Besides an awesome wool-dying experience, the opportunity to see David Kennard of Wellscroft Farm demonstrate traditional sheep herding was a big part of our choice to return to Sturbridge Village for their Wool Days. The dogs were amazing! They could follow whistle as well as spoken commands. I was even able to capture part of the demo on film – see the video at the end of this post!
Learning Laboratory is a celebration of fun, creative, hands-on learning for all ages! Here are some posts I enjoyed last week:
- Rock Drawings from Inspiration Laboratories
- Exploring outdoors – What belongs (cleaning the beach with a toddler) from Rainy Day Mum
- Dandelions and other flowers from Sunnydaytodaymama
- Water structure from Taming the Goblin
I hope you’ll share your favorite learning posts! Text links back or sharing my button is always appreciated, so that others can learn about this series!
MaryAnne is a craft loving educator, musician, photographer, and writer who lives in Silicon Valley with her husband Mike and their four children.
We watched a sheep herding demonstration recently also and really enjoyed it. It was neat to see how much the dogs seemed to enjoy the work.
The dogs really do seem happy! The person doing this show explained that he breeds dogs, but only sells them to working farms, because he says border collies need something to do to be happy. He said you can own one as a pet if you are going to invest a LOT of time into training and exercising them to make the most of their inborn talents.
That sounds like lots of fun! I wonder if we have anything like it around here.
I hope you find something like it. It is so much fun for our kids!
How neat to see this live!
It was a great day out :)
What a totally amazing day. It’s just so much fun to expose children to the world and so many fascinating experiences
Yea! My kids still talk about the sheep shearing, cow milking, whip cracking time we had at a farm show a couple years ago. Maybe we should go again!!
Farms are kid paradise!
How cool. they used to have sheep herding at Scarborough Faire, but they haven’t the past couple of years, which is a shame because it was really cool to watch.
Your renaissance fair is called Scarborough Faire? That’s fantastic! Every time I make something with parsley, sage, rosemary, or thyme in it I have this irresistible urge to start singing that song…
This did nothing to help quiet my urge to have a sheep or two… :) You have fed the desire LOL
What a wonderful experience – we have a local sheep farm that shears the wool and passes on to be dyed to local crafts men, but we have never seen it being done – we have seen sheppards though and love watching them at work with their sheep dogs.
Thank you for featuring our beach clean up
I loved watching the shepherd with his dogs!
And I thought your beach clean-up post was absolutely lovely :)
Sheep shearing is a wonderful experience to share with children as you have. And, I sure to appreciate the beautiful wool they give us for our warm wooly sweaters, hats and scarves for our winters here!
It was very neat to see! And now my kids understand where that lovely warm wool comes from!
What a fun adventure!
It was a great day out, in spite of being very hot and muggy! And now today I have the heat on – gotta love New England…
That’s so cool! I assumed they always used electric shears. How cool to see them use the clippers!
It was very cool! I’m guessing clippers are much easier, though! The shears seem to require a certain skill level I wouldn’t expect from shears…
That must have been such a fun day. I never knew that we bread sheep to keep their wool for shearing! So interesting!!
I found that very interesting! I had heard of “wool gathering”, but didn’t realize that that was the main way to get wool, originally!
I love to watch sheep shearing! Every year in Pella, the local sheep farmer came to town and let the kids come and watch!
How cool!
This looks such an interesting place to visit and how wonderful that you were able to watch 1830-style sheep shearing! Thank you for sharing our dandelions post. :)
You are welcome! You did such fun things with dandelions!