryrie Brink.

So even if my students never build an earth oven again, they deeply understand what it takes to do so, how it works and why... and beyond the practice with measurement, they had a little taste of history as well.

This post contains affiliate links to materials I truly use for homeschooling. Qualifying purchases provide me with revenue. Thank you for your support!

Zac Is a Reader!

Zac's birthday was yesterday; he's newly 9! It has been great fun this school year watching him become a reader.

I'm a firm believer in the Waldorf method, so I don't push reading. I would much rather have kids discover it on their own and feel like it has been a joyful adventure. I didn't say anything to him at all about the alphabet in PK or Kindy. Not even the alphabet song. We just kept it strictly play-based.

June 2018, age 3

In 1st grade I introduce the Capital Letters and the kids focus on learning to write words and make their own books. In 2nd grade I introduce the Lowercase Letters and we partner-read The Magic Belt and Totem together on the staircase while the older children have SSR. There are more sets of these decodable books by Phonics Books and I highly recommend them!

At the start of this year Zac wanted something that felt like a "real book" so instead of starting Talisman 1 he went through a bunch of vintage early reader titles with satisfyingly heavy covers... including the "See and Read" series and "The Story of" books by Robert McClung.

By March he was coming to me for a Reading Meeting every few days, so I started looking around for what else I had that was designed for a newly confident reader. (Even when you can sound out a lot of words, you need largish print and a lot of white space on a page. Visual tracking is its own separate skill!) Enter Jake Drake.

It was when we got to the Jake Drake books by Andrew Clements that I really feel like Zac became a reader.

Before Jake Drake my child was reading because he was supposed to. Part of school, have to do it.

With Jake Drake, he was reading because he wanted to. He was begging me to buy the other books in the series, he was staying up late at night with his bedroom light secretly on so he could keep reading, he was offering to read passages to me, he was making comments aloud as he read. These are not my favorite books because they are about problems with life in public school -- and I don't want to vilify public school -- but he loved them and that was what mattered. Everytime I turned around, my child's nose was in a book.

After Jake Drake he got EXTREMELY into The Boxcar Children (I read the first book to the class at lunchtime, hoping someone would get interested in the series, and it worked!) and he has read over 30 titles and asked for more for his birthday. Zac has also enjoyed Judy Blume (Freckle Juice), Roald Dahl (Esio Trot, George's Marvelous Medicine), Sid Fleischman (The Whipping Boy), and Ruth Stiles Gannett (Three Tales of My Father's Dragon).

It's so amazing how your home changes when your child becomes a reader. The house is silent for hours at a time because they are reading. Not a peep out of them; they are deep in the magical world of books. I remember my girls being like this and now it's so fun that that door has opened for Zac.

Now he is reading the Eddie books by Carolyn Haywood. They are laugh out loud funny and he just loves them! They are wholesome old-fashioned adventures for boys. Unlike Haywood's "B" is for Betsy books, many of which are still in print, the Eddie Wilson books are harder to find. But I think they are well worth tracking down. Note: eBay is often cheaper than Amazon.

Here are all of the titles in the series:

#1 - Little Eddie (1947)



#2 - Eddie and the Fire Engine (1949)




#3 - Eddie and Gardenia (1951)




#4 - Eddie's Pay Dirt (1953)




#5 - Eddie and His Big Deals (1955)




#6 - Eddie Makes Music (1957)




#7 - Eddie and Louella (1959)




#8 - Annie Pat and Eddie (1960)




#9 - Eddie's Green Thumb (1964)




#10 - Eddie the Dog Holder (1966)




#11 - Ever-Ready Eddie (1968)




#12 - Eddie's Happenings (1971)




#13 - Eddie's Valuable Property (1975)

.

The last three trail away in quality and we won't be reading them.
#14 - Eddie's Menagerie (1978)
#15 - Merry Christmas from Eddie (1986)
#16 - Eddie's Friend Boodles (1991)

My favorites are the early ones, that are both written and illustrated by Carolyn Haywood, and they maintain the same fun lighthearted tone.

Just a note that Merry Christmas from Eddie is actually a compilation of all the Christmas chapters from many books, here published together. She did the same with Merry Christmas from Betsy.

What was the book (or series) that turned your child into a reader?

This post contains affiliate links to materials I truly use for homeschooling. Qualifying purchases provide me with revenue. Thank you for your support!