A few weeks ago I said I was going to write more about our homeschooling style.  I haven’t had time to write much, and truth be told I’m still learning so much about Charlotte Mason that I can’t accurately write up something about it.

The basic way Charlotte Mason style homeschooling works is that we use living books instead of text books.  Living books are narrative style books, like an autobiography, that are written by one person and pull your thoughts and emotions into the story, get your interest, so that you remember what you’re learning about.  Basically the opposite of reading a dry encyclopedia.  The opposite of a text book, which are usually little summaries of historical events or boring explanations.

There is a lot, and I mean A LOT more to CM learning than just living books.  I’ve been trying to learn about it on my own for the past year since I discovered Charlotte Mason and I’ve been totally overwhelmed and sometimes confused.  We’ve tried out several homeschool co-ops in our area and I haven’t found any other parents who do CM.  None of the co-op classes have lined up with the philosophies, which has been disappointing.

I’ve been praying, wishing, hoping, and praying even harder that I might find another family who is interested in Charlotte Mason.  A few weeks ago I posted on a local board asking if anyone had a certain book for sale (A Child’s History of the World) because we needed it for Year 1 and I’d forgotten to order it.  Someone offered to give it to me, which is awesome because it’s a $40 book.  Then someone else saw my post and messaged me to ask if we were doing Charlotte Mason because she knew that was a living book.  She went on to ask me if I’d heard about the Charlotte Mason study group starting up.

Say what?!

Apparently a few other mothers are interested in Charlotte Mason homeschooling and they are starting their own group to study one of Charlotte Mason’s books.  (Volume 6)  Her books are written in Victorian English.  They are educational theories, dense reading.  Thought provoking stuff about not only education but a lifestyle, how you intend to raise your children.  I already own the book they were going to study and I’ve tried to read it on my own, but it was a little discouraging to slog through chapter after chapter with no one to bounce thoughts off of.  The book has lots of “ah-ha!” moments that beg to be discussed.

Not to over generalize, but most of the parents I’ve met at these homeschool co-ops don’t seem to be into this sort of thing.  There are a lot of worksheets and curriculum packages, not much in the way of deep discussions on things like educational philosophies.

I was THRILLED to hear that not only are there other CM families, but they want to have a study group.  SIGN ME UP!!

(Yes, me, the socially awkward person who avoids groups of people as much as possible. This could be premature, but it is possible that I *might* be coming out of my shell.  At least peeking out…)

I went to the first meeting of the group last week and there were 14 other moms there.  That’s a pretty big number!  Quite exciting.  We discussed the preface and introduction of the book for three hours.

Three hours people.  Three hours of actual intellectual discussion on a topic I feel passionate about–parenting and education–with others who are interested and in agreement, from varying backgrounds and different ages.

Be still my heart.

The very, very best part is that these all seem like normal people.  Smart, caring moms who aren’t snooty or weird.  Just normal, average families.

The very, very, very best part (oh yeah I just found a reason to use the underline!) is that the leader of the study group is organizing a Charlotte Mason homeschool co-op.  The study group is planning the co-op together.

Yours truly is possibly going to be teaching the three year old class.  Play based learning.  (Because I love toddlers and preschoolers more than any other age group.)  We plan to start the co-op in January.  I never realized how much planning it takes to run a co-op!  Between the 15 mothers at the study group there are about 50 children.  Some of the women have large families, some just have one child.  There’s a good mix.

Tonight I went to the second meeting and it was as good as the first meeting.  Three more hours of discussion.  I am able to ask experienced mothers for advice with every tiny problem we’re having.  Since this is our first year of real schooling (more than just Kindergarten) it’s been a little challenging.  It’s like the support I’ve found on the internet has stepped out into reality.  I may no longer need the internet if this trend continues.  No joke!  The leader of the group invited us to come over to her house soon so Rosie can see how her kids do “school” and be encouraged.  I think that will help a lot.

I’m also learning more about so many different resources that will be extremely helpful as Rosie gets older.  Things I would have not figured out on my own, or at least not easily.

I will be posting more about Charlotte Mason and how this style of schooling is working out for us as we go along. If you’re interested in reading more about it, below are the main principles from Charlotte Mason written in modern English.  Keep in mind these were written in another time period and some things you have to take with a grain of salt.  Overall the goal is to give children not just knowledge, but the desire and wisdom to be self-educating so they can learn (and enjoy learning!) throughout their whole lives.

