Books and Crafts, Oh my!

"School" has been going slow lately with sick babies around but we have been reading and crafting and just enjoying being a family!

Some of our newest favorites..

Baby Island by Carol Ryrie Brink

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs by Judi Barrett

Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans

The newest favorite craft.. making envelopes from junk mail!

We get the community paper and after scanning through it we usually throw it away BUT we have found that we can instead recycle by making envelopes, we LOVE them!

Here are some pics..

First we paint the thinner pieces with Gesso

We then cut out the template using an envelope that we carefully took apart!

We then fold the creases and make our envelope!!!

One paper gave me 19 envelopes.. you could probably get more from them but I chose not to use some of the thinner ads...

Try making these for yourselves, they are addicting and give a unique personal touch to the letters that you send out! You could even have the kids paint or color on the gesso for a more personal touch!

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Sick baby...

Its a good thing that we homeschool! This year has been hard for us due to the constant changing of the crazy weather.. my baby is sick again so today will be another lazy day full of reading books and cuddles and perhaps a movie thrown in!

Learning about Nutrition

The great thing about being a Homeschooling family is that we can do school anytime with any topic of interest! We have lately been on a new journey of learning how to eat more "whole" foods and "raw" foods. The children have enjoyed being included in this adventure!

We have all fallen in love with Green Smoothies!

The kids enjoy deciding what to add to the smoothie each day!

Normally we start our day with this yummy source of veggies and fruits.. today we threw it together a bit later and here are the goodies we chose-

2 banana's

half of an orange

1/2 cup of Raspberries

1/2 cup Pineapples

Hand full of Kale

LOTS of Spinach

(We add one glass of water to the blender and blend)

These Green Smoothies have MANY wonderful benefits.. check out these sites for more information about starting your own addiction :)

Green Smoothie Girl

Happy Foody

Here are some great websites about eating more Whole Foods!

Keeper of the Home

The Nourishing Gourmet

Passionate Homemaking

Lots of Colds and Unschooling going on lately!

Yes it has been a LONG time since my last post but we have all been passing around a horrible cold and are still trying to recover! LOTS of unschooling going on around our house as we just go with the flow of this thing! Here are some of the things that we have done..

My middle princess finished last years math and has already been diligently (on her own) working on this year! WOO HOO!

My eldest princess has collected and read just about all the Mandie books, her siblings have taken on the roll of hiding her books so that she will play with them instead of reading!

My son helped his daddy build a tree house, skinned his hands up by realizing that you cant just slide down a tree like a fireman's pole :)

Sometimes our homeschool looks like this...

A Monk's Dinner...

In history this week we have been learning about Augustine, Britain and the Medieval Monasteries. We decided to recreate a Monk's Dinner...

Monks often ate fresh baked wheat bread but were not allowed to have butter on it except at Christmas or other special occasions.

Monks do not eat meat from four legged animals.

Monks are not allowed to talk at meals- we tried, we really did BUT what can I say we are a very communicative family :)

This recipe was taken out of our history activity book.

Cooking with Kiddos

Part of our "school" includes cooking with mommy! Cooking is a great way to teach math skills, using all the five senses! Usually in our family we rotate which child gets to play with mommy in the kitchen, this particular morning was the Eldest Princess's turn!

Here we have The Princess Apple Cake:

In a large bowl combine the following:

2 cups of flour

1 3/4 cups of sugar

3 eggs

1 cup of olive oil

1 teaspoon of vanilla

1 tablespoon of cinnamon

1 teaspoon of baking powder

1 teaspoon of salt

Chop up 2 1/2 cups of apples (we peeled ours)

Fold the apples into the mixture

Bake in a 9x13 greased and floured pan at 350 degrees for about 50 minutes.

Let it cool and then sprinkle with Powdered Sugar

Keep an eye on little fingers though.. they like to sneak pinches of the sugar :)