Monday, September 27, 2010

Apple Pie by Hunter

Reason number 1,273 to love home schooling: spending Monday morning together in the kitchen, baking an apple pie with the apples you picked last Monday morning :o)
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Last week, our Five in a Row book was How To Make an Apple Pie and See the World. (I will post our lapbook on this sometime tomorrow) Our unit study culminated with the baking of a magnificent apple pie.
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Step One: Combine dry ingredients
(ps - how adorable is the juxtaposition of the Urlacher jersey/puppy dog apron??)

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Step 2: Pour dry ingredients over apples that took mom forever to peel and slice with a paring knife because she got all ready to make the pie and realized she doesn't have any kind of a peeler...

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Step 3: Press pie crust into 9" pie plate

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Step 4: Destroy any evidence that might suggest you used a store-bought pie crust.



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Step 5: Pour coated apples into *homemade* pie crust.

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Step 6: Place top layer of *homemade* pie crust, and flute the edges. That's right, flute.

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Step 7: Paint the *homemade* pie crust with an egg white (or as Hunter, the five year old comedian, prefers to call it - boogers)


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Step 8: Put the pie in the oven and wait patiently...


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Step 9: Sniff and admire :o)

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All in all, our project was a huge success! We had a great time together, and Hunter is extremely proud of his pie - we are so excited to rip into this bad boy during half-time tonight!

Sunday, September 19, 2010

Mike Mulligan

This week we started a new curriculum (although, we are still doing Math-U-See and A Reason for Handwriting/Spelling)

Five in a Row!

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This is awesome. Each week we have a new book, and do projects in five different disciplines (social studies/geography, language arts, art, math, and science), all relating back to the story. I chose to incorporate lapbooks, because it keeps all of our components in one place, and let's face it, I like things that way!

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We started out with Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel. Over the course of the week, and with just this one story, Hunter explored steam powered machines, learned about stewardship, measured squares, wrote about personification and character traits, and drew trees from both aerial and close-up perspectives!

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I took a few videos of Hunter giving a 'tour' of his first five-in-a-row lapbook. A few disclaimers:

-please excuse the pj shirt :o)

- I swear on McDonald's Frappes that I did not tell him to say all that stuff about having fun doing projects with his mom... if you listen closely, you can hear me melting behind the camera :o)

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I printed off all of the lapbook components from HomeSchool Share - they have GREAT five in a row resources!

I can't wait to start this week's book - How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World!

Charter School

After a fun and busy Labor day weekend, Hunter started classes at the Big Sur Charter School. I had a lot of fun making this day as special as possible for Hunter. I have very fond memories of my first days of school growing up. Shopping with mom for new supplies, new outfit, new backpack, and dad going in late to work so he had time to make us waffles :o)
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Fortunately, Justin had the day off as part of the long weekend, so we started the day off together with blueberry muffins and some sausage
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The annual front door picture
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Is he a handsome kindergartner or what??
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Cubby!
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Hunter, with his first ever homework assignment - and 'all about me' poster that he had to present to the class!

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After we dropped Hunter off, Morgan, Justin, and I headed to the Paris bakery for breakfast part 2, and coffee
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Four hours later, it was time to pick Hunter up. He was super excited, and said he had a great time. To celebrate, we went out to Baskin Robbins for a treat
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We are two weeks into this charter school thing, and I'm still trying to decide what I think. Hunter really enjoys it, has made some friends, and seems to be benefiting from the time he spends there, so we'll stick it out for now. Tomorrow we are taking a field trip to a local apple orchard, so that should be fun!