a recipe and some other stuff

First off, I made banana muffins tonight and I think they are rather good for you. Of course they could be better, but then they'd taste like something from the bottom of a hamster cage so...you know.

This has been a gradual tweaking of my banana muffin recipe until I got here, and I think I'm satisfied. Done in this quantity it makes 20-24 muffins, depending on how full you fill the cups.

2/3 c. oil (or 50/50 oil/applesauce which is what I do)
2 eggs, beaten
1/2 c. milk
2-3 large bananas
2 tsp vanilla
1 1/2 tsp baking soda
3/4-1 c. sugar (I use the golden cane sugar, Fair Trade, yadda yadda, but I bet 1/2 white, 1/2 brown would be good.
1 c. unbleached unenriched flour
1 c. whole wheat flour
1/2 c wheat germ

Preheat oven to 350* and grease or put muffin cups in a muffin tin. Combine first 5 ingredients (the wet ones) and mix them up well. In a separate bowl combine last 5 ingredients (the dry ones) and mix those really well so the baking soda doesn't stick together and taste really terrible. Then pour the wet into the dry and mix until combined. Fill muffin cups until they are 2/3-3/4 of the way full then bake for 20-25 minutes until golden brown on top.

You could add chocolate chips like Cor likes, but I don't usually unless he begs :-P

Before:

After:

Molly really likes them so they must be pretty good.

We did some more math today. Molly found it really simple but I think it's a good exercise. She counted the number of each animal and then colored in a graph with the corresponding number of boxes.

We also did a reading lesson from The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading. So far she's picking up really quickly, but all of the lessons we've done have been straight, sound it out type of words. Right now we are going through different consonant blends at the end the words. After we finish the lesson I have her practice spelling some of the words. Since her fine motor skills are right where they should be for a child her age, writing spelling words is out. She can write, but it's very arduous for her so this makes it a bit easier. I have her spell them to me and I write them out as she spells them. We've done this on the MagnaDoodle and on the sidewalk with chalk so far.

These were some of her words from today.

I also recorded a video of her reading from the book. She's really coming along nicely.



I'm hoping to do some garage sale-ing tomorrow. Molly will be in tow, so hopefully we won't come home with a car-full of toys that she won't play with.

pretty bored tonight

Molly and I did some "Molly school" today. I have the Singapore Math curriculum I mentioned in an earlier post. What we have is supposed to be the first half of kindergarten, I assume if this was used in a school it would take the first semester. I guess that means we shouldn't be flying through it at the speed we are. There are ten units in the book and we do half a unit in a sitting, and we could do more but we stop after half. So far nothing has been even the slightest bit challenging for her, following the directions properly is harder for her than the actual work.

I think we'll still go through the whole book and move on to book B that way we can seamlessly move on to the first grade book probably sometime over the summer. At least by then she'll be 4 and I won't feel so weird about having a 3 year old doing first grade math.

On a completely different note, my friend Erin who also has a blog: http://motherhoodyall.blogspot.com/ has given me an award, hurray my first blog award! It's the Honest Scrap award :-)

So, here are the rules...As part of receiving this wonderful Blog Award you are required to list 10 random things about yourself and then pass along this award to your 10 favorite bloggers. I don't know that I follow 10 blogs that I can pass it on to so I think I'll just do the 10 random things :-)

1. Every single time I get back to my house after running around I change into my "comfy pants." Sometimes they are sweats, sometimes gauchos but I very rarely keep my jeans on. If I need to go somewhere else later, I'll just change back into my jeans so I end up changing my pants like 8 times a day.

2. The older I get the more afraid of flying I get, which is weird because I've never really had a bad experience. I just get more nervous each and every time I get on a plane. 

3. I really like McDonald's. I don't want to like it, but I do. Sometimes I get a craving for it and it's all I can do to resist. Mmm...french fries.

4. I can stand horror movies. I watched them a lot as a kid, but anymore I just can't stand them. Even stupid ones that very few people actually find scary I will find scary and have bad dreams from it. 

5. In reference to #4, I still get freaked out when I'm alone at night. I have a terribly active imagination and I want to run up the stairs because I'm just sure something awful is behind me. Rationally I know that's not true, but for some reason I always scare myself to death. I also always hop quickly into bed because I'm positive some scary claws are going to reach out and grab my legs if I'm not quick. Yes, I might as well still be 5 years old. 

