Back on track

Getting back into the fresh food prep.  Looking forward to the start of the CSA season in 3 weeks!

The first three are from the Eat to Live Cookbook:

Super Slaw with cabbage, apples, and beets among other things

3 Bean Mango Salad over greens

Veggie lasagna with sliced zucchini instead of noodles

This one is from the Crazy, Sexy Cancer Cookbook, and it is my favorite of the day:

Asian Stir Raw- also good over greens

And finally, my sister's favorite- the You Are What You Eat Cookbook's Shepherdess Pie in the making:

Weaving!

So, in my last post, I shared how the kids learned about weaving to better understand an English assignment.

Today, we went to the library for a homeschool music class, and when we walked into the meeting room, the walls were covered with fantastic woven art.  This was a fabulous chance to start a review  discussion of looms and weavings.

There was also a woven basket with slips of paper and pencils and a sign asking visitors to vote for their favorite pieces.  It was interesting to watch the boys make their selections.  We all had a hard time choosing.  Everything was really beautiful.

You don't know this?

Seriously, why don't you know this, Child?

I think we homeschooling parents are often shocked by what we consider to be gaps in our kids' educations, and we have no one to blame but ourselves.  I'm saying this tongue in cheek, here, but there is an element of truth to it.  All kids have gaps in their educations because it's physically impossible to teach someone every aspect of human knowledge.  Darn kids.  Why can't they just absorb ALL the information by osmosis?

So, we were diligently working on our Writing & Rhetoric book, and discussing the story of Arachne and Athena, where Athena gets angry at Arachnes's depiction of the Greek gods acting like jackasses, and smashes Arachne's loom with the shuttle.  It didn't take much discussion to realize that my boys had no basic knowledge of how a loom worked, let alone the components of a loom.  Therefore, they didn't have as deep an understanding of the story as they should have.

As we often do, we took a pause from the writing program, and took a little tangent to learn about looms and weaving.  We watched a couple videos of people working looms, we looked at diagrams of loom parts and we talked about what kinds of things were made on looms.  Then, I had the kids do some weaving of paper strips, so that they would understand how threads can be interwoven to make fabric.  This was a time consuming project for them, but they enjoyed seeing the progression of their work. With a little help, Andrew even turned his weaving into an Easter basket.