Not Back to School Day at the beach
First Day of School--they wanted pictures just like all the other kids
I've gotta say, I'm pretty proud of myself. I put together this block almost completely on my own. I knew what I wanted to cover and arranged it my own way. I even found my own stories.
Week One our theme was grains. I knew I wanted to cover the seven major grains of the world: wheat, rice, barley, millet, corn, rye, and oats. My chief resource was the book Baking Bread with Children by Warren Lee Cohen. I have owned this book for several years and mostly thought of it as helpful for kindergarten. But it has an informational section all about the seven grains, where they are grown, what they are used for, etc. It also has a whole section of bread stories--folk tales and the like.
We cooked with everything except oats and millet. Oats because we eat oatmeal all the time, and millet because none of our local stories carry it.
Sariah's modeling of characters from the story Sharing the Corn from the book Native American Gardening by Joseph Bruchac.
Rye Bread (not a hit in our household)
The focus of our second week was Food Preservation.
We started out with a trip to an apple orchard, where Sariah and Preston got to ride the train all by themselves.
We opted for our modern electric dehydrator to dry apples.
But dried lemon balm and sage the old-fashioned way.
We learned about canning and made apple butter.
From there we went on to pickling.
For help on the historical aspects of this block, I relied on The Little House Cookbook by Barbara M. Walker and A Pioneer Sampler: The Daily Life of a Pioneer Family in 1840 by Barbara Greenwood. I also found a sweet source for stories in The Sandman: His Farm Stories and The Sandman: More Farm Stories by William J. Hopkins. Both can be found free online.
One big focus academically this past month has been cursive handwriting. Another has been reading and phonics through word families. Sariah is struggling with reading, and finding ways to help her has stretched me.
We got out of the house to attend a homeschool day at a local state park. We actually made some friends--too bad they live an hour or more from us.
Our third week of this block was focused on Gifts from the Animals. We spent the first day or two listing all the farm animals we could think of and what they offered to humans--down to goose feathers for bedding, goose grease for hand salve, tallow from beef for candles and soap, even cats for catching mice that might get into the grain and dogs for protecting poultry from predators. Sariah is a horse fanatic, so we couldn't forget about those. Horses transport people places, pull stumps to clear fields, and pull plows.
However, our main focus was cows.
We made butter.
We also made yogurt and mozzarella cheese.
All of which were edible!
We then talked about one of the biggest contributions of cows, which is manure to fertilize the soil. We also made chicken stock in the crockpot as part of discussing gifts from chickens.
This was a fun and busy block. I'm glad to not do so much cooking for awhile!
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