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Homemade Bread Business

15 Feb

Monday morning I announced that I was going to teach the girls to make bread for homeschool. Cherry Pie told me she already knew how and declined the lesson.

This morning, figuring that we would see if she really knew how, I asked her to make bread for the family. I came home from yoga to this, and all I can think is, “She could have been making bread for me for the last 3 years if I had only asked her to.”

The future looks bright.

Pumpkin Pie and Peach Pie need lots of practice though. I’ve decided to let them do a business venture, both to earn money and to get lots of bread practice.

For math today, we calculated cost of ingredients and determined a price. They decided $3 per loaf of bread and $4 for 1/2 dozen cinnamon rolls was fair. We will see how it goes.

They will make whole wheat bread and cinnamon rolls Monday and Saturday mornings and deliver in the afternoon.

A Day in the Cezanne Still Life

18 Jan

First try at fruit still life al la Cezanne

Intention: We will watch all the Olympics!!

1& 1/2 hours later, casualties:

Art Study: Hundertwasser

21 Sep

Hundertwasser style flowers #deepspacesparkle #artclass #homeschoolrocks

First Try Oil Pastels

15 Sep

First experiment with oil pastels.

These took 3 one-hour sessions to complete

😅

First Day of School 2017

15 Aug

First day of homeschool 2017. I love these smart girls and the fact that I get to learn with them! 10th grade, 6th grade, 8th grade, kindergarten, and 3rd grade.

The Result of a year of Homeschool on the kids who are “too young” for school

4 May

Banana Cream Pie is 5&1/2. Sometimes she sits by me during our morning school time while I read aloud and the big girls and I repeat the scriptures, poems, and Shakespeare passages that we are memorizing. Often though, she is playing or not even in the room with us, or repeatedly interrupting to tell me she wants to play with the kindle or is hungry.

One day as we repeated our review poems, she said, “You forgot the one about ‘bread lasts only a day’.” So we added The Human Touch by Spencer Michael Free to our review for the day.

For exams, I had each of the big girls recite the 3 Shakespeare passages we worked on from Midsummer Night’s Dream. Pumpkin Pie got stuck after
“The eye of man hath not heard,
The ear of man hath not seen…”

And suddenly, Banana Cream Pie piped up with
“‘Man’s hand is not able to taste’, ya-doi!”

Then today, Peach Pie was lying on the trampoline, and Banana Cream Pie knelt next to her and patted her cheek and said:
“Asleep my love?
What dead, my dove?
This cherry nose,
These onion bunion cheeks..”

Wild laughter ensued.

Proof Positive that five-year-olds can enjoy Shakespeare and get his jokes or make their own from his.

I took her into the school for Kindergarten screening and they were impressed that she knew all of her alphabet letters. They didn’t even ask if she could recite Shakespeare!

Critical Thinking Skills from the Man of the House

3 May

As requested by me so I can implement them in homeschool.

Ten reasoning abilities and habits of mind necessary for critical thinking:

  1. Consciously raising the questions: what, how do we know?, why do we accept or believe?, what is the evidence for?
  2. Being clearly or explicitly aware of gaps in available information.
  3. Discriminating between observation and inference, between established fact and subsequent conjecture.
  4. Recognizing that words are symbols for ideas no the ideas themselves.
  5. Probing for assumptions (particularly the implicit, unarticulated) assumptions behind a line of reasoning.
  6. Drawing inferences from data, observations, or other evidence and recognizing when firm inferences cannot be drawn.
  7. Performing hypothetico-deductive reasoning; that is given a particular situation, applying relevant knowledge of principles and constraints and visualizing, in the abstract, the plausible outcomes that might result from various changes one can imagine to be imposed on the system.
  8. Discriminating between inductive and deductive reasoning; that is, being aware when an argument is being made from the particular to the general or from the general to the particular.
  9. Testing one’s own line of reasoning and conclusions for internal consistency and thus developing intellectual self-reliance.
  10. Developing self-consciousness concerning one’s own thinking and reasoning processes

Mere Motherhood

21 Apr

Today I handed the girls a book about Egyptian hieroglyphics and told them to have fun. I snuggled the twins and read Mere Motherhood by Cindy Rollins. I couldn’t put it down. Though our lives have been quite different, I felt that our hearts are much the same, and she said things that I needed to hear, so much that I’ve been grasping at but not quite catching hold of.

Its all there, the joys of Motherhood, the agony of it, and redemption in the end. I rubbed shoulders with a kindred spirit today.

While the Twins are Napping

4 Apr

A quick chalk pastels lesson.

Invitation Poems

30 Mar

This week we read some Songs from the Tempest “Come unto these yellow sands…” and “Where the Bee sucks, there suck I…”

Then we wrote invitation poems–invitations to magical colorful places full of sound where marvelous things can happen.

I just really love Key Lime Pie’s poem because it is so full of her personality.

Through the Jungle
Come with me to the nice green jungle.
We’ll swing from vines,
Climb trees.
We’ll visit the gorillas
Boom, boom boom!
(They pound their chests.)
And the parrots
Rawk, rawk!
We’ll see the jaguars,
And the jaguars might chase us
So we’ll hide in the trees.
Maybe we’ll even see some lizards.
We’ll swing back through the vines
Down through the trees.
We’ll go back home
And eat leafy greens.

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