Hello peppers!
It was ruminant animal day, which means the peppers spent time with the ruminant animals on the farm. Ruminant animals have a stomach that is very different from us. Ruminants don’t have to completely chew all their food because instead of one compartment to the stomach, they have four. They are known as ruminant animals because of their first compartment to the stomach, the rumen.
This morning the green and the yellow peppers helped feed and move the chickens outside. Each pepper carried a chicken and put them in their outside coop. A few of the chickens managed to escape from the peppers but Ms. Megan, Ms Alana, and Ms. Julie helped catch them.
To see and “feel” the different stomachs, we made buckets to simulate the inside walls. Before we put our hands in the buckets we felt a rubber model of a sheep stomach to know what they would feel like then, each person put their hands in the bucket filled with animal food and water to represent real stomach contents, as they guessed which stomach they were feeling.
We went on a hike with our ruminant friends, Jenna and Rita, to the woods. Another ruminant friend, Murphy, even followed us along the fence out to the woods. While we were in the woods, we discovered a geocache. We wrote in the log that we found it while on a hike and when we found it.
In our corn biscuits, we used our corn meal that we ground up. We pretended to eat like cows by eating the corn. Along with our corn biscuits, we shook up cream to make butter. We then found out where buttermilk came from. It was just the liquid left over from the butter! We opened up our yogurt that we made yesterday and it was so thick!
We had Inquiry Fish this week, which is a program through 4-H which lets them explore engineering type activities by building a device to feed fish. The only had limited materials, so it took a lot of communication and cooperation. This is a program that is only in eight states currently and allows for kids to build critical thinking skills.
We had a ruminant relay today! In the rumen, it can hold up to 50 gallons so we took water to a bucket and then ran back to the group to represent the cud that is chewed for up to 8 hours a day. Then we went to the reticulum, where hardware can build up and the magnets that the cows can hold to catch metal stays, we carried an egg to another hula hoop. The like the omasum filters, we sorted a stick and a rock from a bucket to hula hoops. The abomasum is the true stomach, because it is like the human stomach, and we ran to the tree. To show the end process, we hopped on one foot, to represent “plop, plop, plop”.
See you all tomorrow!
Garden Kitchen Recipes
Corn Biscuits
- 1 3/4 cup flour
- 2/3 cup corn meal
- 2 tbs sugar
- 1 tbs baking powder
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1/2 cup butter
- 1 cup buttermilk
Pre heat oven to 450 degrees. Make sure butter is well broken down by using hands to mix with dry ingredients before adding buttermilk. Mix well then make biscuits about the size of your palm. When done, biscuits will be slightly golden brown on the top. Makes about 12 biscuits.