A Glimpse into Toa's World

Yesterday's quote:

"This game makes me happy because it's monkeys defending our Earth from balloons."

This morning's question:

"Mommy, how do you draw a shuriken?"

The labels on a page full of little pencil drawings drawn during the sermon and then stuck in his Bible:

"Ninga Monkey; Dart monkey; ice monkey; barnoclel ? monkey; baby monkey; apprentice monkey; boomawing monkey; Balloon Guy; Rupper; Zomg Zomg; sun god; (and in speech bubbles: 'OHOH OHOH' and 'ya')"

 This afternoon's quote:

"Mommy, I'm really smart because I can play my game and clean my room at the same time!"

Two for Tuesday: Thanksgiving Favorites

Let's be honest. Everyone has certain dishes that just must be on the table in order for Thanksgiving to feel real.

Yeah, yeah, it's all about stopping and counting our blessings. We do that. I promise.


And then it's all about eating.

Here are two of my must haves. (Other than a smoked turkey, which the Jedi is forever more obligated to provide for me. This year, he's adding burnt ends to the meat menu as well. Mmmmm....burnt ends......)

Sweet Potato Casserole

Ingredients:

• 6 whole sweet potatoes ~3 lbs
•  3/4 cup sugar
•  1/3 cup milk
•  1/4 cup butter  (melted)
•  1 tsp vanilla
•  1/2 tsp cinnamon
•  1/2 tsp nutmeg
•  2 whole eggs (lightly beaten)

 Topping:

•  1/3 cup packed brown sugar
•  1/3 cup chopped pecans
•  2 tbsp flour
•  2 tbsp soft butter

Directions:

1.  Boil sweet potatoes for 30-40 minutes. Let cool, peel and mash. (I generally do this the day before. It's just easier. You can store them as is. Or you can mix up the casserole, put it in the fridge, and then bake it the day you need to serve it.)
2.  Combine mashed sweet potatoes with sugar, milk, melted butter, vanilla, cinnamon, and nutmeg (ie--everything except the topping ingredients). 
3. Spoon into greased 2 quart casserole.
4. Combine topping ingredients, cutting in the butter until crumbly. (I might be guilty of doubling the topping amounts when I bake this. Twice the sweet stuff. Yum. Yum. Knowing that not everyone is enlightened enough to want a dessert item on their dinner plate, the amount given in the recipe above is for the more moderate version.) Sprinkle over casserole before baking. 
5. Bake at 350 for 30 minutes (casserole should be steaming hot in center). If you're pulling it out of the fridge to bake it, plan for a 40-50 minute bake time.

One year, I accidentally put the spices for pumpkin pie (1 tsp cinnamon, 1/2 tsp allspice, 1/2 tsp nutmeg) in the casserole and Vaya liked it better this way. More recently, I've been leaving out the nutmeg altogether because Toa of Boy likes it better with just cinnamon. So, feel free to adjust the spices some.

The second Thanksgiving must have is a pumpkin pie. Like, cook it from a pumpkin, pumpkin pie.

I'll include the cook it from the pumpkin directions after the pie recipe.

I'm all about logic. Ask Sweetling. She'll vouch for me on that.

Deep Dish Pumpkin Pie

Ingredients: 

• 1 - 3/4 cup flour
•  1/3 cup brown sugar (firmly packed)
•  1/3 cup sugar
•  1 cup cold butter/margarine (cut into pieces)
•  1 cup chopped nuts (walnuts or pecans, but why would you pick walnuts over pecans?)
•  16 oz pumpkin (or 1-3/4 cup of real pumpkin, baby!)
•  1 can sweetened condensed milk (14 oz)
•  2 whole eggs
•  1 tsp ground cinnamon
•  1 tsp ground allspice

 Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350° F.
2. In a medium bowl, combine flour and sugars. Cut in butter or margarine until crumbly. Stir in nuts.
3. Reserve 1 cup of the crumb mixture. Press the remainder firmly on the bottom and halfway up the sides of a 12 x 7 inch baking dish. (Or a deep dish pie pan, but it has to be really deep dish.)
4. In a large mixer bowl, combine remaining ingredients (except reserved crumb mixture, dur!) and mix well. Pour into prepared dish. Top with reserved crumb mixture.
5. Bake for 55 minutes or until golden brown.
6. Cool. Serve with vanilla ice cream if you'd like. (You'd like, trust me, you'd like.)

 Ok, And, because I said I would, here's how, in the past, I've cooked my pumpkin. The Jedi's mom taught me this method. I like it better than boiling the pumpkin, but I don't like how it makes my house smell. You have been warned.

