Kids in the Kitchen - Baking Cookies with Susannah

This past Sunday evening Daniel played for a special Thanksgiving Service at church while the rest of us stayed home (and the littles finished their naps).  Sundays after church are low-key for us, mostly resting and spending time together as a family.

This particular afternoon I decided to give Susannah some baking experience. She has helped me with baking a lot over the years (when she was a toddler she would stand on a stool watching and sometimes helping dump ingredients into the mixer). This time I decided to let her be as independent as possible, barring something terrible (salt instead of sugar, that type of thing).

I chose my favorite Gingersnap Cookie recipe, partly because I was in the mood for them, and partly because it is a very simple recipe. And they are super delicious!

I had her read through the directions of the recipe BEFORE she started putting ingredients into the bowl, to help her learn that ingredients list order isn't always the mixing order.

From there she just started making the cookies! She had questions from time to time but I only had to intervene once when she used baking powder instead of baking soda. I was able to scoop out the baking powder, and I told her that I've made the same mistake before. :)

She did all of the work from start to finish, even putting the cookies into the oven and taking them out when the timer beeped.

I was proud of her and she was excited to have gained and earned that level of independence. I'm looking forward to lots more cooking and baking together in the days and years to come!

A Day in the Life

Today was our first "back to reality" day after our vacation.  We got home Friday, but took it easy Friday and Saturday.  Sunday was the normal day of church and resting. Monday morning was my MUMS group meeting and Catherine had a well appointment in the afternoon.  After her appointment I ended up getting groceries before coming home.  Monday was also my day to work in the office, so once I was home I holed up there for the tiny bit of time left in the day. I didn't even put away the non-cold groceries.

As such, this is how my kitchen greeted me this morning:

The morning got off to a bit of a rocky start and a lot later than I wanted, but eventually the ball started rolling instead of skidding.

Susannah did her piano practice, Charity unloaded the dishwasher and Sylvia had free time.  After that, Susannah and Sylvia started their school-work for today.  It's a challenge to get back into the discipline of staying focused and actually doing the work, but we managed.

While the girls did school I started cleaning up the kitchen.  I started with the groceries because I was stepping around them to do anything. Plus Silas was wanting to open all the packages, and managed to open the lid AND the pull-tab inner lid of a can of peanuts!

There was plenty of helping people with various needs mixed in every other minute or two. It seems to take forever to do a single task right now in life!

Finally the groceries were away and Silas stayed busy for a bit "fixing" the kitchen door.  He uses an old mixer attachment thing (that I no longer have the motor for) as a "screwdriver," and tinkers on the screws of the door.  At one point he was outside fixing on the deck.  He actually had gotten my meat thermometer to use at first, but I swapped him for the real pretend (??) screwdriver.

Charity played in the living room for quite a while.  These magnetic tiles were a fun Aldi find a few months ago.  I have always wanted some but never wanted to spend the money on them. When I saw them at Aldi they seemed to be a good price.  The girls love playing with them, so it was a worthwhile purchase!

Before I got much headway on housework (oh, I did wash and dry some laundry here and there), it was time to make lunch.  I made sandwiches for everyone else and a salad for myself.  It was yummy: lettuce and spinach, tuna, apple, avocado and grapes drizzled with extra light olive oil and balsamic vinegar.

After lunch Susannah put away the food while I fed Catherine.  Then I loaded Catherine into the Ergo (love that thing!) and we went for a walk.  Our first stop was the chickens to look at the peeps that hatched while we were away.

Then we went to a "meadow" that is literally 1 house away from us to walk.  This was the first time I took the kids for a walk like this. They loved it! We are definitely doing this more often.  The weather was beautiful too.

Silas held my hand for the first while. 😊 I tried to show him our shadows but he couldn't "get" it.  Catherine fell asleep and was a content passenger.

I love the colors of fall and noticed the deep burgundy of these leaves. I think they might be Sumac but I'm not sure.

This just begged to be photographed.

On the way home Silas stopped often to collect rocks.  It is interesting to see the difference between girls and boys!  He also will collect sticks to carry.  Hopefully I won't find toads in his pockets some day...

When we got back Catherine wanted to eat again.  Susannah worked on her school some more (she was in Sloth mode all day).  Silas went down for a nap and Sylvia and Charity played.

I finished cleaning up most of the kitchen and then had the girls work on some picking up.  Some worked more willingly than others.

I made chicken pot pie for dinner.  I just chopped up chicken to cook, added mixed vegetables, some chicken broth, 2 cans of Cream of Chicken, some Poultry Seasoning and some rubbed Sage. It filled the casserole dish to the brim, then I topped it with homemade pie crust.