It includes all regular school subjects, though I think once you reach high school level there will be some break away for things like calculus if Rosie wants/needs to learn something like that.  I never took calculus and didn’t need it for my major and neither did Tyler, but for some reason people love to pick out that one particular subject so I used it as an example.  (There, now I don’t have to get 20 more comments asking me how my child will ever learn calculus!) By the way, there’s a home school co-op or college class for that, I don’t have to worry about it right now or ever.

Anyway.

Links with more info are below the principles.

A Short Synopsis of the Educational Philosophy Explained in This Book

‘As soon as the soul spots truth, the soul recognizes it as her first and oldest friend.’
‘The repercussions of truth are great. Therefore we must not neglect to correctly judge what’s true, and what’s not.’
– Benjamin Whichcote

Whichcote meant that the end result of truth is so great, that we must be careful to make sure that what we live by is, indeed, the truth.

1. Children are born persons–they are not blank slates or embryonic oysters who have the potential of becoming persons. They already are persons.

2. Although children are born with a sin nature, they are neither all bad, nor all good. Children from all walks of life and backgrounds may make choices for good or evil.

3. The concepts of authority and obedience are true for all people whether they accept it or not. Submission to authority is necessary for any society or group or family to run smoothly.

4. Authority is not a license to abuse children, or to play upon their emotions or other desires, and adults are not free to limit a child’s education or use fear, love, power of suggestion, or their own influence over a child to make a child learn.

5. The only means a teacher may use to educate children are the child’s natural environment, the training of good habits and exposure to living ideas and concepts. This is what CM’s motto ‘Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life’ means.

6. ‘Education is an atmosphere’ doesn’t mean that we should create an artificial environment for children, but that we use the opportunities in the environment he already lives in to educate him. Children learn from real things in the real world.

7. ‘Education is a discipline’ means that we train a child to have good habits and self-control.

8. ‘Education is a life’ means that education should apply to body, soul and spirit. The mind needs ideas of all kinds, so the child’s curriculum should be varied and generous with many subjects included.

vol 6 paraphrase pg xxx

9. The child’s mind is not a blank slate, or a bucket to be filled. It is a living thing and needs knowledge to grow. As the stomach was designed to digest food, the mind is designed to digest knowledge and needs no special training or exercises to make it ready to learn.

10. Herbart’s philosophy that the mind is like an empty stage waiting for bits of information to be inserted puts too much responsibility on the teacher to prepare detailed lessons that the children, for all the teacher’s effort, don’t learn from anyway.

11. Instead, we believe that children’s minds are capable of digesting real knowledge, so we provide a rich, generous curriculum that exposes children to many interesting, living ideas and concepts.

12. ‘Education is the science of relations’ means that children have minds capable of making their own connections with knowledge and experiences, so we make sure the child learns about nature, science and art, knows how to make things, reads many living books and that they are physically fit.

13. In devising a curriculum, we provide a vast amount of ideas to ensure that the mind has enough brain food, knowledge about a variety of things to prevent boredom, and subjects are taught with high-quality literary language since that is what a child’s attention responds to best.

14. Since one doesn’t really ‘own’ knowledge until he can express it, children are required to narrate, or tell back (or write down), what they have read or heard.

15. Children must narrate after one reading or hearing. Children naturally have good focus of attention, but allowing a second reading makes them lazy and weakens their ability to pay attention the first time. Teachers summarizing and asking comprehension questions are other ways of giving children a second chance and making the need to focus the first time less urgent. By getting it the first time, less time is wasted on repeated readings, and more time is available during school hours for more knowledge. A child educated this way learns more than children using other methods, and this is true for all children regardless of their IQ or background.

vol 6 paraphrase pg xxxi

16. Children have two guides to help them in their moral and intellectual growth–’the way of the will,’ and ‘the way of reason.’

17. Children must learn the difference between ‘I want’ and ‘I will.’ They must learn to distract their thoughts when tempted to do what they may want but know is not right, and think of something else, or do something else, interesting enough to occupy their mind. After a short diversion, their mind will be refreshed and able to will with renewed strength.

