Veggie Cooking

 Yesterday afternoon was another food prep/cooking day.

I made a dip out of green peas and garlic, a spiced butternut squash soup, a roasted beet and roasted garlic soup, a chard and cabbage slaw, a broccoli and steamed acorn squash salad, and a roasted cauliflower and roasted red pepper salad with kalamata olives.  The recipes were on WholeLiving.com in their 28 day challenge.  I changed some of them a little to accommodate the ingredients I had on hand.  I also accidentally put tahini in the cauliflower salad, but it sure made it taste good!

This was lunch on Sunday.  I found a Mimolette cheese at BJ's of all places, so I had to buy it and try it.   It was pretty good.  I felt like I was back in France or Germany with this meal!

And here is the juice I had yesterday- pink grapefruit, carrot & ginger.

Orange-y

I can't get over some of the gorgeous colors that come out of the juicer.  Today's mix was 1 Honeycrisp apple, 5 carrots and a big, ole' chunk of ginger.

Back to work

It has been challenging to get back into a routine after the holidays, especially since Hubs and I went away for our anniversary over MLK weekend, and the Babysitters-Who-Shall-Remain-Nameless provided way too much fun for these children!  They want to keep the good times going and not buckle down.

Well here's a rundown of what we've been doing in the new year.

Language Arts:

We've covered the parts of a sentence and have begun learning about prepositional phrases and clauses.  We are starting to do some sentence analysis in our Practice Island book.  We did some worksheets on capitalization and comma placement.  We've been working on writing short poems (laborious!) and writing similes.  I tried to get them to write short stories with a sentence prompt, but that concept didn't take hold in their brains.  We'll have to keep trying with that.  They read a few history related books independently and have also been reading a Thea Stilton book for their upcoming book club meeting.  In spelling we've covered words with au, aw, o as in log, al as in halt and all.


We just finished learning all the lower case cursive letters.  I'm going to start assigning some written work to be all in cursive.

We are listening to Inkheart in the car, and all of us want to keep driving around to hear more of it.  We don't want to come in the house!  Great story!


Math:


We've been reviewing multiplication facts by working on Kumon workbooks.  They did a little multiple digit addition and subtraction review as well.  We covered Lessons 21 & 22 in MUS Gamma, which are introducing multiple digit multiplication.


History:

We learned a little more about Prussia.  We studied our big maps to see where modern day Germany is, and we pointed out all the countries we can identify on the map.  We learned about conflict in the New World and King Louis XIV of France sending over troops to fight the Native Americans.  We learned about the strife between the Wampanoag and the Plymouth colonists.  We learned about William Penn establishing a colony for Quakers in the New World.

Science:  

We have been learning about acids and bases and acid-base reactions.   We made two different kind of base indicators and tested out some household cleaners and other substances to see if they were acids or bases.  

French:

We've been reviewing everything we've learned so far and today we had a scavenger hunt.  I hid clues around the house and the boys found them.  The grand prize was lunch at Panera, including a pastry!

Some of my clues were misspelled, but they didn't catch on.

  

Latin:

We've learned caveat emptor and ex libris.

Music:

We reviewed all the songs we've learned and learned the high C on the recorder.  They started practicing Corn Song.

Life Skills:

We worked on phone manners, and are supposed to be working on eating with utensils.  That will be on ongoing project!

Health:

We talked about common household hazards.  We had a discussion about what we will need to do to babyproof the house for when we start babysitting The Tiny Girl.

We reviewed the food groups and made a shopping list of fruits and vegetables.  The boys shopped from their lists by themselves at Whole Foods.  I think they did a fine job, but we have about 30 bananas.  Guess I'll be freezing quite a few for shakes.

P. E.

We've been having dance parties in the living room and doing segments of a kids workout video we got from the library.

Art:

We did Lesson 10 in Artistic Pursuits, which is about showing your works.  I told them we would have an art show at some point.  I also had them make self portraits.  Ugh.  They really are not artists, although this is some of their best work to date!

We haven't done much in Chess, except play a game or two.  Need to get back to that.  

I let them each have one day to choose the schedule of classes for the day.  I was surprised by what they chose.  They both chose Language Arts, Handwriting, History, Reading, Science and Recess.  Andrew also chose Chess and Art, while Ed chose Health, Life Skills and a double dose of Science.  Neither chose Math!  Guess they're going to have to do some Math in the summer to catch up!  ;)

Juice!

I'm so happy to be juicing again.  It really does make me feel better.  This morning I juiced 2 large carrots, 3 stalks celery, 1 medium lump of ginger, 2 granny smith apples and 3 large beets.

This is the glorious concoction that came out of the juicer.  I want to paint a picture with it.

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.