Soup!

Have to write this one down before I forget because it was so delectable!

2 parts chicken stock
1 part veggie stock
red lentils
French lentils

brown and wild rice mix
onions
carrots
celery
red pepper
garlic
fresh parsley
button mushrooms
a handful of fingerling potatoes
chopped collard greens
bay leaf, salt and pepper

Back to the smoothies and juicing

Okay, my goal for the new year is to get back to the regular alternation of fresh juice and green smoothies.  Yesterday, I juiced carrots, celery, ginger, granny smith apples, and beet greens together.  Pretty tasty.  Even Nellie drank some.

This morning, I made my standard green smoothie:  frozen blueberries, frozen strawberries, frozen mango, frozen pineapple, green superfood powder and today I added red chard for the greens.  Delicious!

Here's a picutre of the greens I bought at Whole Foods.  They have the most beautiful greens.

Here's the smoothie before I added the water:

And here's the final product:

Totally Out There Post for New Year's Eve

I was looking at some other homeschooling blogs, and it suddenly dawned on me that I never blogged about the boys' theatre class.  At least I don't think I did. . .  I'm getting old, so my memory ain't what it used to be.

This fall, the boys took their third theatre class with Mr. Dustin at the Solon Center for the Arts.  Instead of putting on a regular play at the end of the session like they've done in the past, the kids wrote their own radio play and performed it before an audience.  It was recorded for posterity, too.  They had sound effects and everything.  I loved how they threw the script pages to the floor when they were finished reading them.  Mr. Dustin had told them all about Orson Welles' War of the Worlds radio show and how radio used to be a popular form of entertainment before TV.

Holiday Week

Wow, it's been a while since I posted here.  We've been fairly busy.  This week, though, we are taking it easy, school-wise, and are having a Holiday Week.  Monday, the boys did a Chanukah crossword puzzle, a Christmas maze, and a worksheet called Mitten Math.  There were mittens with multiplication problems on them and mittens with answers on them and you were supposed to color the matching problem and answer mittens the same color.  This one kind of threw Andrew for a loop, but he finally figured it out.

After the worksheets, we read a picture book version of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, Eight Wild Nights: A Family Hanukkah Tale by Brian P. Cleary, and started two chapter books- The Best Christmas Pageant Ever ("What's a pageant, Mom?"- Andrew) by Barbara Robinson and Jason's Miracle: A Hanukkah Story by Beryl Lieff Benderly.

Tuesday, we did a Hanukkah word search, a math review sheet with addition problems in Christmas trees, read Heart of a Snowman by Mary Kuryla & Eugene Yelchin, and continued reading our two chapter books.  We also made a bûche de Noël, for which, the boys did most of the work.  It was pretty tasty and gluten-free, so Mom could eat it, too!

Wednesday, we did a narration of the Nativity story, about which Ed was having an attitude problem, so his is slightly hostile:

Then we did a subtraction review sheet, in which the problems were all in presents, and colored a couple of Hanukkah pictures.

Somehow, I printed off a regular menorah, and not a hannukiah, but whatever!  Then we read Nate the Great and the Crunchy Christmas by Marjorie Weinman Sharmat and Craig Sharmat and Hooray for Hannukah by Fran Manushkin.  We also read more in our holiday chapter books.

Thursday, they did a page of Christmas math word problems, and a page similar to the Mitten Math, but this time with Gingerbread Men.

Then, they did a page where they had to find the differences in a scene featuring an elf with toys, followed by a lesson in the ways different languages say Merry Christmas.  Then, we read Demain, c'est Noël by Claire Masurel,  Marvin's Best Christmas Present Ever by Katherine Paterson, and The Trees of the Dancing Goats by Patricia Polacco, along with the chapter books.  This was a beautiful story that had me in tears!

For Friday, we will read The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry, as well as finish up the chapter books.

Recap of the past 4 weeks

Language Arts:

Grammar-  We've finished learning all the parts of speech and have moved on to learning the parts of a sentence.  We know what a subject and predicate is.  We will soon start labeling all the parts of speech and parts of the sentence in our Practice Book.

Poetry-  We've learned all about foot and meter- we can tell you the difference between an iamb and a trochee, a dactyl and and an anapest.  We learned maggie and millie and molly and may by e. e. cummings, and now we're working on Winter by William Shakespeare.

Spelling and Vocab- We've worked on different letter combinations that make the same sound like, oo, oul and u all making the same sound in words such as wood, could, and put.  We've also learned the Latin stems ex and spec and have had spelling words with those stems.