18. Children must learn not to lean too heavily on their own reasoning. Reasoning is good for logically demonstrating mathematical truth, but unreliable when judging ideas because our reasoning will justify all kinds of erroneous ideas if we really want to believe them.

19. Knowing that reason is not to be trusted as the final authority in forming opinions, children must learn that their greatest responsibility is choosing which ideas to accept or reject. Good habits of behavior and lots of knowledge will provide the discipline and experience to help them do this.

20. We teach children that all truths are God’s truths, and that secular subjects are just as divine as religious ones. Children don’t go back and forth between two worlds when they focus on God and then their school subjects; there is unity among both because both are of God and, whatever children study or do, God is always with them.

vol 6 paraphrase pg 1

(Copied from: http://amblesideonline.org/CMM/M6_00.html )

An FAQ about everything related:
http://amblesideonline.org/FAQ.shtml

We’re doing Year 1 and using the basic plan from here:
http://www.charlottemasonhelp.com/2009/07/books-and-schedules.html
I also like this, Secular Charlotte Mason, for when the religious aspect gets to be too much. Because while we are Christian I’m not really into extremely religious homeschooling. Good to see this site because it shows how you can still do CM style regardless.
http://www.secularcm.com/

I read this article today while eating breakfast.  It’s about how India has hope in the stalled fight against polio.

It’s about how the oral polio vaccine is cutting down on the number of cases, though they still cannot seem to fully eradicate polio in the poorest of areas.  When casually reading the article it leaves you thinking, why yes this vaccine is life saving.  Thank goodness they have something to stop polio, thank goodness someone is out there vaccinating the poor!

But then I was chewing my cereal and I realized, like many vaccine related topics, there’s a carefully masked second side to the story…the logical side, unfortunately.

First of all, why do these children have to be vaccinated so many times against the same disease?  I understand there are different strains of polio and they have updated/improved the vaccine, but not 50 times!  Why did none of the 12 times the 3 year old was vaccinated work?  Surely she couldn’t have had diarrhea all 12 times she was vaccinated.

“Lalti Kumari, a shy 3-year-old, limps alongside her grandmother. She had been vaccinated 12 times, but still caught the disease in March 2009, likely because malnourishment or diarrhea made the doses ineffective.

“I don’t know how it happened,” said her mother, Sharmila Devi.”

“Rajkishore Tanti, a 45-year-old who estimates his two children were vaccinated roughly 50 times each, said the eradication program is the only government service that reaches the village.”
First of all, why do these children have to be vaccinated so many times against the same disease?  I understand there are different strains of polio and they have updated/improved the vaccine, but not 50 times!  Why did none of the 12 times the 3 year old was vaccinated work?  Surely she couldn’t have had diarrhea all 12 times she was vaccinated.  If the area is so poor, why do they waste money vaccinating and re-vaccinating against the same disease?  The article even comments on one huge factor that went into eradicating polio in the USA…

“As contact with polio-laced sewage became less frequent, people no longer contracted the disease in early infancy, when side effects were rare.”

Yet Bill Gates is spending $102 million dollars vaccinating these poor areas against polio, over and over?  Do you realize how much money $102 million dollars is for a dirt poor Indian village?  Think what all $102 million could buy!

Bill Gates has the power to buy them fresh water wells.  He can set up a clinic, one that keeps the oral re-hydration solutions and zinc to treat the diarrhea that supposedly interferes with vaccines.  He can have a huge impact on the lives of these people.  He could help build outhouses or some way to treat sewage, since polio is spread through feces.

Oh and want to know my favorite part?  They are giving these children the oral polio vaccine.  This is the version of the vaccine that contains the live virus, which means the children who get the vaccine shed live polio virus in their poop.

Now follow my logic: They are giving the live polio virus in an area where the article says children poop by the side of the road, an area so poor they don’t even have a ball to play with, let alone a place to wash their hands.  An area so poor that the people are constantly ill, they have poor immune systems due to lack of nutrition and sanitation.  WHY would they give these people a vaccine that is not to be used around people with a compromised immune system?  It is possible for others to catch polio from those that have been vaccinated!

In the United States when they used to give the oral polio vaccine some people would get the disease from it.  You weren’t supposed to be around any cancer patients or those with weak immune systems for an extended period of time after being vaccinated for that very reason.

It makes great sense to give this vaccine to the unhealthy poor, those who will be spending time all around the poop of vaccinated children sheding the live virus.

