Pictures From Our Study of the Middle Ages

This is Westen's representation of the four alls: the Peasants who worked for all, the knights who fought for all, the king and queen who ruled all, and the priests who prayed for all and who were thought to be all knowing.


We also made our own Medieval Feast. The bread was a special recipe Wes worked on with his dad. It's called Rose Petal Bread. Notice the hollow our bread in the picture. That is what we used for our plates. The main course sits on a piece of flat bread or "mess". We had salt as a seasoning, but no pepper. We drank from goblets and used our fingers! If the bread looks good, Here's the recipe:

Rose Petal Bread

You will need:
1 package of active dry yeast
1.5 cups lukewarm rose water
1 tablespoon sugar
2 teaspoons salt
3-4 cups flour
Cornmeal and butter
Food Dye
1 egg white

To begin, make the rose water by simmering rose petals in a small amount of water. Remove the petals.

In a large bowl, dissolve the yeast in the rose water. Stir sugar, salt and some flour into the yeast. With clean hands, knead the dough. Add more and more flour until it won't take anymore.

Push the dough around on a floured board. When the dough becomes smooth and elastic, cover the bowl with a clean cloth and go play for an hour!

When you return, the dough will be bigger. Punch down the dough, and divide in half. (we made ours into one larger loaf) Form each half into a circle, oval, heart or long loaf. Place the loaves on separate buttered baking sheets that are sprinkled with cornmeal. (We just placed ours on a silicone baking mat on top of a cookie sheet.)

Next comes the art part. Mix a food color with a little bit of egg white to make "paint." Paint vines, leaves, flowers or any other art on the top of the loaves. (my son chose blue food coloring. We painted the whole top of the loaf and then decorated with rosemary and chives.)

Bake in a preheated oven for 40 minutes at 400ºF. Delicious!

The Fourth Quarter

I must have a touch of the Spring Fever because I haven't managed to blog since Spring Break. You must think Wes and I are taking the rest of the year off, but that is far from true. It's already the third week of the last quarter and we've been hard at work. So lets break it down:

Cursive ~ This quarter we are writing EVERYTHING in cursive!
Writing ~ We launched a Letter Writing Campaign. Every week we are writing a friendly letter to someone we know and providing them with paper and a stamped envelope in the hope of getting return mail. Our last issue of the Indie Press this year will be the Friendly Letter Edition and will showcase our efforts. Each letter is written over the course of two days. On Tuesday and think the letter through and record what we want to say on our mini tape recorder. On Wednesday Wes can use that recording to transcribe his letter into a beautiful cursive not with proper Friendly Letter Format.
Language Arts ~ We have made grammar part of our daily routine by incorporating our Practice and Learn Third Grade workbook into the schedule. Each day we do at least one page.
Reading and Comprehension ~ After easing back into this kind of work last quarter, now it's full steam ahead with daily reading and one-a-day comprehension practice from the Third Grade Reading Comprehension Master Skills.
Math ~ We are mostly reviewing in this last quarter to make sure we are in a really solid place going into next year. An exception to this is that we are tackling multi digit multiplication which is new. My rough plan is to go from Multiplication to Division to Fractions and then some basic Geometry if we have time.
Social Studies ~ We are reading about Early American life.
Science ~ We are studying the human body. We have already done an overview and now we are looking more closely at specific areas of the body beginning with the brain.
Extras ~ We are still publishing a bi-weekly paper which we call the Indie Press. We are also still incorporating Piano and Keyboarding and our Recipe of the Week into our schedule.

So you see, we are still working hard. Don't let my lack of checking in make you believe otherwise. I'm also behind on my photo sharing so I will leave you today with a few pictures:

Chilly Burgers


Space Spuds


Anatomy

Oh and I just remembered! We have also taken a field trip to the Arizona Science Center. We have another field trip to the Wild Animal Park this Friday and I want to buy tickets for the Childsplay Theater production of Never Ending Story. So see? We are busy!

Week 8 ( Feb. 23-27 )

Recipe of the Week:

Cookie Pizza

Finally! A full week of school after a month of missed Mondays. Monday is an important day at Indie Teach because it's Recipe of the Week Day! I let Wes pick out whatever he wanted and he chose Cookie Pizza. He's becoming quite the chef and is handling more and more of the baking steps. I think his favorite part today was picking out the toppings for his pizza. He had all of his little goodies counted out and waiting for his pizza dough (large peanut butter cookie) to be ready. Big Brother Jens is liking this whole Monday recipe thing too. His pizza was topped with nothing but marshmallows!

Week 6 ( Feb. 10-13 )

Another short week this week. We seem to be having several of those in a row, but sometimes things just can't be helped. Wes and I are making the most of our time.

This week we are starting an exciting new section in our science studies. We are studying plant anatomy and how plants grow. We've read three books. One book, What's Alive? by Kathleen Weidner Zoehfeld, talked about what determines whether something is alive or not alive. Afterwards Wes spent time outside identifying 6 living and 6 non-living things. He drew pictures of them on individual cards and colored and labeled them. Then he turned this collection into a poster with one half representing the Alive and the other the Not Alive things.


Going backwards, we started the entire section by reading Oh Say Can You Seed which is part of The Cat in the Hat's Learning Library collection. It's actually full of information as well as beloved characters. Finally, today Wes read A Tree Is a Plant by Clyde Robert Bulla. This goes into detail about the life cycle of an apple tree. We also started our big Bean Sprout Project.


We have three different kinds of beans started, mung, broccoli and lentil. Wes picked the beans. We tried to pick three that looked different as seeds. Wes is keeping logs of all our our scientific data and as the week goes on, we will be learning more about these kinds of seeds in particular as well as charting and comparing their individual progress.

We are in a math transition right now. We will be starting the study of weights and measures.

I'm going to try to push on through to the end of the cursive alphabet this week and then we'll move on to writing words.

In language arts, we are beginning to study verbs. I plan to spend a fair amount of time with this part of speech and really grow Westen's understanding of verb forms.

Our Piano lesson went well today. We are learning how to approach the process better. I'm a little rusty as a music teacher.

Week 2 ( Jan 12-16 )

First I have to share a picture from the end of last week. We finished off with a Friday Fiesta! Wes created a homemade pinata and he and his brother and another friend had a great time whacking it open with a baseball bat after dinner.

Its already Tuesday of Week 2. Monday was a review day although we moved on to D's in cursive. Today in:

Math - we are starting with Fractions. We are going over the basics for a day or two and then we will move on to comparisons and operations.
Science - Wes read one book about Space and I read another about Mars
Recipe of the week - Caramel Corn - made for snack time and wrote up recipe, made copy for newspaper


Cursive - E's and letter combos A-E
Social Studies - The Sonoran Desert + Spanish words

Week 1.1

Wes and I just got through our first day homeschooling. We covered a lot of ground. I skipped working on our menu because it seemed like too much. We only had one moment when I had to help Wes refocus on his work. Our school day lasted from 9:00 to about 1:20 with a 30 minute break at 10:30. It's a little longer than I expected, but it will take me some time to get used to how long activities take and how quickly Wes does his work.

Today's Recap:

Whole numbers and place value

Solar System

Recipe Write-up

Chicken and Cheese Burrito with Broccoli and Bacon Bits.... Yummy!

Began Cursive

Map of Mexico

Spanish numbers through 12

For tomorrow:

Practice whole numbers and place values

Place Value Game

Cursive, review A's

Solar system Study Jams A Day on Earth

Make Sun Dial

Piano

Compound words

Fiction reading

Story Board