Tracks in the snow

The sun his beautiful today, there is no wind, it's a perfect winter day.  (The calm before the storm?  I hear we're supposed to get more snow this weekend.) 

The boys and I decided we would take a walk to the back of the field (across the creek) and check out this snow drift we can see from our school window.

While on our walk, we saw lots of animal tracks.  The ones that sank down into the snow, we couldn't tell whether they were coyote or deer tracks.  But here are some interesting ones that were on top of the snow.

These were so tiny, we though maybe mouse or some other small animal.

These were definitely bird tracks.

And the most interesting tracks of all.  The foot tracks look like rabbit, maybe, but we didn't know what in the world would make the lines behind it.  Maybe porcupine quills???

Our creek as we crossed over at the bridge.

And we FINALLY made it to the drift.  It wasn't as big as it looked from the house, but pretty none the less.  And we got quite a workout trying to get back there.  Our feet kept sinking into the snow with every step about 4-5 inches. 

Of course, the boys are light enough, they could walk on top the snow drift without sinking.  Good exercise for all of us and good to get out of the house for awhile.

Astronomy

We started Apologia's Astronomy book this past week.  We will probably go well into the summer to finish this unit, but hopefully that will be the best time to study the stars.  As an introduction, we were to make a "to scale" solar system.  They gave us the dimensions for each planet.  We used balloons and wadded up pieces of paper to get them all to scale.  Some of the planets are hard to see in the picture, so I have labeled them for you.