So instead of improving their quality of life with nutrition and medical care, Bill Gates wastes money vaccinating the same poor, rural population…the same kids 50 times.

The villagers even question this!  It says so in the article.

“Villagers complain that the vaccinators are the only health workers they ever see. One asked why they didn’t bring other medicine; another demanded clean drinking water.”

“If the road department, the electricity department, all the other government departments functioned like this polio campaign, our plight would be over,” he said.”

So…why?  Why does Bill Gates not spend some of that $102 million on something more logical, on a long term solution that would impact the lives of these people?

I’m sure Bill Gates realizes that infectious diseases will always be present in groups of people who don’t have the proper nutrition and health care to maintain strong immune systems.

Why wouldn’t he then spend money on helping these people build stronger immunity with nutrition, sanitation, vitamins, food, and clean water?  Then more people would be able to fight off all kinds of diseases, not just polio.

There has to be a good reason, right?  I honestly don’t know what that reason is.  I suspect it has a lot to do with Bill Gates’ ties to the pharmaceutical industry.

I’m sitting in my freezing cold house surrounded by half folded piles of clean laundry and random toys.  The heat was turned off and the windows were left open, so it’s a chipper 60 degrees in here this morning.

We had oatmeal raisin chocolate chip cookies for breakfast because the chickens have temporarily stopped laying eggs.

The girls are playing with dolls on the floor in mismatched pajamas while we listen to The Civil Wars.

Next up, a Queen dance party…

Yesterday we were supposed to do chores.  Instead we spent the entire afternoon in the warm sun at the park, and then Rosie went to a friend’s house, and we spent the evening in our backyard.

Our backyard is so ready to be cleaned up for spring.  We filled the yard waste can with a fallen tree’s branches.  Soon we have to repair the wind ripped tarps over the chicken pens, rake up all of the half decayed leaves, and put out some new grass seed.  Then we get to fill up the raised garden beds and plant, plant, plant.

I can’t wait until every day is filled with warm sun.

It feels so good beaming down on our backs.

Today it’s cloudy outside, and rain is in the forecast.

Spring will be here soon though.  My daffodils are coming up, their green shoots taller every day.  They know spring is coming.

The birds are back too, from their winter vacation in the south.  I’ve seen lots of robins recently.

My cat has eaten lots of robins recently.

Outside I found an empty blue robin’s shell on the ground.

This spring Ada will be one year old.  Can you believe it’s been an entire year?

Next spring at this time I secretly very much hope to be pregnant again! I can’t seem to stop the baby fever, maybe it’s a sign.

I just keep looking at the two of them and wanting…no, needing…more.

More love, more baby goodness, more sleepless nights sniffing soft baby hair, more chaos, more messes, more fun, more life.

Even on a cloudy day…

Mother, oh Mother, come shake out your cloth,

Empty the dustpan, poison the moth,

Hang out the washing and butter the bread,

Sew on a button and make up a bed.

Where is the mother whose house is so shocking?

She’s up in the nursery, blissfully rocking.

Oh, I’ve grown shiftless as Little Boy Blue

(Lullaby, rockaby, lullaby loo).

Dishes are waiting and bills are past due

(Pat-a-cake, darling, and peek, peekaboo).

The shopping’s not done and there’s nothing for stew

And out in the yard there’s a hullabaloo

But I’m playing Kanga and this is my Roo.

Look! Aren’t her eyes the most wonderful hue?

(Lullaby, rockaby, lullaby loo).

The cleaning and scrubbing will wait till tomorrow,

For children grow up, as I’ve learned to my sorrow.

So quiet down, cobwebs. Dust go to sleep.

I’m rocking my baby and babies don’t keep.

- by Ruth Hulburt Hamilton

(Thanks Johanna, for the poem.)

The Great Dane found his owner!  He belongs to a college student who went on vacation.  A friend was supposed to be caring for him.  Bet she’s pretty pissed at that friend.  He also apparently had on a collar and tags, but they are no where to be found.  She didn’t even realize he was missing–my neighbor had him outside and another neighbor recognized him.  They called the owner who was on her way home from her vacation.

Anyway, I’m so glad he’s back where he belongs.  His owner said he’s so skinny because he has a stomach disorder.  Now I need to Google this, out of curiosity.

