Bunny Cupcakes

Frost cupcakes with any white frosting.  You can add shredded coconut if you want it to look like fur.

Cheeks: 2 mini marshmellows
Nose: small jelly bean.  I used Lifesaver brand jelly beans
Eyes: small dot of black decorator's gel
Ears: Cut a marshmellow on the diagonal.  The inside part will be very sticky.  Simply dip the sticky part in colored sugar.

Pasta Dyed with Kool-Aid

Go here for directions on an easy way to dye dry pasta with Koolaid.  The colors turned out really good and they smell awesome!

 

From left to right I used: Berry Blue, Orange, Lemon-Lime, Cherry (or maybe it was Black Cherry-I don't remember), Peach Mango, and Grape (yes, it does look more black than purple.)

I made up the pasta so we could make rainbows for Saint Patrick's Day like this:

But instead, the girls insisted on making "rainbow caves" like this:

I really struggled between being frustrated that they weren't following directions but not wanting to squash their creativity.  Sigh.

The Testimony of a Child

Secundus gave a talk today in Primary. I'm a fan of letting kids write their own talks. They are more capable than we sometimes think. So I told Secundus to tell me about Easter. The following is what she told me to write down:

Easter is about when Jesus died. He died on the cross. Then Joseph of Arimethea took him to the tomb. Two soldiers were standing by the tomb to make sure no one took his body. And when Jesus was resurrected, angels scared away the soldiers. Jesus told Mary to go tell his disciples that He was resurrected. They didn't believe her. So Jesus came and showed them His hands. And then they knew that He was resurrected and that He was Jesus.

I then told her that she should end her talk with a testimony and I explained that a testimony is the truth-something that you know to be true. So she had me write, "I know that Jesus is alive right now."



Happy Easter!

Diversity

I have a friend who has a daughter about Tertius' age and she's trying to decide which path to take for her future education.  So she asks me a lot of questions about homeschooling.  One of her questions has been.whether my children are being exposed to diversity.  Do homeschooled children have opportunity to know, and learn to value, people that are different than themselves?

Homeschoolers are accused all the time of sheltering our children in a little bubble.  Since we have to put a little more effort into making opportunities for our kids to meet new friends, it's tempting to stick with the white, middle class, LDS homeschool families that we already know.  But it has been so easy, and so beneficial, to expand our circle. 

It didn't take much time at all to find a few local homeschool groups on Meetup.com.  We now meet with our new friends once a week at the park, once a month for geography class, and sometimes more often for special events.  

My friend's concerns are unnecessary.  I can happily report that my kids and I are forming great friendships with families of all different cultures, colors, religions, and political leanings. 

Reading Tent Town

As one child put it, today was the "Best Day Ever!"  I think we can safely say Reading Tent Town was a resounding success.  Now we've got to decide how soon to do it again. 

The activity began in the mess hall.  Each of the kids was given a plastic plate, a plastic knife, and some veggies.  They cut up vegetables while my friend Cindy read Stone Soup.  Anytime she got to a point in the story when a new ingredient mentioned, she would ask a child to come and add it to her big soup pot.  The version she read was by Ann Mcgovern.

Tip: Brown and crumble the ground beef ahead of time.  Also open and drain your canned veggies before anyone arrives.  Finally, pre-cut the potatoes, celery, carrots, and onion into sticks that will be easier for the kids to chop with their flimsy knives.

The kids loved to chop up and add their veggies.  They were working away so hard.  But the other moms told me they think Tertius was the only one interested in cutting up the onions.  When everything was added to the pot, including of course the stone, it went in the house and on the stove to cook while the kids moved on to the next phase of the activity. 

Tip: Scrub the stone really good and then boil it by itself beforehand to make sure it is nice and clean. 

Spread around my yard were six small kid-sized tents.  Each tent was attended by a mom with a book (or a few).  Attached to the outside of each tent was a picture to represent those stories.  And on a card around each child's neck were all of the pictures so they could get them marked off as they visit each tent.  The themes we did were princess, pioneer, farm, train, Hiawatha, and Easter.

Tip: Those cards were so perfect!  I'm so glad I decided to do them.  Even one of the youngest kids (who is younger than Tertius) would look at his card, pick a picture, and then walk around to find the tent that matches the picture he had decided on.  It was so cute!

We had six story tents and sixteen children age 2-6.  Each small tent could accommodate 2-3 kids, with the adult sitting outside reading the story.  I keep referring to adults, but actually, 2 of the tents were attended by "big kids."  I love that we had older siblings interested in helping out.  I think the 11 year old boy was disappointed that he was too big to sit in the tents and listen to the stories, but he had a great attitude about it and made sure I knew he was a great reader. 

Tip: Either have tarps under the tents or towels/blankets for the adults to sit on.

