First Book Club Meeting

We had our first book club meeting for kids ages 6-9 this morning.  The kids had read The Chocolate Touch by Patrick Skene Catling.  We had about 12 kids participating today, so that was a great turnout.  All the kids sat around the table, and I asked them questions about the book.  They were all very eager to talk about it, especially two or three kids in particular.  I had to ask them to give other kids a turn, but it was wonderful, because they were all so excited about the book and discussing it.  After we discussed the book, we did a vocabulary sheet, because there were quite a few elaborate and long words in the book that were definitely over the reading level of most of the kids.  I thought they wouldn't like it because it wasn't technically "fun", but the kids did a great job trying to figure out the meanings of the words from the context of the story.  Next, we had a snack of chocolate coins (very relevant to the book), pretzels, and raisins.  We ended the meeting with a craft project- making bookmarks that looked like candy bars.

Would girls do this?

Wednesday is the day we do Art around here, so I thought in addition to our regularly scheduled Art class, I'd have the boys makes some fall/Halloween decorations that we could hang in the front window instead of the plastic window cling decorations we usually put up.  I spent time before school this morning, cutting out various fall shapes on the Cricut.   When art class rolled around, I gave them the paper cutouts and other supplies told them to decorate them however they wanted, which, in hindsight, may have been too open-ended.

Here's what we got:

Battle Pumpkin with acorn ears and battle scars, spider with a leaf hat, and a bat with what used to be a leaf cut in half and hanging from his wings- all Andrew.

From Ed, Cyclops bat, spider with what is now supposedly mistletoe over his head, and FrankenPumpkin spitting out a soul.

While I do think they are cute and creative, this is not the festive holiday theme I had envisioned for the front window.   

They did have a lot of fun making them, and I guess they do look kind of nice now that they are actually on the window.

CSA Share #11

Andrew came with me to the farm, so he was able to pick out this beautiful pumpkin.  And there are eggs again!

And the winner is . . .

Beth!  Congratulations, Beth.  Do you want me to mail it to you or just bring it to Croptoberfest?

Here is a picture of Eddie with the winning slip of paper.  I actually wrote everyone's name on little identical pieces of paper and had Eddie pick.  I'm not talented enough to have a random number generator like my sister!

I'm a knucklehead!

Okay, I forgot that I will be picking up veggies at the farm at 1:00 PM tomorrow, so the drawing will take place at 3:00 PM instead!

A Rare Occurence

There is really only one dish that I make that everyone in this house can agree on for dinner:

                                             My homemade chicken noodle soup.

Inspired by my sister, Laura- My first Blog Giveaway!

Okay, so I thought this blog was primarily going to be a homeschooling blog.  Turns out, it's mostly about all the food I've been cooking lately.  To celebrate the unexpected in life, I'm going to have my first giveaway on my blog.

$25.00 gift card to Target   to be randomly selected from those who leave a comment after this post.  


So leave a comment, suggestion, cooking tip, homeschooling anecdote or other useful quip, and I will enter you in the drawing to be held on Tuesday, Sept. 27 at 1:00 PM, eastern time.

Bonne Chance!

Another Day in the Kitchen

The sun is shining so brightly, I feel I should be outside!  But, once again, the ingredients in the kitchen are calling to me.  I have a chicken in the stock pot for some home made chicken noodle soup, but that picture will have to come tomorrow.

So far, I've made: more tomato sauce, but with no extra veggies this time, except onion and green pepper.  This is prior to my pureeing it.

 I shall then pour some of the sauce over the innards of this lovely baked spaghetti squash.  Mmmm.

For dessert, I made all natural "Snickers".  You mix raw almond butter, cocoa powder and honey and stuff it into pitted medjool dates!  Freeze for a few hours, then devour.   There's a 100 calorie snack you can really sink your teeth into.

 I also made what the kids refer to as healthy candy, a. k. a. date/nut balls.

And last, but not least, green beans with bacon and onions.  Savory!

Don't you want to snuggle the monkey?

Take heed, parents.  If you think it might be a good idea to take away your kids' toys so that they would learn to appreciate them and keep them clean and not scattered all over the floor, think again.  A few weeks ago, after yelling at the boys for the millionth time to clean up their room, and coming upstairs to find them fighting and not a single thing picked up, I lost my cool and ordered them out of the room.  I then proceeded to bring laundry baskets into their room and load up all their toys, books, papers and other miscellaneous junk, and take it all into my room.  I sorted through and pitched anything broken, and made a donate pile for the few items that still resembled their original state, but are no longer favorites.  I let them choose one toy each and told them that if they took care of that toy for a whole week, they could earn another one back.  It took two weeks for them to get the message, and now they have 2 toys each.  They are already planning what they'd like to earn back next.