Such a sweet dog!  Aaaah!

I’ve been really loving my Kindle lately.  Tyler bought a leather cover with an attached book light and it makes all the difference.  In the past week I’ve started and finished Dawn on a Distant Shore (Tyler makes fun of me, but it was an enjoyable read, and it’s a series…) and tonight I finished Snow Flower and the Secret Fan.

I just finished Snow Flower and the Secret Fan a few minutes ago.  Now I am so depressed.  Thank God I was not born in the 1800′s as a Chinese girl.

Next I’m going to start the third book in the series I’m reading, the one following Dawn on a Distant Shore.  I think there are two more books in the series after that, they are all around 800 pages long, but I read really fast.

Then I have to read some free books, because I can’t keep buying them.  Project Gutenberg is so cool–all of those books are free e-books.  They are all old books, and there are a million to choose from.

I love reading in bed at night.  It was hard to do with actual books, because Ada would find them in the morning and eat the pages or they would get knocked in the floor.  I never found a book light I liked.  The Kindle is so easy, and it’s just like looking at a book page.

I’d much rather read than watch TV, for the most part.  I haven’t watched TV much at all in the past few weeks.  Sometimes I turn it on out of habit and I suddenly realize how completely annoying and shallow everything on it seems, so I turn it right back off.

Ok, I’ll admit I like Teen Mom.  Shh.  I also like Big Love and True Blood.  However, none of those things are on right now.

Today’s photo(s):

4/365

Rosie had her first ever dentist visit this morning.  It was shockingly uneventful.  I don’t know what I was so nervous about.

I’ve been going to the same dentist since I was three years old.  The dentist was excited that I was bringing in my kid, said it made him feel old.  He took a picture on his camera of Rosie and him together.  I’m waiting for him to email it to me.  He’s a nice guy.

Rosie was thrilled to get to go to the dentist.  (Relief!)  She loved the electric toothbrush thingy, and she was especially happy about the mint chocolate flavored toothpaste they gave her.  In the car afterward she kept going on and on about how they vacuumed her mouth, hahaha.

She has no cavities and perfect teeth!  We brush once a day (usually) and honestly we don’t floss…so I guess a combination of genetics and healthy diet are doing her teeth good.

This afternoon was one of those afternoons…you know, more in the department of patience lessons.  This afternoon it wasn’t so much Rosie’s behavior as it was just a lot of mishaps.

It started when I thought we’d make some blueberry muffins.  I’ve been enjoying the mini muffin tin lately.  Bite sized deliciousness!

Except…fail.  Oh the failure.

Rosie was using the sifter when she stepped right off of the chair she was standing up on.  Then there was this instant explosion of flour/salt/sugar/baking powder EVERYWHERE.

Rosie ran through the house screaming and crying in horror.  “Please don’t be mad!” she sobbed.  “It was an accident.  I’m just a little kid!”

I started laughing so hard, and then I took a picture or three.

Rosie’s running through the house resulted in my entire house coated in gritty flour/sugar mixture.  Did I mention how I’d just vacuumed the entire house not 20 minutes prior to this incident?  *sigh*

I vacuumed again, but our feet are still gritty and a little sticky.  I guess tomorrow mopping is in order.

When the big explosion happened I was holding Ada and I had to sit her down to deal with the aftermath.  I guess I wasn’t paying attention well enough, because when I came back to her she was eating a pile of spilled sugar and squealing.

Aside from the fact that my seven month old just ate a pile of sugar, it was kind of funny until…

Fifteen minutes later we decided to try and salvage the muffins.  Rosie was helping me mix in the messy semi-defrosted blueberries, and she ended up spilling a bunch of them.  Ada was eating a few from the floor along with some dog hair.  Poor scavenging Baby Pants.

Ada started fussing and I was just trying to hurry up and get the stupid muffins in the oven before something else went terribly wrong.

But wait…just as I was sliding the muffins into the oven I heard Ada farting.  She was wearing a diaper without a cover, and I thought, “Oh I’ll just slide this diaper off and plop her on the potty real quick!”  So I did, I slid the diaper halfway off as we were walking down the hall…and despite the fact that my house is tiny, we did not get there fast enough.

Why, oh why does baby poop shoot out all at once?  She pooped right IN MY HAND.