6. I like teeny-bopper girl movies. I actually own New York Minute with Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. Commence your mocking. 

7. I hate shoe shopping. I have feet that are not shaped for shoes and shoe shopping is miserable because I can't ever find anything that fits. Most things don't come in extra wide.

8. I LOVE mashed potatoes, it's an addiction really. But not mashed potatoes you can make at home, though I really like those too, I love mashed potatoes from Popeye's or KFC. 

9. I really like watching cheerleading and dancing competitions on TV, probably on account of the fact that I am so amazingly uncoordinated in that regard and I'd never be able to do it. 

10. I hate putting away laundry except Molly's. For some reason I enjoy her laundry, I guess because everything is cute and matchy-matchy and small. 

experimental dinner

I made an experimental dinner tonight, what Pioneer Woman would call a pantry meal because you make it with stuff you already have, when you are running low on groceries. We aren't really running very low, but I had no urge to run to the store for anything that we might be missing from another recipe so I threw this together. It was a winner, I think. Recipe in these quantities fed all three of us for dinner and more than enough for Cor to take for lunch at work tomorrow. Molly doesn't ever eat a heck of a lot so she just about doesn't count.

Ingredients:
2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts (we used organic, free range, but use what you've got)
1 tbsp olive oil
2 cloves of garlic finely chopped (up to your discretion, add more or less if you like)
1 can uncondensed organic cream of chicken soup (no MSG, no funky things)
2-3 tbsp of cream cheese
2 cups fresh spinach
1 bag of your noodle of choice, we used egg noodles because that's what I had
salt and pepper to taste

First heat the olive oil over med heat. Add garlic and saute for a few minutes till it has started to brown. Add the chicken breasts and cook until they are cooked through. Set chicken aside to cool and pour the can of cream of chicken soup in to the pan and lower heat to med-low. Once that has started to bubble a little add the cream cheese in cubes. Once the cream cheese has melted and mixed into the rest of the mixture add the spinach. You can add even more than 2 cups if you'd like. Cook the spinach until it is wilted. While it is cooking chop the chicken into bite-sized cubes. Then add the chicken into the mixture and heat it through. Sometime while you were cooking all this you need to cook your pasta, work that in as you see fit. Serve the chicken/spinach/sauce mixture over the noodles and top with parmesan cheese if you like.

It's very good, not terribly low fat, but not awful and pretty wholesome if you use organic ingredients. The spinach has no taste really, just adds some green, some texture and since it is cooked in the sauce and not steamed and then the water poured off you get to keep those nutrients that cook out of it. An easy way to add some leafy greens to your meal.

Baby steps to healthier living

WARNING: this is a long post, I worked on it on and off for several hours. You may continue :-)

Notice I didn't say healthy living, I said healthier. We do pretty well, but we could still do A LOT better. I find this can be associated with homeschooling since homeschooling families tend towards being more environmentally conscious, thus more health conscious.

We aren't super environmentally aware, but we try to do what we can. With no recycling here that is kind of hard. We try to do little things though. I use homemade laundry soap (but I buy it online) the great majority of the time to reduce petroleum products in our water supply and to reduce the amount of petroleum we use in general. I try to use environmentally friendly cleaners or homemade cleaners using vinegar, tea tree oil and Dr. Bronner's castille soap. We keep our heat set to low (68 day, 60 or off at night) and our AC set a little warmer than most (75-76-ish). We don't leave lights on in the evenings if we aren't in the room and we use daylight during the day and avoid turning lights on. I only use our dryer on low and I hang dry the great majority of our clothes, I have no issue buying used when things are in good condition. Reduce, reuse, recycle and all that jazz.

We grow a few things in our tiny garden, as much as we can. We also buy local whenever possible. The benefits of this are two-fold. 1) In our garden and at the local farmer's market we know what has gone into growing the plants (well relatively, most of the things at the farmer's market are organic or might as well be, but they aren't organically certified). 2) The food is not traveling far to get to our table, it's coming either from our back yard, or within 100-150 miles inside the state of Oklahoma. The gas saved in buying local is immense. The statistics and research show that most conventional food travels on average 1500 miles to get to the kitchen table where it is consumed. Many of our fruits and vegetables we buy out of season and they come from California or further.