While it baked, Catherine ate again.  About the time she was finishing I smelled something burning and thought the casserole was getting too overdone.  As soon as I could I went to check, expecting to see burnt crust on the pot pie.  Instead it had bubbled over a LOT, and was creating a puddle of oven lava on the oven floor. 🙄  Oh yay...

Catherine was happy after eating and hung out in her seat while we ate dinner.

After dinner it was baths for everyone.  Daniel and I have a pretty good system down pat: I start with Silas and work my way up.  As each kid is finished, he gets them dressed (well, Sylvia and Susannah don't need his help) and starts brushing hair and teeth.  This works really well and really helps lighten my load.

Eventually everyone was in bed, finally earlier than it had been for a while!!  I went out and closed up the chickens, and came back to clean up the kitchen. (The oven spill will have to be cleaned later. This Mama can't be all things to all people and do all things too.)

The Oven Lava awaits...

I'd hoped to get a lot more done than I actually did, but there were no dull moments in the day for sure.

It was nice to end the day with a much cleaner kitchen even if I didn't get to every nook and cranny.

The day ended with feeding Catherine once more before I went to bed myself.

And that is a day in my life!!

First Day of Home-School, 2014

Susannah, age 4

Kindergarten

Goal: Learning to Read

Sylvia, age 2

Observer and master of wooden puzzles. :)

We're eager to see what the year ahead holds for us. :)

Charity was napping when I took the previous photos, so here's her First Day of School picture:

 Charity, 4 months and 2 weeks old

Charity's goal: figure out how to move!

Mama's goal: get her to like food

Preparing for Homeschool - The First Year

Do I really dare call it "homeschooling" when all I will really be doing is teaching Susannah how to read and doing some math? Since I have ordered the material and it will require me to use a portion of each day to teach the material, then I guess yes, it is homeschooling.

As I face the quickly approaching school year as a first time homeschooling mom, so many thoughts cross my mind.

Can I do this? Can I really teach her how to read, do simple math, AND do everything else that must be done? Can I keep up with the dishes? The laundry? The baths, potty trips and diaper changes? Can I keep two other little people happily busy while I teach one something specific?

Is she ready? Yes, of course she's ready. She wants to know how to read. ...but what if it doesn't click? What if I don't know how to teach everything in a way she can understand and learn and retain and and and...  

Will she pay attention long enough to do each lesson?

Will I recognize if it's not working so we can step back and take a break if we need to? I don't want to frustrate her...

I want it to be fun. I know that all learning cannot be "fun" but as much as I can I want homeschooling to be a good experience. For all of us. What if either of us gets tired of schooling? You can't just stop doing school like you can stop playing with kitchen toys or blocks or whatever.

And on and on go similar thoughts in my head. So many "what ifs."

On the other hand, I am so excited for so many reasons. Mostly to see her mind unlock the treasure of reading. I love books. I think Susannah will enjoy reading so much! She wants to be able to read so badly. I haven't told her yet that we will be starting school soon, so that she can learn to read. I am excited to see her excitement.

I'm excited at all the fun adventures the future holds. All the fun field trips I want to do.  We had gone to the printers to pick up some teacher's handbooks that I had printed off of a disc. While standing in the print shop I had the idea to someday take a field trip to a printing place. A working dairy. Museums. Historic places and landmarks. Factories (Hershey, PA is top of the list when they are old enough!!!). So many more ideas go through my head. I know these aren't homeschooler-specific things to do but things that I think will make homeschooling "the bee's knees!"

I've heard about many ways to teach reading and have honestly done little-to-no research on what method I wanted to use. For a while I thought I would just use the same curriculum that I had learned with, but then I heard about American Language Series from a friend. The more I heard about it the more I wanted to use it. 

We will be using American Language Series which covers phonics & reading and spelling, writing & vocabulary simultaneously. (I didn't order from this site, but you can read a very good overview of the course here.)

For Math, we will use Horizon - K (overview here). It was recommended for going together well with the learning to read program. I have had fun looking through these books and anticipate that Susannah will have fun, too.

I don't anticipate that at 4 years old she will grasp everything covered and my guess is that we will make it so far and then put the books away for next year. My goal for this year is to teach her how to read. We can worry about nouns and punctuation and graphs and math later. :) 

We are fortunate that when we built the addition we included a school-room. It's the least-finished room in the entire house but finished or not, here we come!!  One thing I am really excited to do is to make our school room an enjoyable place to learn. I don't know how realistic it is, but I plan and hope to put up some decorations and use various decorative/creative ways to help with learning. I bought a huge bale of colored contruction paper at Costco the last trip and plan to put it to good use!!