The princess story tent was run by two 15 year old girls.  They got to use an awesome castle-shaped tent and they came dressed as Snow White and Rapunzel.  It was so awesome!  The kids loved having these celebrities attend.

Tip: I thought it would be really fun to have all the readers dress in a costume related to their books.  That didn't happen, but it didn't really matter.  Another great idea the mom in charge of the farm tent had was to bring farm animal puppets.  I think it helped some of the littlest kids to warm up to the experience.

One of the pictures on their cards was a bowl of soup to prompt them to go in the house and stir the soup.  It smelled so good!  Everyone was done listening to stories after about an hour.  A few minutes later, the soup was done cooking and it was lunch time!  Since the kids had worked so hard on making it themselves, most of them were very willing to taste it.

Tip: Our princesses brought princess coloring pages with them.  I don't know what prompted them to do that, but I'm glad they did!  It gave the kids something to do in the mess tent while we waited for the soup to finish and cool.

As the kids left, they each got an Airhead candy with the label, "Don't be an Airhead.  Read a Book."

Things I would do different next time:
*Have a bigger mess tent.  It was pretty crowded in there!
*Have hand sanitizer so the kids didn't have to crowd into the kitchen and bathrooms to wash before starting to make the soup.
*Clean my kitchen and bathrooms.  That was pretty embarrassing.
*Make sure everyone is aware of how crazy hot my entire stove gets when one burner is on.  One kid got hurt.  It wasn't a bad burn, thankfully, but it hurt.
*Have juice boxes.  Once we started eating, I realized that I was super thirsty.  So spur of the moment I grabbed a couple bottles of juice from my pantry and started pouring cups for the kids.  They were obviously thirsty, too.  Juice boxes would have just been more convenient.

Public Speaking Assessments Should Start at Which Grade?

A friend of mine shared the following photo on Facebook:

 

It's a picture of an assignment her child brought home from school.  Can you guess which grade her kid is in?  Would you believe me if I said it was Kindergarten?

Seeing this and then hearing her description of the heckling and such she witnessed the teacher doing to one of the kids during his "assessment" just made me sick to my stomach!

Kindergartners are still LEARNING public speaking and story mapping skills!  This is not the time to test them on it, especially if the assessment is going to include furious note taking, gruff tones, harsh criticism, and shouts of, "Louder!" from the teacher. 

If the point of the assignment was to give the kids practice in story mapping, then they should be writing it and/or drawing pictures on simple graphic organizers. 

If the point of the assignment was to teach public speaking skills, then you do show-and-tell, student of the week, have them memorize a short poem to recite, or have them prepare to present a simple couples sentences of "I like this story because..."  And then when they are done, you thank them profusely for presenting and compliment them on the things they did right.  If you must, you can also include in your sweetest, most kind-hearted and encouraging voice, "Next time you have a turn, remember to talk a little louder so the parent helper way in the back can hear you, too."

One of the things that disturbs me the most about this situation is that this nonsense is going on in one of the most desired schools in our district.  This school is part of the public school district but it doesn't automatically enroll children from a certain geographical area.  You have to open enroll into it and they require a certain amount of parent involvement hours a year.  I know a whole bunch of families that have opted to take their kids there.  They all have such wonderful things to say about it. 

If this craziness is going on in a "good" school in a middle class neighborhood, then I'm really scared for the future of our education system and our children.

Answering a Question about Homeschool...

A friend of mine posed this question on Facebook:

"I am seriously considering homeschooling next year. I know a little bit about the K-12 program, but I'm also wondering what other programs homeschoolers use. I'd love to find a program that would include some seminary/religious time daily, although I suppose I could add it in on my own."

So here is my response:

The way I understand it, in California you can basically either register yourself as a private school (and teach whatever the heck you want to), or you could enroll with one of the charter schools. 

We decided to go the charter school route.  Which means that they give us a budget of about $1600 per year per student to spend on curriculum, supplies, and enrichment classes.  I also have an "Educational Specialist" who checks in on us every month and collects samples of work. 

I've heard that some of the charters are more strict than mine.  But with mine, I can teach my kid whatever curriculum I want.  The only exceptions are that the school won't pay for religion-based books (like Apologia) and my ES makes sure that we are hitting all the state standards (which isn't very hard). 

I like the freedom to choose whatever sources I think will interest my children the most and will complement my goals for them and their learning style.  I definitely took one of my friends with me my first time to the local homeschool store to help navigate me through all the choices, though!

For teaching them to read, I have used "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons"  (I've known about it for years as SRA/Distar.)

I love the publisher Evan Moor and have used them for our science, literature, writing, spelling, and Daily Language Review. 

Last year we spent a lot of time learning to read and write the Dolch sight word lists.

For math, we are using Modern Curriculum Press. 

For history, we are using Story of the World.