Another biggie is that we cloth diapered Molly. I started because I thought we could save money and I know that we could've saved money easily doing it, but I liked the plush, super adorable diapers too much. Disposable diaper manufacturers will try to argue that using cloth is equally as damaging to the environment as making and using disposable diapers, but when you break it down that is simply not the case. To begin with, the manufacturing of disposable diapers includes the use of petroleum products, wood pulp (lots of it) and a ton of water. Additionally disposable diapers contain dioxin, a know carcinogen. Don't you just love the idea of your babies most sensitive, delicate parts touching a cancer causing chemical 24 hours a day?? I don't. The main argument that disposable diaper manufacturers use again cloth is that it uses lots of water to wash. This really isn't a valid argument. Most who cloth diaper have enough diapers to last 2-3 days, meaning they only have to do 2-3 loads of diaper laundry/week, and those aren't typically large loads, they are more likely medium or small loads, diapers don't take up that much space. The impact of 2-3 additional small loads of laundry in the big scheme of how much laundry a family with a baby (or more children) does is pretty minuscule. Additionally, cloth diapers will decompose in a landfill unlike disposable diapers. Cloth diapers that remain in good shape can also be sold second hand (or third or four) after the child is done with them, or they can be saved for the next child, you sure can't do that with disposable diapers. If there is anyone who is interesting in more info about cloth diaper can leave a comment and I can tell you more about it. I'm responsible for quite a few converts, haha.

The healthy eating is a little harder to come by, but we are doing it in baby steps. When Cor and I got married a little over 5 years ago we ate pretty much like college kids...which is what we were. Not a ton of veggies or fruit, mostly processed food. We didn't eat TONS of fast food but we ate it pretty regularly. We basically had a lack of awareness of food, how it's made, and what's really good for us. Then I got pregnant with Molly and I started to think more about our behavior in regard to food, among other things. The changes we have made have happened slowly over the last five years, pretty naturally and after a lot of reading and educating myself.

One of the first things we did was to incorporate more fruits and vegetables into our diet. For Cor the vegetable part is easier than the fruit because there isn't a lot of fruit that he likes, but he'll eat most veggies. We don't buy nearly as many canned vegetables as we used to, though we do buy some like tomato sauce and canned green beans and occasionally corn. We buy lots of fresh and frozen veggies. Frozen is equally as good as fresh, sometimes better because of how quickly it is frozen after being picked, we just make sure that the only ingredient is the vegetable, nothing else. After that we slowly started phasing out the processed box food...for the most part. We ditched the hamburger helper and pretty much anything like it. We buy the noodles, rice, meat, spices etc, all the things we need to make what we want to eat and make it from scratch (well, except the bought noodles).

After ditching a lot of the processed food we started reading labels on the processed foods we still buy. I rarely buy anything with high fructose corn syrup, HFCS from here on out (er...except soda, but more on that later). HFCS does not function in the human body the same way other forms of sugar do. I am no scientist and I'm not going to try to explain it because I don't fully understand it, but we avoid it. I also almost never buy anything with MSG in it. MSG is NOT a preservative, it's an additive that is used as a flavor enhancer and can mess things up in your body. So now when we buy something ready made, it does not include either of those things.That's where organics come in because organic food, even ready made, does not contain most of the crummy stuff that conventional food does.

We believe in whole foods. I don't need a "big food" company to prepare my food for me and in the process take out the good things and put in a bunch of junk I don't need. You could summarize our eating with that. I make things at home that most people buy at the store, and if I don't make it myself I'm choosy about who does make it and what is in it. For example, I make our bread or I buy it from a local bakery that only uses the ingredients I would use in my kitchen so it's as good as homemade. In the past our freezer was full of pre-made lasagna, pizza, individual meals etc. Now our freezer is full of left overs I've made that Cor can take to work, frozen fruits and veggies and meat.

Which brings me to my next subject: meat. We like our meat, Cor more than me, but we both do, as does Molly. We are not vegetarians and we will never be. So with meat as a staple in our diet I want it to be as healthy as it can be. A logical thought is, we are only as healthy as our meat is. If the animals we are eating weren't healthy themselves, what makes us think we will be after eating them. This is a more recent change. I've felt this way for a while, but the cost makes it more difficult. Organic, free range chicken is about $5/lb for boneless, skinless breasts and a whole chicken usually runs in the $12-15 range whereas a conventional whole chicken costs about $4-5. When as a family we eat close to a lb of chicken in a given meal, that gets expensive. One thing I've done to help with the cost is to eat less meat :-) Cor isn't terribly fond of this but if I want to be committed to eating this way we can't eat as much of it as we did before. I make a few meat free meals, and in other meals I'll use the chicken in a way where it goes farther, like shredding it and mixing it with other things rather than just eating a whole chunk of chicken whole.