I wasn’t sure what to do.  Lay down the baby and coat the floor in poop too?  No doubt she would then get it on her hands and stick it in her mouth.  I’m only one set of arms, where do I put a messy baby while washing my hands?  I threw the diaper in the bathtub and the baby on a towel in the floor.  After I cleaned up my hands and Ada’s bum I smelled something else.  The muffins!

My mini muffins were getting quite well done.  I rushed off to get them out of the oven and remove them from the muffin tin so they didn’t continue cooking from the residual heat.

Ada was happily playing with Rosie in the living room.

I was sampling muffins happily for a little while.  They came out spongy and slightly chewy, like…Cracker Barrel pancake texture.  Delicious, but odd for a muffin.  I guess it’s because the ratios were off from the mix getting spilled all over.

Then I heard more screaming from Rosie.  What now?  What possibly could go wrong now?

My Chihuahua. MANUEL NOOOOOO!!

He had removed the globby poop filled diaper from the bathtub and was running all over the house shaking it in his mouth like he was trying to snap its neck.

Really.  There are no words for this.  But I was too flabbergasted to take a picture.  (I know, you probably aren’t sorry about that.)

While I was dealing with that fiasco, Ada peed on the floor and started splashing in it.  Because I was too much in a hurry to get the muffins out of the oven to re-diaper her…

Fail.  Afternoon total fail.

It’s ok though.  The muffins were ugly but tasty, and we were still laughing after all was said and done.  Really, this would have been a great comedy if only we had cool British accents.  Kind of like Fawlty Towers.  (This linked video has me laughing so hard I’m crying.  Love this show so much.  We named Manuel after a character on here.  He comes on this episode about 5 minutes in.)

How could I possibly be even the slightest bit angry with these little faces?  Flustered, maybe, but angry…nope.

Blueberry thief!

Blueberries stain…

And then Ada grabbed Rosie’s muffin and stuffed in her mouth and locked her jaws closed so we couldn’t take it away…

For supper tonight:

Elephant scrambled eggs, raisins for eyes, banana trunk, raw sunflower seed tusks, and seven grain crackers on the side.

She was still hungry after cleaning her plate so she had some left over noodles and chicken breast with alfredo from yesterday…

I get questions from people all the time about keeping chickens in my back yard.
My favorite statement comes from my in-laws. “Our eggs come from Kroger’s. Why would we want to waste time and money by growing a garden and taking care of chickens when we could get eggs for $1 a dozen from the grocery?”
The answer to that question can be long and in depth, but for simplicities sake I’ll just say I enjoy gardening and tending to livestock. I also enjoy feeding my family fresh food jam packed with nutrients rather than a tomato that was sprayed with pesticides to grow extra large, then picked green and chemically ripened on a truck as it traveled 1,000 miles to sit on my local grocery store’s shelf. Who knows how many dirty hands have touched that tomato…yuck.

For us keeping chickens was just the next natural step beyond gardening. Fresh vegetables and fruits are absolutely delicious–they taste nothing like the over sized flavorless replicas you purchase at the store. So why would fresh eggs be any different?

It’s true. Everyone who tries our eggs comments on how dark yellow and tall the yolks are, and how they actually have flavor. They taste like eggs! They taste like sun, like grass, and fresh air. They aren’t anything like an egg you purchase from the store, not even similar to the commercial “cage free” eggs you can buy lately.

I loved our fresh eggs so much I decided I needed to share them with everyone. This is why I now have 35 chickens. We get about two dozen eggs a day and sell them to people around town. We’re sort of like drug dealers–the phone is always ringing with someone asking if we’ve got any eggs. People stop buy with some cash and we slip them some eggs…
$2 a dozen is enough money to cover all of their feed and bedding each month with a bit of profit!

I wish everyone could have a few chickens in their back yard. They’re easy, fun pets in addition to being a source of food. Unfortunately chickens aren’t legal in every town or neighborhood. They’re allowed in many places though–check your town’s ordinances (many are easily searchable online these days), and your local home owner’s association if you have one.

When we first decided to get chickens I was totally overwhelmed. What coop should we choose?
How can we build an affordable chicken coop that isn’t an eyesore with limited building knowledge and few tools?
Where should we get chickens?
And holy crap, I have chickens in my back yard. What do I do now!?

