Our fall bucket list is ticking right along, we're not checking off as many things as I thought we would by now but we're still getting things done. On the 15th (so Friday/yesterday) we spent some time in the kitchen and dining room learning how to make banana pudding. This is a treat my mother made during all the holidays for me when I was a a child and it always mystified me on how she made it. When I was about 15 she finally showed me that the recipe is on the side of the box of vanilla wafers ;-)
I haven't showed that part to my kids yet. Of course, after I became an adult I changed the recipe just a bit, instead of just vanilla pudding I mix vanilla and banana together (you get a really good banana flavor that way). All of the kiddos enjoyed making these, except Peanut did not enjoy the "slimy" feel of the cut banana pieces. She did, however, handle them and put enough in her pudding. As a matter of face they did such a wonderful job that they'll be making a big thing of banana pudding for Grandma's house for Thanksgiving! |
| Peanut's walls prepped for painting. |
We spent more time in the kitchen today (Saturday, the 16th) as well, as I had promised all three kids that they could help prepare brunch today. Mixing of pancake mix, making pancakes, scrambling eggs, frying sausage, baking biscuits, sausage gravy... the works. We have a long narrow kitchen and there's enough counter space for all of us now, but it can still get crowded with four bodies cooking at the same time and three of those bodies needing an eye on them so that they're following all the safety rules. We managed to make it through it and enjoyed a very filling warm brunch ... at about lunch time.
I spent most of the rest of the day with Peanut. We were able to get the rest of her book work from the week finished and make our 0-10 math building heroes. I had a thought a few weeks back when a friend had asked me about creative ways to show number families to younger children. My friend's son is in K already and Peanut is doing a mix, so this was something I would have had to figure out how to do as well. Her situation was a bit further along that where Peanut is at the moment as Peanut is attempting to remember what order 1-10 are supposed to be in all the time and what 0 really means, my friend's son was already working on the 20's family. However, I digress. The concepts we came up with were paper dolls, toilet paper tube people, or "people" rocks (instead of pet) to make the concept of number families more concrete. 
It took a bit of work today, some time, glitter, glue, a bath, and a broom but we got 11 little math building heroes finished. They're now displayed in her room and we'll bring them out tomorrow (and other days) to make some stories to go with them. I may even ask the Cracker Jack's to split them in half and write a story (along with a picture) that we can make into a book for Peanut. We could then read the book to her. We plan on doing this with the teens next month and it's already planned that the teens are going to be cranky and funky because they need to be different with their own ending on their number names.Mind you, Peanut CAN count to 20 on most days ... some days she gets numbers mixed up and so we're implementing this practice now so that the numbers will stick in her head more. For the teens we're enlisting the Cracker Jack's help to give them a bit more of an attitude and we may do paper dolls for the twenties family (we're a bit burned out on paper dolls at the moment as the girls have made a zillion lately). I'll post each set as we do them and anything else we do to reinforce these concepts.
Now, I can actually hear some of you asking... "If you were working with Peanut on all of this, what were the Cracker Jack's doing?" If you've liked us on Facebook then you know they finished catching themselves up on pretty much everything yesterday. They still had to work on their science projects. Well, these weren't so much projects but lap books ... but, we don't do many (like almost zero lap books put together) and the Cracker Jack's like when you call things projects. They both had the exact same lap book assigned for the week for their science and after a week of them snapping at each other they really needed to work together to get these done. I set them up in the "classroom" and explained what they needed to do. The day started with arguments over and over they were snapping and arguing with each other on what to do next. By the middle of it they were working well together, and they actually both finished a lap book before 5pm this evening! YCJ actually was caught saying, "This taught us more than about animals and winter ... it taught us how to work together!" (A heart melting moment for any Mother.) |
| Our Thankful Wall at this point... had to take the picture sideways to fit them all in! |
For those of you keeping track this means that the kiddos are all caught up with the week's work and they'll actually have Sunday off of school. We'll still be doing some projects, reading, and art but they don't really consider that school (even if we all know they're learning).
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