Cookies

I was so happy with how these cookies turned out. I’ve been wanting to make piped butter cookies for a while now. I love how they all turn out in with these beautiful designs depending on how they are piped. Then I melted chocolate chips and dipped them. I followed the recipe from Sally’s Baking Addiction for her Homemade Butter Cookies. They turned out beautifully. 

I also had a hankering for a cookie my mom used to make growing up and went looking for the recipe for these Dutch Spice Cookies. These cookies actually have a few names, others being Dutch Windmill Cookies or Speculaas. I followed the recipe I found on Curious Cuisiniere for Dutch Speculaas Cookies. I remember my mom chilling the dough that had been rolled into a log and wrapped in ceran wrap and then slicing up the log into circles for the round cookies. That is way easier than rolling it out and cutting out shapes and plus it was almost midnight when I was doing this so I wasn’t too eager to spend extra time rolling and cutting dough. Maybe next time, but for now this was super easy and they turned out really nice. Yum!

Potato and Leek Soup with Skillet Bread

I love Potato and Leek Soup. It’s pretty much potato soup with the onions replaced with leeks that give it such a wonderful flavour. I have lots of potatoes right now. We got some from our garden this summer and then we picked a couple huge bags up from some local farmers selling potatoes on the side of the road. I made Potato Pancakes a couple days ago and have been looking forward to this potato soup as well. I was so happy that I had 33% cream and fresh parsley on hand to put in and make it really rich and flavourful.

Maybe serving bread with potato soup is carb overkill but I usually serve bread with soup so I’m going with it today. It’s not like we eat only starches every meal. Haha! 

This Skillet Bread with Fennel Seed is one of my go-to recipes. It’s pretty fast and easy to make and is actually my only use for my ginormous 16” skillet right now. I made a double recipe and split it between my 12” and 16” skillet. 

You can find the recipe for this Skillet Bread with Fennel Seed at https://sweetpaulmag.com/food/breads/skillet-bread-with-fennel/.

All ready to serve!

Grasslands National Park

 Have you gotten a chance to explore Canada's natural beauty? Grasslands is our favourite place to go camping and we try to go every summer. When people ask where we're going camping, they usually have no clue where we're talking about even for people from Saskatchewan which is the province Grasslands is in. They can't believe we'd choose to go camping at a place where there is no beach, no showers and it is super windy. But we love Grasslands and I'll tell you why!

There's a reason Saskatchewan is called the land of the living skies. In the prairies, you can see miles and miles away especially if you find a high point to look down from. There are no trees to block your view. With the sky being so vast, this is one place where you can realize just how small we are on the earth. The sky is absolutely gorgeous and there are lovely lookout places where you can see the sunset over the vast space of land and the river run along in a snake of green on the prairies. On the far hills you might be able to see small black specks that binoculars will reveal to be bison. It is so beautiful. 

Because of the lack of trees and flat land, the wind can really pick up. This can make tenting difficult. Our tent pegs really well into the ground, but I've seen other tenters give up trying to set up their tent and opt for one of the otentiks. Most of the other visitors are in campers. The wind can make dishing out meals a little difficult too, but both the East and West Block Camping areas have a building campers can use for shelter and cook their food in if it is too difficult at the site. There are even propane barbeques available for use. But the wind really is wonderful. The days are so hot but the wind makes really helps to cool down and another plus to the wind is the lack of bugs. I've been to so many campsites surrounded by trees with no scenic view from the actual campsite where you are just getting eaten alive. It's miserable. But where there is wind, there are no mosquitoes. Yay!

There is so much wildlife. My husband loves to bird watch so this is a great place to do it from. There is such a huge amount of bird life there, from birds that nest in the grass and hop around hiding in the grass to birds of prey souring high up in the skies. The littlest kids loved to watch the ground squirrels come around investigating for food. After one meal, a little ground squirrel hopped into our pot we'd mixed pancakes in and left a little present for us. The kids liked watching the holes to see if the animals would pop up although we'd warned them not to dig in the holes as there could be tarantalas, black widows, rattle snakes or other biting creatures hiding in such holes. My kids also like looking for bugs and there are lots of grasshoppers and other small insects living in the grass. The West Block has other animals such as the bison, prairie dogs, and burrowing owls.

Besides wild animals, there is a lot of plant life. You might think that it is just grass, but there are a lot of varieties of grass, sage brush, cacti and wild flowers there. At the office, you can get a brochure that lists a lot of flowers that bloom there with a picture of the flower, it's name, the time of year it blooms and little boxes to check off if you found it. The smell is so fresh there because of all the grass too, it is so lovely. 

It is hot in the afternoon, so we often take a siesta in the tent at that time of day. We can open up all the windows on our tent to let the wind pass through. It is so relaxing to listen to the wind rustle the grasses and feel the shaded warmth of the sun in the afternoon like that. If the kids really need a cool down, we'll go for an afternoon scenic drive in our air conditioned van. 

Grasslands National Park is also a dark sky preserve. It is so far from any bigger towns that the night sky can provide a great view of the stars with no light pollution.

Although the East Block doesn't have bison or prairie dogs, but it does have lots of fossils. Dinosaur bones have been found there and my children easily found small pieces of petrified wood and fossils from animals. They were doing the test in which you lick your finger and touch it to the rock to see if your finger sticks to the rock to see if it was a fossil. They licked a lot of rocks. Haha!

We love Grasslands, the fresh natural beauty, the vast expanse of skies, and the variety of wildlife and plant life that we can explore there! It is a great place to take the kids and enjoy the creation that God made!

Online Resources for Home Education

So I'm sure you are all feeling the effects of the social changes with the current pandemic. If you have kids in school, you are definitely undergoing some big changes of suddenly having to educate at home. We are probably not being affected as dramatically as others since we already do most things from home, but there have been some notable changes. The kids no longer have swim or gymnastics classes and we can no longer get books from the library. The last issue has caused me to rely more heavily on online books so I wanted to share some of the online resources I am making use of.

Picture Books

I had been reading a picture book to the kids each day of our school. But now have turned to YouTube quite a bit to find some videos of other people reading the books aloud. There are actually lots! Most books I am interested in reading to the kids, I can find an video of someone reading it aloud. 

Besides Youtube, we are using Storyline Online for our daily picture book. The kids are loving it! They are especially quiet and attentive for these. It has appropriate background music to set the mood and close up views of the pictures in the book. All the readers have been really excellent that I've heard so far and begin with a short introduction of themselves and the book and conclude with something for the audience to think about. 

Reading Eggs

I had been interested in this before when I got a free trial in the past, but I finally bought a family subscription for 1 year. It really wasn't that expensive for all that is offered, $89 for 4 kids for a year. 

Reading Eggs teaches phonics in a step by step fashion through games and short video clips. It starts with the letters teaching the sounds they make and start putting them together to make words eventually teaching kids to read on their own. 

After the Reading Eggs, there is Reading Eggspress for kids who can already read. Although some of my kids can read, they haven't made much use of this part of the program, but I would like to try to interest them in it as it has a lot of books loaded there for them to read. 

The Mathseeds part is a fun way to practice math. The visuals are really great so they can see the numbers with the number of objects. I'm interested to see just how difficult the lessons will get. My kids are finding it pretty easy so far but the highest lesson they've gotten is 50 and there are 200 lessons. 

I should mention that there is a placement test to take before starting each of these so that the child can be placed at the appropriate spot in the lessons. Although my older two pretty much passed through the Reading Eggs portion, I wanted them to have more practice with long vowels and so set them back to that lesson to progress from there. As a parent, you can change where they are at if they are finding it too difficult or easy or just want to give them extra practice on something. 

The last section I didn't mention yet, is the Reading Eggs Junior which is for preschoolers. It has puzzles, matching and sorting games and other games for learning colours, numbers, letters and more. There is also access to short videos and books that are read aloud with pages to turn. There is a lock on the Reading Eggs Junior that won't allow you to leave the page unless you enter the correct numbers. 

I've been pretty pleased with this program and consider it well worth the money for the kids to have that extra practice with their reading through fun games that they will look forward to.

Scholastic

Scholastic has a section on their website called Scholastic Learn at Home right now.  It is divided by grade level groups. I am mostly using the PreK and Kindergarten and the Grades 1 and 2 section. Then it is divided into weeks with 5 days in the week. Each day contains a video of a picture book being read aloud, a non-fiction book that can also be read aloud and a couple of games. Then it has a learning video from a series called Watch and Learn that teaches something related to the story book and has a short quiz at the end. Then there is an suggested activity. For the preschoolers it is usually some sort of pretend play and for the Grades 1 and 2 it is usually to draw something creative like designing your own spider or draw community you live in or listen and draw what you hear. I was surprised how much my kids liked these. And it is nice for me to just sit quietly and let the computer to the talking for a while. (Does your voice get hoarse when you are teaching all morning? Mine does.)

Audio Chapter Books

I was lucky and had just taken out two chapter books that I wanted to read to the kids from the library just before it closed. But now that I've finished them, I've been looking for a way to continue our literature time with another book. There are lots of free audio books online right now.

I am planning to use Audible Stories: Free Audiobooks for Kids to read Alice in Wonderland. There are lots of other books on there at varying levels so I hope to continue using it. I was reading aloud to the kids while the kids to their drawings. (We do nature drawings every other day working through our bird book right now, and a page from Draw Write Now on the other day.) I'm looking forward to letting the computer do the reading for me and getting to join the kids and draw alongside them. 

Internet Archive

There is a huge archive online of books, many of them too old to still be copyrighted, but still good books. This Internet Archive holds many other things besides, but I like to use it for the books. I discovered that most of the old Hooked on Phonics books are uploaded onto this site. Great practice for the kids who are just starting to read! Some of the Thornton Burgess books are on there like the Burgess Bird Book, Animal Book and Flower Book. There are lots of classic books on there too like Mr. Popper's Penguins, A Little Princess and Chronicles of Narnia. Lots of Little Miss books too. I'm sure there are lots of things I haven't even thought to look up but besides digital books that you can flip the pages through, there are audio books too although I haven't tried them yet.

Other Educational Videos and Episodes

The most obvious resource is probably Netflix. It has Our Planet episodes, Magic School Bus, Wild Kratts, Sid the Science Kid and many other great educational videos.

We use Watch Cartoon Online quite a bit too. There are lots of preschool educational cartoons such as Blues Clues, Curious George, Creative Galaxy, Dinosaur Train and other non educational stories like Bubble Guppies, Bob the Builder, Thomas the Train, and Llama Llama. You could never exhaust this resource in your lifetime. I use it for additional episodes of Wild Kratts that haven't been put on Netflix yet too. There are lots of movies there as well, if there is something your looking for, all animated of course. But we enjoyed getting to watch the video after reading the book for Winnie the Pooh, the Wizard of Oz and Stuart Little all at this site.

I mention Youtube again here because it also contains lots of educational episodes. I like to go there to watch Bill Nye's science shows when it relates to what we are studying. There's also a neat science "youtuber" (is that what you call a person who posts videos on youtube?) called SciShow Kids. She posts about all sorts of science things, many of them questions that her fans have written to ask her to post about. Many of the posts are less than 5 minutes each, a length of time I don't usually mind adding to our school day if it helps explain or draw interest to the subject we are studying. She posts about such a variety of topics that almost anything we are studying I can find a post that relates to the topic. She has a puppet mouse that accompanies her and has real footage as well as cartoons of the topic to explain how things work.


Spanish Language

PBS has published a series of episodes called Salsa for Spanish language study. The language is simple and they make use of puppets for the characters in the show. Most of the episodes are based on well known children's stories and make use of simple phrases and specific vocabulary that is repeated over and over in the episode to cement the words in. All the talking is entirely in Spanish with no other language spoken in the episodes. Each episode is about 15 minutes. My kids really like these and have asked to watch them again.

I will mention here that many shows on Netflix can have the audio changed to another language. This can create some difficulty in understanding if the speakers are still moving their lips to the English words though. However, Peppa Pig has been reworked in Spanish with natural language and the cartoons moving their mouths with the Spanish words. We are learning about pets right now in our Spanish lessons and I was planning to watch the episode in which Peppa's school class bring their pets to school for a pet contest. Peppa Pig is also in German, French and Italian. I don't know if the cartoons move their mouths to go with each of these languages, but it definitely does in Spanish.

In Conclusion

In addition to all these other things I like to look for clips on youtube that relate to what we are studying. When we draw our bird from our bird book, I like to find a short clip of the real bird in the wild with the sound it makes. When we are learning about a certain famous place from our history it's nice to see the actual place in a video clip- we looked up the Parthenon in Greece and the Nazca Drawings in Peru. We may never visit these places in real life but we can at least see what they actually look like instead of just reading about it in a book. (A picture is worth a thousand words.)

What an amazing resource the internet is! I realize it can be a huge time sucking hindrance in our life, but it also can provide an endless amount of learning if we are using it properly.

Pies and More Pies

My husband got me a food processor and a mixer for my birthday/ mother's day. Did you know you can make pastry dough in a Cuisinart food processor? Well you can! It does a really good job too. I had a busy day last Saturday in the kitchen making these pies. As you can see my kids have already had their fingers in them, but they still tasted great. And I didn't cook then for my Mother's Day Sunday dinner. Yay! 

I made a French Silk Pie, Lemon Meringue and two Chicken Pot Pies. One went in the freezer for an easy meal later.

Nazca Drawings

We had a lesson last week in our history about the Nazca Indians of South America. It was an ancient civilization, but one of the most amazing things they left behind were these giant drawings they had carved into the earth that were only discovered when pilots started flying overhead and spotted them. The drawing were so big, they weren't recognizable from the ground. So when were were at the park on Sunday and the kids were complaining there wasn't enough play equipment to go around, I suggested they make Nazca drawings in the sand. They came up with some pretty neat ideas all on their own.

Primary and Secondary Colours Lesson

I love when normal family life and school mesh together. 

Today was my third son's 6th birthday. I made him a chocolate cake and proceeded to make Fluffy White Frosting to put on top. My son requested a rainbow cake, so I said I could make one but only with three colours: red, blue and yellow. 

The kids were actually really disappointed after seeing there were only those three colours and green in the food colouring box and insisted that there were six colours in the rainbow. So I insisted there were three and proceeded to mix all the frosting in three separate bowls with the three primary colours. 

Then I took out three more bowls and put two colours together and got them to mix them. They were so amazed to see the colour change and their interest was piqued to see what colour the next two colours would mix into. 

I then got to explain that all the colours are made up of these three colours and even brown was made from all three mixed together. I talked a little then about what primary colours and secondary colours were. I was pleased to see they were really thinking when one asked about black and then explained that black and white and all the colours in between like gray are shades, not colours and some animals and even people can't see in colour but only black and white. 

Then I showed them the ink packets in our printer. There are actually only the three colours and black that make all the other colours for printing. They were so impressed. So glad we could have that lesson on colours with a a special treat for my sons birthday. I hope to follow it up with a colouring lesson with pencil crayons in which I only allow then to use those three colours. We'll see. Maybe we'll try it with cross hatching too. I'll have to think about it. Sometimes I try things like that and have to tone back on the difficulty and just stick with simple colouring. Ha!