We took the easy route.
Lowe’s had wooden play houses on clearance at the beginning of the Fall. They were only $75! We got one of those, as well as a thick sheet of plywood and a boards to build a floor and stilts to set it on. My husband and a friend were able to put it together in one afternoon. Then I painted it yellow, just for fun.
We made the unfortunate discovery that chickens can fly or climb over the fence even with a wing clipped. To stop this we got a 7×13 foot dog kennel and set it up as a chicken run. (You can find these fairly cheap on Craigslist!) Then we zip-tied a tarp over the top to block out the sun and prevent hawks from swooping down.

Beware when purchasing adult birds–you can never tell their age for sure, and chickens are often silent carriers of disease. A healthy looking adult chicken can sicken a new bird because once a chicken catches a bird virus they may heal, but they always remain contagious for life despite appearing healthy. We made this mistake once and lost our entire chicken flock to disease. That’s why we decided to start over with chicks!
We purchased our chickens from a hatchery as baby chicks and hand raised them so that they would be friendly pets. Later we built an incubator and hatched more chicks. That was a lot of fun.

For their bedding we use low dust pine shavings purchased for cheap at the feed store. That goes inside of the coops with some diatomaceous earth and stall dry mixed in. Those two things cut down on flies and odor!
In the chicken run we put down several bags of washed play sand to cover the mud. Every month (or as needed) we cut open a bale of straw and the chickens scratch in it and spread it out over the the ground. When too much chicken poop builds up I sprinkle garden safe lime over everything and spray it down with water, then put fresh straw on top. The lime helps decay the poop and also stops odor and flies.
We clean out the inside of their coops every couple of weeks. Since we don’t have a compost area set up in our back yard I just give away the contents of the coops on Freecycle. You’d be shocked at how many people will gladly come and pick up tubs of chicken poop! I get at least 50 responses each time I post it.

Feeding the chickens was another matter of confusion. Our chickens enjoy supervised free ranging time in the yard as well as lots of kitchen scraps. They eat anything and everything, though we don’t feed them much meat–only what tiny bits happen to be stuck in the other scraps. (Chickens also shouldn’t eat raw potatoes or raw onions, something they contain can sicken birds.)
We debated over what type of feed to purchase for their main staple.
Organic feed is available online or at a specialty store down town. The good thing about organic food is, well, it’s organic! The chickens aren’t building up pesticides in their bodies through their feed, which could be passed into their eggs.
However, organic feed is extremely expensive and this means we would have to sell for a higher cost. That would limit the amount of customers because people can’t afford and don’t want buy expensive eggs!
Organic feed also has to travel far to reach us. This means it uses a lot of oil, and it’s not as fresh.
There are cheaper non-organic feeds at the big chain stores like Tractor Supply. Those are also not as fresh, since they are pre-made pellets. Sometimes we feed our birds those foods, but we’ve noticed it increases the amount of poop they put out and their poop is stinkier! They also eat more of it. A 50 pound bag lasts one week for my 35 birds and two ducks.
Once we discovered a local feed mill we decided to always give them our business! Their feed is ground and mixed right there, so it’s always fresh. It’s also considerably cheaper. A 100 pound bag is $15, compared to $14 for a 50 pound bag of pellet feed from Tractor Supply. The feed isn’t made from organic grains, but the fact that it’s local and fresh and affordable outweighs the pricey organic option for us. It also lasts longer, for two weeks per 50 pounds instead of one week with the pellet feed. It’s also nice to know we’re supporting a local business rather than a big chain store.
We supplement their feed with oyster shell to make sure they have enough calcium to lay hard shelled eggs. Tractor Supply sells five or six pounds of oyster shell for $6. The local feed store sells a big 50 pound bag of oyster shell for $7. Sometimes it pays to shop locally! And you know what? The local store loads all of the feed for me. All I have to do is back up to the loading docks. I can go there with my kids and not worry about how I’ll lift all of the huge heavy bags while holding the baby and my three year old’s hand.

Back yard chickens are such an easy pet. You have to feed them, water them, and clean out their bedding every now and then. You have to lock them up somewhere safe a dusk. That’s about it! They’re easy for kids to care for. Most of our chickens are friendly. They’ll follow us around the yard, eat from our hands, and they can be picked up and carried. I love them!

And hey, if you decide you don’t like them…you can always cook them up for supper. ;-)