Reading- The boys have done some independent reading of nonfiction books from their library bins.  They also took turns reading The Big Wave by Pearl S. Buck to me.  As a tie-in to our history lesson on China, we read a beautiful picture book called The Paper Dragon.  For read-alouds, we read Runaway Ralph and are in the middle of The Three Musketeers (children's version).  We are also listening to The Pepins and Their Problems in the car.  They've also done a couple pages in their Spectrum Reading Comprehension workbooks.

Handwriting-  We've moved on to the loopy letters- e, l, h, k, etc.

Math:    They've learned all the multiplication facts and are working on mastering them, by doing worksheets, flashcards and games.  They've done a couple Multiplication Mosaics pages, too.  They are reviewing addition on a new fun website called Clever Dragons.  Andrew thinks we will be able to move on to division soon, but I think we'll do some measurement and geometry first.

History:  We learned about the 30 Years War, and about Japan isolating itself from the outside world and driving out the Catholic missionaries.  We learned about the Manchus invading South China and driving out the Ming Dynasty.  We learned about the line of Moghul emperors in India and why Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal.  We learned about the unfortunate King Charles of England who took over from his father James I.  We learned about the Cavaliers and the Roundheads, how Charles was beheaded, and how Oliver Cromwell became Lord Protector of England.

Have I mentioned how much I love Story of the World?  And how helpful it would have been if I'd known this stuff before I went off to college?  These kids don't know how lucky they are!

They also went to a class at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History about Plains Indians.  It was an interesting class- mostly about what resources they used to survive.  Here are a few photos from that day:

Andrew wore his headdress from Grandma, and received quite a few compliments on it.




Science:    Science has been exciting.  We've been discussing chemical reactions and and things such as catalysts that affect chemical reactions.  We looked up some really cool chemical reactions online.  You can see some of them here.   We made some chemical reactions of our own, too.  Below are photos of NaCl reacting with the CO2 of Coca Cola:

French:  We've worked on learning larger numbers, reviewing days of the week and beginning to learn the months.

Latin:  Phrases we learned- Facta, non verba, Dixi, Terra firma, Semper ubi sub ubi ubique, and Non est mea culpa.

Chess:  Watched the video about En Passant and continue to go to Chess Club.

Music:  Working on Jolly Old St. Nicholas on the recorder.  I was hoping to get them to do a duet in time for Christmas, but that's not looking too good at the moment.

Life Skills:  We made checklists for cleaning the living room and their bedroom and went over how exactly to do each item on the checklist.  We also practiced pouring drinks without spilling.

Health:  We covered hair and nail care, health care product advertising (how to read past the claims), following directions on prescription medicine,  and the difference between prescription and OTC drugs.

P.E.  Struggling with this one.  I posted about Swim & Gym, but we need to figure out something more. I do make them do random exercises, but my New Year's resolution is to get a better phys. ed. routine going.

I think I've covered just about everything.  I'm sure I forgot some stuff, but it's getting late, and I'm being beckoned to the second floor for bedtime routines.

Eddie broke my camera.

So, I've been using Nellie's camera, but this is really cramping my style.  I've been so used to having the camera out to take pictures of school stuff and delicious food.  Whatever will I do?  Maybe if I'm a really good girl, Santa will bring me a camera for Christmas.

Stolen from another homeschooler . . .

This is from an article ‘Home Is Where the School Is’ by Patricia Heidenry from the October 19, 1975 issue of The New York Times Magazine. " My desire to educate the children at home is based essentially on my belief that it is almost immoral for the children to spend a large portion of their youth in one building with more than a thousand other children and teachers in an environment that is lifeless and not life-giving. I use the word "immoral" to emphasize how strongly I feel about the time that is wasted by children in school. And I use it to indicate that this time wasted is something more important than children's I.Q.'s. Our children's lives – not their reading scores – should be our primary Concern. Children's lives are more than products that must he molded until they adapt well to society, or to another school, or to the work force. As it is now, a child's life is very much bound up with schools and schooling, and that animating force that gives life to each child is ignored in the rush to maintain reading levels, to excel academically, to make the honors class, to pass and to gain admittance to college. Children have no control at all over their lives in most schools. Their personalities and their individual talents are never the basis of the curriculum."

Craft Fair Goods

Well, my first show wasn't that great, but I think it was mainly because there weren't a whole lot of customers.  I'm holding out hope for the next show.  Thanks to Aunt Kaki for sitting with me the whole time and for pushing the purses and gift card holders!

As promised, I'm posting a picture of my setup.  This was the original setup, then with the help of Aunt Kaki, we rearranged some things.