Baking a Pumpkin

1. You need a pie pumpkin, a baking dish, and a cup of water. Rinse the outside of your pumpkin. Scrub off any dirt.
2. Cut your pie pumpkin in half. I'm not sure it matters how you cut it in half, but I find it easiest to let it sit on it's pumpkin bottom and then I saw it in half close to its stem on top.
3. Scoop out the seeds and pulp.
4. Lay the pumpkin cut side down in the baking dish. Pour enough water into the baking dish to have about a quarter inch or so in the bottom.
5. Bake at 350 for about an hour. It needs to be tender when you stick it with a fork. 
6. Remove it from the oven and let it cool.
7. When its cool, scrape the soft meat out of the pumpkin skin.
8. Now, some instructions will tell you to send it through the food processor. Like I'm going to climb up on the counter to drag that thing out of the top shelf of the cupboard. I don't think so. I just mash it up like I would a potato and use it as is. 
9. You do need to store it in a plastic container in the fridge till you need it for a recipe. It also freezes well. 

I have two pumpkins sitting on my kitchen floor. One of them is going into a pie. I think the other wants to go into some dough for cinnamon rolls sometime after Thanksgiving.

Weekly Wrap-up: The Sweetest Vocabulary

My last two homeschooling posts were about Toa's curriculum.

Today, I started to put a snippet about Sweetling's vocabulary lesson on Facebook. Instead, I decided to put a couple of snippets about vocabulary together to make a blog post.

 

Snippet Number One

This scenario isn't atypical of a Sweetling school time. No Sweetlings were harmed during the making of this anecdote. Unless you count the therapy she might need later in life.

Me (singing): Ignominy, do doo do do do. Ignominy, do do di do.
 [pause]
Me: You know, I wasn't like this when I was in school.
Sweetling: Really? What were you like?
Me: When I was in school I was quiet and studious and serious.
[pause]
Me: So, maybe when you get older....you'll become like me.
Sweetling: NOOOOOOO!!!!!!

Snippet Number Two

This is Sweetling's list of challenge words for this section of her vocabulary book. We read through the challenge words and take a guess at them if either of us think we know what they mean. If we aren't sure, or if, as is often the case, we have no earthly idea, we make a mark by them and then look them up.

Here was the list so far:

• literalism (knew it)
• litarati (marked it)
• transliterate (knew it)
• scriptorium (think we know it, marked it to double-check ourselves)
• serif (knew it)
• shrive (could take a wild guess, but we marked it rather than go with Mommy's wild guesses)
• superscription (knew it)

Then we got to eponymous.

"Oh, I know that one," says Sweetling.
"What? How do you know that one? I don't know that one," says me.

Then Sweetling proceeds to give me a definition of eponymous and uses it in a sentence. I was still incredulous, so she looked it up to prove that she was right; and that I was less right. Really? What young teen has "eponymous" as part of her working vocabulary?

Sweetling does, that's who.

(The rest of the challenge list was euonymus, metonymy, paronomasia, agnomen, cognomen, nominalism, nominative, and praenomen....just in case you were wondering.)

Our curriculum:

This year, we returned to Vocabulary for Classical Roots.
 
 Last year, we took a year off of a formal vocabulary program. As you can see, Sweetling isn't lacking for an awesome vocabulary, so a year off wasn't going to hurt her.

But now, we're looking at PSATs in a year, followed by SATs in another couple of years. So, I felt a return to a formal vocabulary program was in order.

The book itself is divided into 16 "lessons". (We work through one "lesson" every other week.) I love the way the text groups words around central concepts. Lesson 5, which is the one we're currently in, and lesson 6 together form a section titled "Reading and Writing". Each lesson uses four or so classical roots, teaching the classical root, its meaning, and its spelling. From those few roots, the lesson focuses on learning fifteen vocabulary words.

I find this approach to be a much more effective and sensible method to acquire language than a list of words that seem to be randomly selected with little in common.

I purchased two workbooks, one for Sweetling and one for me. We sit together to work on our vocabulary. After the various exercises, we compare our answers with each other. When we differ, we discuss our reasoning for each of our selections and decide together which response is the best choice. (I won't say which of us is often less right than the other. I'm trying to get through this school year with some of my dignity still intact.)

The engaging discussion during the lesson and the unofficial challenge for us each to try to use the vocabulary words throughout the week increases the long-term retention and use of new vocabulary. Plus, it's FUN.

(And what teenage girl doesn't welcome the opportunity to prove that she knows more than her mother?)

Check out what others are doing this week on Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.

Weekly Wrap Up: Bad Day and Good Math

I had all the photos taken to include in a post about how much we like our new math curriculum. And then we had...

A Day.

One of THOSE days.

One of those maybe-the-yellow-school-bus-isn't-such-a-bad-option-after-all days.

I'll spare you the details. They aren't pretty. Highlights included Toa of Boy dumping his uneaten lunch in the garbage in an act of defiance and then going hungry for the afternoon while he sat at the kitchen table doing worksheets I printed off the internet (in my own fit of frustration and defiance.)