Apparently, I forgot a few items.  I left the basketball hoops that hang over their closet doors, and there were some items in backpacks that I didn't find, including the stuffed monkey you see in the picture below. So, after what seemed like a particularly long school day, I sent them up to their room to play, away from me.  I was doing my usual round of websites, when I heard an intruder approaching.  I called out, "Didn't I tell you to play upstairs?"  Eddie answered, "But don't you want to snuggle the monkey?"  I turned around to this:  

Ah, the joys of homeschooling . . .

Yesterday, I devoted a chunk of the afternoon to making phone calls about pesky items that have fallen through the cracks, and with which I have not desired to deal, as of late.  One of these items was the fact that I have not yet received my letter excusing the children from public school in favor of homeschooling.  I sent the huge packet of paperwork to the superintendent's office via certified mail on August 2.  Legally, they have two weeks in which to respond, but I give them the benefit of the doubt, that they are extremely busy with the unrolling of the new school year at that point.   According to the Ohio Revised Code, I don't really need their letter if I have proof that I sent in my required paperwork- except that I do need it to receive educator discounts at many locations.

So, I called the superintendent's office and was told that they hadn't received my paperwork.  I informed them that my return certified post card stated that a George Somebody had signed for it.  Apparently, he is the fellow who picks up the mail at the post office for the school board and the secretary became flustered when she realized that something was amiss on their end.  She had me scan and email the paperwork directly to her.  I received confirmation this morning that she received it, so hopefully I will hear back soon!  I want my 15% and 20% discounts at JoAnn and Barnes and Noble!  ; )

CSA Share #10

Lots of fruit in this week's share.  The peaches were fantastic!  Can't wait for the pears to ripen.

I miss the pool!

It's cold and rainy and so fallish this morning.  I really feel like swimming, though, and looking out at the rain-filled, leaf covered black tarp is so depressing.

Summer is simply not long enough in Northeast Ohio.

Shepherdess Pie, sort of

I used up some of the things I had left to make a version of shepherdess pie.

Now I'm cooking some chicken, and then I'll be done for the day.  Sorry, scrapbooking room.

More cookin' with CSA produce

Okay, so instead of cleaning and organizing my scrapbook room, which was my original plan for the day, I decided to tackle the giant pile of squash on the sunroom table.  Here's what I've made so far today:

First, I baked up most of the acorn and Sweet Baby squash.

I cubed up 4 butternut squash and made a big pot of soup.

I made a stuffing with brown rice, carrots, onion, and granny smith apples, which I put in the Sweet Baby squash and baked.  Sooooo tasty!

I had some purply-green runner beans, so I looked up a recipe online and modified it a little.  It has tomato, onion, green pepper, olive oil, coriander, cumin, chili powder and turmeric.  Different, but good.

And, I added a little agave nectar and some allspice and pumpkin pie spice to the acorn and bon bon squash.  A sweet treat.

Stuff I made this afternoon

Tomato/veggie sauce- has onion, green pepper, zucchini, carrots, basil, etc. all from CSA

Zucchini bread from the 2 giant zucchinis

pickled banana peppers!

Year 2, Week 3

Today we are wrapping up our third week of our second year of homeschooling, and I wanted to reflect on how it is going so far.  If I keep a record here, I can notice patterns and hopefully improve each year.

I changed up some of the curriculum and altered my approach to a few subjects.  I kept the elements of last year that were working well for us, and the new elements seem to be integrating well into our daily routine.    MCT Language Arts is such a better fit for us than First Language Lessons.  I love the Well Trained Mind approach to learning, but the Language Lessons didn't fit for us.  They were too slow moving and repetitive to capture the attention of two active boys.  MCT moves much more quickly and the layout and graphic design of the books are much more engaging for the kids.   The poetry component is superb.  I wish I had been exposed to poetry in this manner as a child.

 Last year, I used a huge stack of library books for my science curriculum, and that worked well for our study of earth science and astronomy.  There is a dearth of elementary level resources for Chemistry, so I chose an actual early elementary Chemistry text book for this year, along with a few other books and resources that I found at Barnes & Noble.  The kids are enjoying Chemistry thus far, although we haven't started the text book, yet.  We've been reading about states of matter and what elements are in a book called Chemistry:  Getting a Big Reaction.  This is a short and colorful book, which also appeals visually to the boys.

Math U See is still working well.  We've mastered multiplication by 0, 1, 2 and 10 in the first three weeks of school this year.  I'm sure it's going to get a little harder as we move on to the "not so easy" factors.

Cursive handwriting is going better than I expected.  We've learned lower case a, d, c, q and g so far.  The boys resist writing so much that I thought this would be a challenge, but I'm letting them use whiteboards when initially learning the letters and it seems to be working much better than learning to write them on paper.

We are on our third year of Story of the World.  Luckily, we were introduced to it by Aunt Amy before we even started homeschooling, so we are ahead of the game in history.  I recommend Story of the World for adults who don't feel that they have a good basic knowledge of world history.  We listen to the audiobook version read by Jim Weiss.  I also love the activities, maps, and further reading suggestions provided in the Activity Guide.

I'm ramping up Music this year, doing 2 days a week as opposed to 1.  We are getting a little more music theory and a little more practice playing the recorder.

I've signed them up for Homeschool Swim & Gym at Cleveland State, and the first class went surprisingly well.  The CSU students and staff who run the program are well organized and the kids learned skills while having fun.

We've done 2 lessons in Artistic Pursuits, and I think they like the program.  I just have to face the fact that my kids are not the "artist types".  They like to draw if it has to do with illustrating their comic books, but they are still mostly doing stick figures.  This book is making them think, though, and I can already see an improvement.

We are doing Health once a week, using a preset curriculum I purchased last year.  We've been focusing on how germs spread for these first few weeks.  I've tried to do an experiment where you touch things around the house and then touch a piece of bread, which you moisten and put in a dark place.  Then you wash you hands and repeat with the bread.  I guess my house must be too clean ;)  because we've done this now with two different kinds of bread (organic, even!) and nothing is growing on our bread.

We are still doing Chess once a week, using the Championship Chess materials, but it's getting beyond me now.  If we can ever afford it, I think I'll send them to Progress with Chess classes.

French is still not going that well.  E is more enthusiastic about it than A, but neither one really wants to learn  it.  Poor things!  But we are getting a lot of Latin roots in our MCT program, so that should start helping with the French vocab.  We're reading a book about Mary Queen of Scots for history, and it takes place in France when she was a young girl.  It is set at many of the chateaux that I visited when I lived in Tours, so I keep getting excited and showing them pictures.  They want to visit these places, especially Chambord, so that might be an incentive to keep up the French lessons.

We still do recitations in the morning.  They repeat all the Latin words and phrases they have learned, the poems they have memorized, and their science vocabulary every morning.  This really helps things stick in their minds.

So far, the best part about this year has been the enthusiasm and good attitudes of the boys.  They were excited to get started again after our summer break, and the excitement hasn't worn off, yet.  They both really like homeschooling and don't want to go back to public school.  That may change in the future, but for now, I'm enjoying spending this time with them and watching them learn and grow.

Edible Harry Potter Wands!

My friend Christine posted a link on my FB page about how to make edible Harry Potter wands.  I showed it to the kids, who are definitely excited about them and want to make them immediately.  I think we will need to do a Harry Potter summer school this summer.  

I had to start a new label and a new post.  I love listening to Audiobooks!  I'm going to post a running list of all the Audiobooks I've listened to.  I'll make a list of the ones I can remember.  Anyone who wants to discuss them with me, just post a comment.

Okay, so two families did not come and pick up their shares of veggies.  I gave some to Mom and to each of the neighbors on either side of us.  Tonight, I plan to wash, cut and prepare as many of them as I can for cooking in various recipes.  I'll post some pictures of what I make if I get the chance.

Blogosphere

That's a funny word.  I like repeating it over and over in my head.  It makes me laugh.  I did not get enough sleep last night, can you tell?

Gotta get up in the morning!

Okay, so my new plan didn't go so well this morning.  I had determined that I was going to get up early, go down the basement, get a load of laundry started, then do a work out while I waited for the wash cycle to finish.  Yeah.  Well, I got the washer going, and started stretching out.  Then, I realized that I'm so out of shape that last night's new Line Dancing class made me too sore to do an actual workout this morning.  We'll see what happens tomorrow.

CSA Share #9

Our School Area and First Day of School 2011-2012 pictures