Aside from my local homeschool supply store, my two favorite places to shop for supplies are:  Rainbow Resource and Lakeshore Learning

I highly recommend you check out some of the homeschool blogs and free resources on my side bar.  Those women are amazing and often do reviews about different curriculum.  In particular, since you mentioned K-12, you should check out the one (1+1+1=1) who uses something called Calvert with her boys (1st and 5th grade.)

Finally, in regards to adding religion to your day, this is what has worked for our family:
I try to wake up before the kids.  As soon as I get up, I go sit in the living room and study my scriptures.  When the kids get up, they get to pick one of our childrens' scripture story books from a stool next to my chair and read to themselves.  As soon as I am done, we say prayer together and then work on our scripture memorization.  I talked about the Charlotte Mason method that we use here.  The things we add to our binder to work on are all the scriptures and songs from the Primary Outline for Sharing Time and any other Primary songs I want us to learn (like Latter Day Prophets and the songs where you name all the books in the scriptures in order.)

Good luck in all your decisions!  And feel free to ask any other questions you may have!

Don't Name It!

While waiting in line to purchase two small plants:

Secundus: "I'm going to think of a name for mine!"

Me: "Don't name it!  Don't get attached to it.  We're going to let one of them die."

I wonder why the lady in the next line over was giving us weird looks?

Cool or Lame?

Last night I let the kids go camping.  In their own bedroom. 

It consisted of them sleeping on the floor in sleeping bags around a table that held our star projector and white noise machine set to play sounds of a summer night. 

Given that we live in the suburbs and never go camping, they thought it was awesome and asked to do it again tonight.

But my sister, who lives in a rural area, teased that it was super lame.  Well, she's right.  It is super lame that we can't see any stars at night (and that I wouldn't feel safe sleeping in our yard.)  I guess we'll just have to plan lots of backyard camping trips this summer at her house!
 

Slow down and go with the flow...

My goal lately has been to make school more fun.  For me, that doesn't necessarily mean that I have to plan more crafts or games.  But it does mean that I will push less hard, enjoy more, and let the kids have time to be kids. 

Yesterday that meant that when I gave Primus her spelling test, every word was given as an insult in a sentence.  ("Oil.  I'm going to pour oil on your head.  Oil."  "Stopped.  I stopped liking you the day you were born.  Stopped.")  This kind of teasing is received well in my house.  She thought it was hilarious and came up with her own comebacks, also using spelling words.

Today that meant two impromptu field trips. 

I have been meaning to find time to go to one of my favorite toy stores to do some school shopping (they are an approved vendor for our charter.)  This morning I noticed that they were doing a story-time and activity about the water cycle.  So we piled into the car and while the kids played, I did my shopping. 

When we left, I remembered that the fish hatchery was nearby.  I knew that the salmon weren't climbing the ladder anymore, but I hoped the visitor center was open.  It was and it was empty so we had the undivided attention of the naturalist working there, much to the delight of Secundus.  Then we spent plenty of un-rushed time feeding the baby trout in the outdoor tanks.

On the way home we stopped by grandma's house for lunch and a quick visit.  Then we came home to read a whole bunch of Greek myths, at Primus' request.  It was by all accounts a great day!

Mario Party Cupcakes

Cupcakes inspired by the world of Mario!

 

Mario:
white frosting, "M" made of red vines

Luigi:
white frosting, "L" made of green apple licorice

Toad:
white frosting, red M'&'Ms for the spots on his head

Princess Daisy:
yellow frosting, white frosting flower, green M'&'M for the flower center

Bowser:
green frosting, candy corn spikes

Kool-Aid Playdough Birthday Gifts

I never know what to get my many nieces and nephews for their birthdays.  For the four that live near me, I have started to DO something with them instead of giving a tangible gift.  They love it and I love it!  Some of the things we've made are a big cupcake, Oreo balls, chocolate mud, and mini cinnamon rolls.

But what can I do for the ones that live in another state?  A search of Pinterest brought me this great idea: Playdough Kits!  I made up a bunch and am sending them in someone's luggage.

On the ziplock bag I wrote the recipe:

1) combine 1 cup flour, 1/2 cup salt, 1 pkg Kool-Aid, and 2 Tbs oil in a big bowl

2) add 1 cup boiling water

3) stir with a wooden spoon until cool enough to handle

4) knead by hand until totally mixed

Here you can see everything included in the bag: 





The flour and salt are mixed in a small peanut butter jar.  That jar is the perfect size to store the finished dough. 
The oil is in a small plastic breast milk storage bottle. 
I also included a small playdough mold I happened to have (from buying these in the past) and a tongue depressor.  (Craft sticks are the best, cheap little tool to use for cutting, pressing, and poking playdough.  Plus, the jar is just a little too deep to make digging it out with your fingers easy or comfortable-so use the stick.)

I hope they enjoy it.  And I hope they think of how much their Auntie Shirley loves them while they help their parents mix up their dough.