Hard Lesson

There is one correct answer to the request, "Clean up what you were doing before you start something else."

The answer is not "No!"

If the answer is no, then guess who cleans the stuff up? And guess where it goes? And guess who cries when she sees the scraps of paper that she "worked so hard on" in the recycling bin?

I am not heartless -- they really looked like scraps of paper. She had been making a collage with pictures cut out of a (toy) catalog. Then she disappeared upstairs to sing and dance to her own internal music. Wouldn't you think she was done, too?

Maybe, MAYBE next time TJ will remember that the only answer is, "Yes, Mommy."

School House Rock as an educational tool ... no, really

Sing along with me the School House Rock refrain, "Ha-a-ay, learn about the U S A." Constitution Day passed us by last week (September 17), but we are making up for it by school-house-rocking out the Preamble of the Constitution.

I've got a Five In A Row approach to this topic (FIAR to be explained in another post), yet somehow we're balancing this against our unschool-y tendencies. My goal for TJ is to recite the Preamble, in broad terms to state what the Constitution is, and to name some of the liberties listed in the Bill of Rights. That should be enough for a kindergartner, no?

Monday, TJ and PJ navigated through the School House Rock dvd while I got a break (shower, coffee, sudoku -- small necessities!). The Preamble tune got stuck in our heads.

Tuesday we printed out the text, with "We the People" in that old fashioned, fancy font. It turns out that there are a lot of interesting words in that short segment of the document! So she asked me what promote, tranquility, and posterity mean, and I wrote above the words. She asked about most of the words, in fact.

Wednesday was a bit of review. Mostly we finished listening to the Little House in the Big Woods, but we didn't try to connect it to the Constitution. TJ can tell you that we, as Americans, have the right to say what we want, go to church if we want to (or not go, if we don't want to), and to hang out with our friends.

By the end of the week, I'd like her to create a poster about what the Constitution means to her. We're going to send it off to a contest for next year's campaign to promote Constitution Day. Didn't you know? (I didn't.) The signing was September 17th, 1787.

We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America.

Monkey Bread

I've been on a bread baking kick for a couple of weeks.  The girls love the sandwich bread recipe from America's Test Kitchen Cookbook (my kitchen bible) so much that they eat the crust.  It is cheaper, and more fun, to bake our own, so we've been making lots of bread.

This particular cookbook has lots of pictorial explanation, and the very next recipe after the sandwich bread looked so tempting!  Monkey bread is a variation on the sandwich bread dough that elevates it to dessert heights: seven tablespoons of butter, almost two cups of sugar, lots of cinnamon, and nuts.  (We didn't use nuts because we were going to share this with lots of kids.  But I do want to try this with pecans.)

"Where's the chocolate?" they asked.   

"You are going to like it even though there isn't any chocolate.  Trust me."

We had a great time measuring out the ingredients and talking about yeast.  TJ will tell you that the yeast burps, and that it needs sugar to eat and something to keep it warm.  She knows that the burps make bubbles in the dough, and that the bubbles make the bread rise.

The next step is the most fun: divide the dough into thirty-six pieces and roll them into balls.  I foresee lots of lessons in multiplication and fractions as we make this recipe in the future.  Then dip the balls in butter, roll them in cinnamon sugar, and then fill up a bundt cake pan with these goodies.  

This recipe is awesome.  It even makes its own sauce!  "Drizzle the leftover butter and sugar mixture over the dough balls."  We turned the bread out after baking and caramel dripped out of the pan.

I thought it would be nice to get a picture of this fabulous thing when we got to park day.  I showed up carrying my platter with still warm bread, and suddenly all the kids who had been on the play equipment were in the shelter around the picnic table where I had placed the bread.  I turned around to get my camera out of my bag, turned back ... and it was like locusts had descended.  The whole thing was almost gone!  

Which is fabulous.  We had a blast making the bread, and I can't ask for a better end to one of our kitchen creations.

Coffee House Kindergarten

The preschool co-op started for PJ this week, and I had the good fortune to be in the classroom with her on the first day. She has the advantage of familiarity with the way the day begins, having watched her big sister the last two years. PJ walked in the door and right away knew what to do: put her show-and-tell in the basket, hang up her bag, wash her hands, and find her nametag. From there it was different, because she stayed and her sister left.

PJ had a pretty good first day. She did three paintings, made two "kissing hands," and played at the bean table for a long time. I hope she will do well without me next week. I'm a little nervous about her because she was so clingy, but she has friends there and she likes her teacher. She's going to be okay! And I'm going to repeat that affirmation to myself to make it true.

What does TJ do while PJ and I are at school? It won't happen all that often, but when it does, she is off to Coffee House Kindergarten with Jennifer and G. Jennifer took the kids to our usual coffee place (for the record, this is not an SBUX but a locally owned cafe). They played with Cuisenaire rods by making patterns with them. Jennifer brought along her yarn dobbie and knitted rainbow snakes that the kids formed into letters.

And they ate doughnuts.

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Thank you, Jennifer, for the Tinkerbell bracelet and necklace! PJ is so attached to them, that she has to know where they are before she goes to bed.

Apple picking

There are moments when I am certain that homeschooling is the right thing for us. Like when we took off for our favorite apple orchard on Wednesday afternoon with our friends from Idle and Blessed.
They picked more apples than we know what to do with. Then the kids rolled down a grassy hill and chased each other around for almost an hour.  Jennifer and I sat back and watched and enjoyed the mountain air. We had the place to ourselves, so it wasn't a big deal when PJ shed her clothes. Nature au naturel! Lucky girl.

The ride home was quiet with four sleeping children. It was a great day at Princess Baking School.

Why do squares roll?

TJ asked "Why do squares roll?" this afternoon. It took me a moment to catch up with her thought process. She was asking about rolling dice. We've been playing Yahtzee.

We had a conversation about dice and marbles, rugs and wood tables. She has a great sense of the physical world. The marble would definitely roll farther than a die, and would definitely go farther on the floor because it is smooth.

But she's not satisfied with knowing these things. "I think we should do that in Princess Baking School for a science experiment."

Now where do I find some marbles?

School on Sunday

I wonder how much I need to keep track of "lessons." Not for the Commonwealth of Virginia, which could not care less, but for my inner record keeper. I have gone so far as to write up a plan for our unit study for Little House in the Big Woods. The words "objective" and "teaching method" appeared, I guess because some habits die hard.

We listened to the book this evening, which happens to be a Sunday. The girls worked with yellow play dough as we heard about the sugar snow, the dance, and maple candy. They didn't do anything school-ish, like a product to show comprehension. (There are no work sheets in the kindergarten class at Princess Baking School! There will be lap books.) Proof that TJ is listening: she giggled when Laura and the other Laura Ingalls got into a spat over who had the prettiest baby sister.

Nothing is really different in the way we go about our days, and the fact of not changing is taking some getting used to. September, to me, meant disrupting what felt like the natural order of things. As the school year wore on, a stomach ache always arrived on Sunday evenings in contemplating the homework I had left to do for Monday.

I will have to remember that we "did school" on Sunday so that, maybe, I can feel a bit less guilty about "doing nothing" later in the week.