Beef is a bit more complex. You can buy "natural" beef, but it's still corn fed, or at least corn finished. Corn is not good for cows as they are made to eat grass. Cows fed grass are healthy, cows fed corn are not healthy, they are more susceptible to infection and illness, thus why cows are fed antibiotics IN their food. This means when we eat the cows, we are eating the antibiotics they have been fed...and we wonder why the bugs are becoming resistant to so many antibiotics. Corn fed cows are also fattier, and higher in omega-6's which are good, but if they aren't balanced out by healthy omega-3s they aren't good for you anymore. Grass fed beef is balanced between omega-3s and omega-6s. Is also has much less fat in it, comparable to buffalo, which funnily enough is grass fed, go figure. Grass fed ground beef is typically $5/lb so we buy less of that too and use it more sparingly, just like chicken. If we are having friends over and want to make burgers or something we'll typically buy conventional beef because it's just too costly to buy that much grass-fed beef.

We don't buy milk with rBGH, the growth hormone, ever. Added hormones do not do good things in people's bodies. We also buy most of our milk from Braum's. It's not organic, but it's rBGH free and it's produced in Oklahoma so it doesn't have far to go to get here. I also like that they only ship their products into the states that border Oklahoma which keeps fuel used low. We still have other areas to work on. In a perfect world I'd like to be soda free, but I'm a coke addict (haha, soda not illegal drug). Coke is full of HFCS, except around passover when Coke produces a limited about of Coke made with real sugar because HFCS is not kosher and they want to keep their Jewish customers during that time. I should stock up during that time. So my newest commitment is to not buy 2 liter Cokes at the store. If we are out and about I can get a Coke, but I'm not just going to keep it on hand at home.

We do still have Diet Dr. Pepper at home, but that will be next to go...eventually. I don't like it as much as Coke, but it's now Cor's soda of choice. Aspartame is no better than HFCS, probably worse. From what I've read it seems that aspartame, while calorie free still causes the body to produce insulin because the sweet taste and chemical composition (I think) make the body think it's getting sugar. All this insulin is spit out to deal with the sugar and then there isn't any there so the insulin levels in the blood stay high for a while, or something like that. In any case, it's not good. So after we are comfortable with no Coke in the house and it is second nature, then I'll attack the diet Dr. Pepper. That's how we've made the changes we've made. Little by little and slowly so each change has become natural and not full of stress and deprivation. I'm proud to say that nowadays Cor prefers homemade foods and none of the pre-made stuff is as good to him anymore.

We still eat fast food, probably more often than we should. Molly still drinks watered down juice occasionally rather than water all the time. We go out for treats about once a week and get ice cream or frozen yogurt or donuts. Sometimes I buy a frozen pizza or a Stouffer's lasagna for those nights where I just don't feel like cooking. We even eat hot dogs sometimes :-P

I also know people who do a better job at healthy eating than we do and that's okay. We'll keep moving that direction, little by little. I think what we've done so far is helping us be a healthier family and that's what counts, not how much better or worse we eat than another family. We all do what is best for our family :-)

Lotsa pictures

Yesterday Molly ran in the "Amazing Race" at school. It was a fundraiser for the school and each of the kids asked for sponsors. They ran, oh, maybe 30 yards, not far at all, but far enough for a group of 3-4 year olds (and bigger kids too). Each one of them got a medal for participating and Molly was SOOO proud of herself and had to hold on to the medal even though it was on a ribbon around her neck and not going anywhere.

So, first a few pics from the race.

First they had to stretch, you can't really see Molly in this picture, but she's there I promise.

Waiting to run, she's holding her friend Isabella's hand. I hear about Isabella ALL the time, I think they play together just about every day at school.

and.....GO!

And crossing the finish line, like I said, it was a very short race, but they did all run in the same direction, I thought that was a pretty big achievement in itself.

Molly ran over and showed me her medal.

So now onto today. We met some friends at the Arts Festival in downtown OKC. The Arts Festival is a pretty big deal and a lot of fun. Lots of artists selling their work, but also lots of delicious local food and music and dance groups and fun things to do, including running around in the Myriad Gardens. The gardens are about to be shut down for a year for a big renovation so this is the last big event I believe.