Like I said, not a pretty day.

But, Toa crafted and apology in Legos (the two r's aren't quite visible in the photo). I made his favorite dinner that evening. So, hopefully things will be back on track now.

And, despite our horrible, no-good, very-rotten day, both Toa and I do like the math curriculum, so I'm going to share about it anyway.

Everyday Mathematics was recommended to us by a good friend. I visited the website and watched a video of a classroom lesson. Then I looked at the prices and had a sticker shock moment. But, I was able to find the two student journals I need on ebay, used, but not written in.

(I skipped buying the Student Resource book that was supposed to go along with the curriculum. Even on ebay, it was out of the budget and it didn't seem like we absolutely needed it.)

Each lesson includes a page of "math boxes" that are a collection of very short review work. Normally, Toa of Boy hates the review section of math lessons, but the math boxes are different enough that he hasn't realized they are meant to keep skills fresh. (Shhhh---don't tell him they're review work!) I am NOT a fan of 'busy work' or generic worksheets....despite my breakdown this week. But the math boxes have a wide enough variety of skills to keep his mind engaged.

Sadly, the one random Math Boxes I happened to snap a picture of has a section of simple addition/subtraction problems which is pretty rare. I thought about cropping them out of the picture before I loaded it to my blog, but I thought I'd leave it. There are the occasional computation reviews. Still, they are rare enough that the math box page doesn't become a drudgery.

(You can click on the image, or any of the images, if you'd like to see a slightly larger version of it.)

 The lessons are set up so that the math boxes are supposed to come at the end of the lesson, however, we do the math boxes first. For the most part, Toa of Boy can complete the math box page independently, with only an occasional question or two. There are a few times, like today, when he completes the math boxes when I'm not even around, and then I check them and we do the teaching section later.

We don't have a teacher's manual for the teaching sections, but for the most part we haven't needed one. In part, we don't need one because I'm comfortable enough looking at a lesson on multiplication arrays and coming up with a spur of the moment hands-on activity.

But, mostly, we don't need a teacher guide because the lessons have clear student instructions for unique and engaging math activities.

Here are a couple of Toa's favorites.

This lesson involved measuring how many steps you took to cross a large room, measuring the room, and then finding an approximate length of a step. Then you time how long it took you to take so many steps...and somewhere in there it lead you through approximating a walking speed. We skipped some of this process, because Toa looked at me and told me that it takes him and Grandma about 30 minutes to walk the big block of our neighborhood and that he asked the Jedi drive their walking route to measure it's distance with the car's odometer. From this, Toa told me it takes him about half and hour to walk ________.

Next, the lesson asked us to pick a destination in a different city. Toa had to measure the distance to the city, and then figure out how long it would take him to walk there if he walked continuously with no stops for rest or food. Then he had to figure out, realistically, what stops he would need to take and how long the stops would take, and what a more realistic arrival time would be.

His other favorite, so far, has been a lesson on data collection and examining data to find the mean, the mode, the median, and so forth. Not too exciting....unless the data you are examining is first collected in a cool 'reaction time' process. First, the 'reaction time' strip was cut out of his workbook. Then I held the strip, and he kept his thumb and pointer finger open around the bottom edge of the strip. With no verbal warning, I dropped the strip, and he had to quick pinch to catch it. The strip had a gauge to measure his reaction time according to where his thumb landed on the strip.

Now, if I, or some textbook, had just given Toa of Boy a set of random numbers and asked him to do some landmarking and computation with them....getting the lesson done would have been like pulling teeth. But test his own reaction time and then crunch those numbers to learn which hand had the quicker reflexes? Oh yeah. Bought and sold, baby.

I also was blessed with several fun and interesting learning books at a used curriculum sale last spring. I had a nice stack of 50 cent to 1 dollar books in my hand, and the sweet mom running the booth told me I could just have them. "Be blessed," she said. And I was and am!

One of those books was logic links.

We aim for doing a few logic puzzles about once a week or so.

Another book we were blessed with is a math card game book. It's SO MUCH BETTER THAN FLASHCARDS for practicing multiplication and division skills!

Here's a sample game, taking from a side view of course, so as to be totally confusing. Each of two players is dealt three cards (the columns on the left and right of the photo.) Then two cards are flipped over in the middle. They are multiplied to find the "target number" for that round. Each player gets a point for each of the cards in their hand of three which can be divided evenly into the target number. (We kept track of our scores with tally marks on a separate piece of paper.) Then all the cards are discarded and new cards dealt out for the next round.

(And, just because I'm me, this post was actually written at the beginning of  September. Then it sat unfinished waiting for me to resize photos so that they would load easier and not take up so much of the space blogger allocates for saved photos. BUT, it's still a good overview of how math is working for us this year!)

Check out what others are doing this week on Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers!