Tag Archives: Homeschooling

A Tasty School Project

26 Sep

I’m so excited about this project. This may very well be the best idea I’ve had in our almost two years of homeschooling.

Let me explain…My eldest daughter used to enjoy writing, photography, and cooking; but for some reason she seemed to lose interest in all those things. So when I’d hear her complaining (every single morning) how much she didn’t like breakfast and that there was “nothing to eat” – it gave me an idea…maybe that would make a great school project. During the week she could research (ie Google) a breakfast recipe that appealed to her and on Sunday she could make it for our family, then the following week she could write about it. So that’s how her blog “Candy’s On The Case” was born. This covers so many different school subjects like English, Food Technology, Computers, and Photography. Not bad, eh? The biggest plus? She is now enjoying writing, photography, and cooking again…and we get a gourmet breakfast every Sunday – amazing, or what?! The goal is to do this for a year. Surely by the end of the year she would have discovered some breakfast foods that she likes.

Here are few of her delicious breakfasts so far:

Berry Yogurt with Toffee

French Toast with Feta

Chorizo and Cherry Tomato Omelette

I can’t wait to see taste what else she comes up with.

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Spring Lamb Anyone?

6 Sep

Yay, it’s spring! My favourite season of the year.

We are changing things around in our classroom to make it feel more springy. So, out with the snowflakes and in with the…Spring Lambs! baaaa.

The idea for this particular craft came from here.

First we downloaded the pdf pattern and traced it onto our cardboard manila folder (all I had that vaguely resembled cardboard was a manila folder).

Then we cut out the different parts and started cutting a whole heap of cotton buds. Who knew that cotton buds were so versatile when it came to craft? Remember our pointillism paintings which also featured the humble cotton bud? Anyway, cutting the cotton buds was messier than I thought. There were cotton buds flying all over the place.

Next we started attaching them with some craft glue to the body. Once we finished covering the cardboard with cotton buds, we moved onto the head.


This time we glued white paper to our manilla folder, so the sheep’s face would be white. Then we added two small cotton buds as ears and three smaller ones on top as a fringe.

We then tied a small bow and covered the part where the three cotton buds at the top of the head meet. Then we were ready to add some facial features.

Once the body was dry – this took some time because we used quite a bit of glue – we attached some wooden pegs to the back as legs.

Then when that was all dry, we attached the head.

These little lambs are supposed to be able to stand so you can use the pegs as a holder for notes or photos, but ours were so heavy from the amount of glue we used they have trouble standing. Oh well, we still think they are super-cute!

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Learning to Make Sushi

8 Aug

Candy loves sushi! Loves it!

No one else in our family is too keen on it, so she rarely gets to eat it.  A friend of mine offered to come and give us a lesson on how she makes her version of sushi. And she was so cute, she went all out and came dressed up in Japanese-style clothing and brought along cute chopsticks and Japanese-themed decorations…she even bought the girls their very own sushi mats!

This is the recipe we used (which is from a friend of a friend):

2 cups Arborio rice (you can use sushi rice, but I’m told this is as good and it’s cheaper)
3 cups water

Rinse your rice well, until the water runs clear. Then put your rice in the pot of water, bring to boil and then simmer the rice for about 10-12 minutes with the lid on, you’ll need to keep an eye on it, so it doesn’t stick. Remove from heat and stand covered for 10 minutes so that all the liquid absorbs. Then stir through the rice vinegar substitute (recipe below) and allow to cool.

Rice vinegar substitute:
1 teaspoon citric acid
3 teaspoons sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup warm water

Of course you can use rice vinegar, but this is easy if you don’t have any.

My friend likes to line her sushi mat with cling film so that the rice doesn’t get stuck in the bamboo.

Now for the fun part…I always thought this part would be trickier than it was.  It really was quite simple once you got the hang of it and when we didn’t overfill our sushi.

Place a nori sheet on your bamboo mat and press down some rice onto it, and then add your other ingredients and roll up your sushi.  Oh, and make sure to dip your hands in some water to prevent the rice sticking to them. You also need to make sure you don’t overfill your sushi. Some of the fillings we used were: carrots, cucumber, tuna, avocado and chicken. Carefully roll up your sushi using the mat. Once they are all made, refrigerate them so they can firm up before you cut them.

This recipe makes quite a few, I would probably halve the quantities for our family

We all had a great time learning to make sushi.  Some of us have even discovered a love for sushi that we never knew existed.

We still haven’t attempted to make some on our own, but we will soon.

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Borax Snowflakes

20 Jun

It’s been getting colder and colder…this might have something to do with the fact that it’s winter…anyway, we thought we’d make some winter craft.  And what is more wintry than a snowflake?

We made ours using borax and pipe cleaners using the instructions found here. What you need to do is to twist some pipe cleaners to form a snowflake shape and then tie a string to one point of the snowflake, this is then attached to a pencil and hung in a jar. The jar is first filled with boiling water and borax (3 tablespoons of borax per cup of water) which is mixed until all borax is dissolved, add food colouring if you want. Then lower your snowflake shape into the jar and let the borax do its thing! Let this sit overnight and you should be left with a pretty snowflake. I say “should” because our first attempt didn’t result in a snowflake, just some wet pipe cleaners. The problem may have been the pipe cleaners we used:

This was actually the photo I took after they’d been in the solution overnight. See what I mean?

sure, they were pretty, but the borax slid right off them because they were glossy (at least that’s what I think the problem was), it might also have been that some small child was moving the jars. So the borax solution ended up being used as a toilet cleaner – not necessarily a bad thing – it does say on the pack that it can be used as a toilet cleaner. Interestingly, no mention of snowflakes on the pack!

Okay, attempt two with new pipe cleaners – the fluffy kind:

We prepared our borax solution and snowflakes and hung them and went off and enjoyed a rather yummy breakfast at a local café.

Fast forward a little over one hour later and we return home to find this:

aaaaghhhh!!! This was not what we wanted to see. Thankfully, it didn’t get any worse. The good news was that the borax was starting to attach itself to the pipe cleaners.

The next morning we had borax crystals attached to our pipe cleaners – still not great, though.

Here we go again…attempt number three:

This time we made them to look like these Martha Stewart ones and we added a lot more borax.

Someone got a little carried away with the blue food colouring!

Finally, we have snowflakes!!

Linking to:

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Synonym Word Wall

23 Oct word wall

I saw a great idea recently on Pinterest.

Image from Pinterest

It’s called a Tired Words Wall. Instead of using a more common word such as “said”, you would go to the “said” pocket and pick out a synonym to replace that word. This makes writing more interesting and improves the child’s vocabulary.

The original word wall had this cute little poem attached to it:

Tired Words
Tired words want to go to sleep.
Let them rest! Don’t make a peep!
Try to use a synonym instead.
Let those tired words stay in bed!

I thought I’d have a go at making my own version of this.

You can get some ideas for word alternatives here.

I’ve made mine so that you can change the words on the pockets as the need arises.
I just did this by placing a velcro dot on each pocket.

Here is the finished product:

Linking to Living Life Intentionally

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