We went to the stage and saw these Irish dancers. I lose because I don't remember what their troupe is called, oops. They were fairly young though, the youngest was 10 and the oldest was 24. Neither of those people is in this picture.

Molly had to get up and dance too, it's what she does. In the first pic she actually looks like she knows what she's doing, what with that pointed toe and all, but rest assured, she doesn't. I just love the trash can in the background, don't you??

Then we went over to the pond and looked at the local wildlife. The koi in this pond were ridiculously big, they could've eaten my arm, seriously. We didn't have our polarization filter so none of the fish pics turned out very well, too much reflection.

There was a concert going on across the pond (haha!) with some crusty hippie musicians, but they sounded pretty good. 

Molly found this tiny flower and carried it around for 15 minutes or so.

This was a neat metal leaf sculpture that she couldn't get enough of, we have at least 30-40 pics of her playing in here, but these are my favorites. I can't get the kid to make a normal face to save my life, so I'll take whatever she offers me, silly girl. Make it bigger and you can see the ridiculous face she's making, and the pic is so nicely framed by the cranes, ahhh, nature.

I might have another post later with some real content, but for now that is all :-)

The weather has been nice the last few days, so nice in fact that Molly has spent the majority of today out on our back patio doing who knows what. We don't really have any toys back there, but we do have a Molly sized set of lawn chairs and a table with an umbrella and our little garden is back there. Of course, when you are three the entire world is a fascinating place, especially a back yard. She's been coming in and out all day telling me what the bugs are doing, and of course she accidentally stepped on a beetle so she had to bring it's tiny carcass inside in her hand to show me. He wasn't all gross, thank goodness, but she felt bad and told me that she really love that bug and was sad that she squished him.

Cory had a dentist appointment this afternoon, his first one in about 4 years. Molly hasn't been yet for her own check up (call me a bad mom if you want) so I took her and she got to watch him get examined and get his teeth cleaned. She was fascinated with the spit sucker. I haven't taken her yet because our dental plan pretty much only covers places like Gentle Dental or My Dentist, huge practices with multiple dentists, and many of those, in fact all the ones I called before I made the appointment at My Dentist for Cor, didn't want to see children until they were 5. Well that would be all well and good if our insurance covered pediatric dentists as primary care dentists, but they don't. Luckily this My Dentist office said they would take her and do whatever they could and if she seemed like she was too scared then they would refer her to a pediatric dentist from there and that THEN our insurance would cover it.

So tomorrow she's going for her first cleaning and examination. She might have a tiny cavity in one of her molars, but I'm not sure, it's just a tiny spot. We think she inherited Cor's deep grooves in his teeth. I'm going to feel REALLY bad if she has a cavity, even though I know we brush her teeth often and genetics plays a big part in dental health. She doesn't seem scared about it though, so I'm glad for that. She was TERRIFIED of the doctor from birth up until about 6 or 8 months ago and then she just snapped out of it and talks the doctors ear off nowadays. It was sort of out of character for her since she's so outgoing and chatty and always has been.

I realize this post has been not terribly homeschooling related, but a) Molly learns from everything she does at this age, so her exploring the backyard and watching a dentist appointment really are quite educational for her and 2)/b) I think I'll also use this blog to ramble about my daily goings on, because I'm not interesting enough otherwise (am I interesting at all??)

Send your friends to read about my mundane life! I want more readers :-)

Also, if I expand my repertoire I'll get to get on my soapbox about the myriad of other things I think about on a daily basis :-P

Lastly, photo dump from chalk time in the backyard


Ignore the fact that you can see straight up her shorts and admire how long and skinny her legs are, I'm having a moment of jealousy.

Her hair didn't look nearly this neat by the end of the day, she looked like something the cat dragged in.

Posted this one on FB. She wanted to go inside and wash her hands and I made her stop for a picture...this is the look I get. She wasn't about to cry, she was just making a crazy face.

then she squats and makes the same face.

Then she's back to normal with a big grin...then I let her go in and wash her hands :- D

A book Molly read tonight

We did some reading together tonight. I read her two LONG books from the library and in return she read me two Molly books.

One of them was Where is Max? She really impressed me with her reading. It's a leveled reader but introduces several sight words that don't follow any regular reading rules. She needed help with many of the words, but she figured out a few on her own, words we've never worked on. She figured out these words all on her own: you, softly, empty, Max's (apostrophe, tricky stuff), low, down. We've got quite a few more lessons for the reading rules, but I think it might be time to incorporate more sight words.


On a non-school related note, we didn't get to go to Texas for my grandpa's funeral today. We got up early and got all ready to go, then got Molly out of bed and she obviously wasn't feeling well. I called my grandma to tell her I wasn't sure we were going to make it and she was understanding but sad, of course. Right after I got off the phone Molly got sick, yuck. After that she perked up a bit and hasn't gotten sick the rest of the day, but she's hasn't been her normal self. She's been really sinus-y with a runny nose and lots of stuffiness and sneezes. I think the getting sick was related to mucous and not a virus, at least I hope so. She's eaten a bit today and has seemed fine, she even ate 4 chicken nuggets for dinner and still appears fine. So all in all today I've felt a bit low and stressed, but everything will be fine in the long run. In the next few weeks we'll try to get down to Texas again, after all the chaos subsides a bit.

Not too much to say

I've been getting things in the mail for the last week. I got the two Dover coloring books I ordered. They are very realistic pictures so I don't know if Molly is as interested in them as she would be in cartoon-y coloring books but that's okay, she likes them well enough. They have a good, long paragraph at the end  I also just got Mudpies to Magnets: Preschool Science Curriculum that has LOTS of good experiment ideas in it. It is designed for classroom use, but most of the experiments can be adapted for home use.
















I also think it's time we moved past book 1 1/2 in the Explode the Code series. I picked it up and turned to the end of the book and she can read everything, even though we haven't even started the book. It's a bit repetitive so she might just need to move a little quicker to more difficult reading lessons. I've been wanting to figure out what her reading level is, like late Kindergarten or early first grade etc etc. I need to find a way to figure that out.

The last few weeks have been SO busy that we haven't done much in the way of sit down learning. Last Friday we had lunch at Poblano Grill and had a little extra time so we sat down and practiced the skill taught in a song from Starfall.com. "When two vowels go a-walking, the first vowel does the talking." We practiced words like "road, toad, rain, pain, read, neat etc.

We also played on the computers at the library today. I've said it before and I'll say it again; the library is one of the richest resources around! She played a math game where she was learning the value of coins and counting them. Of course the library has books, but they do so much more. I think everyone should visit their local library at LEAST once a month, preferably more like once a week. There are activities for all ages, from birth to adult.They have a ton of activities and more than just story time type of things.

We moved Molly's plants out to the backyard garden today. They were growing a bit too big for the little planter they were in so they got transferred to the ground. After all the rain we got over the weekend, it was nicely saturated. So, now we have peppers, tomatoes, strawberries, cilantro, dill, chives, cucumbers, lettuce, mini sunflowers and marigolds.

I think that's all I've got for now, not too interesting as of late.

Copied from another blog, but an interesting read and food for thought

*I won't be posting much for the next several days, since I have a friend in town for another friend's wedding and then we will be heading to TX for my grandpa's funeral, be patient with me while I get back into the swing of posting, life has been a bit chaotic this last week.*

Stop homeschooling and get your child socialized! How many homeschooling parents have heard those sentiments? Dare I say all have? Few argue with the idea that homeschooling children perform better educationally, but there looms the idea that homeschooled children will grow up to be freaks who cannot get along with others because they are not socialized with their peers. Where does this idea come from? Let's step back and see what the research has to say about this issue:

Larry Edward Shyers completed a thesis at the University of Florida called Comparison of Social Adjustment Between Home and Traditionally Schooled Students. This nearly 300 page thesis explored the self esteem of eight to ten year olds. He looked at 70 homeschooled children and 70 children in traditional schooling using the Piers-Harris Children's Self-Concept Scale. He found no difference between the groups. He also looked at how children treated one another using the Children's Assertive Behavior Scale. He found no difference between the groups. He also participated in an observation using Child Observation Checklist's Direct Observation Form and found that homeschooled children had less problems than traditionally schooled peers. He went on to conclude that interaction with adults is more important in developing social skills than interaction with children. When you step back and think about it, his conclusion makes complete sense. Children best learn social skills from an adult who has fully developed social skills instead of a peer who is still learning how to get along with others. Children model behavior of those they are around the most.

Thomas Smedley also completed completed research on The Socialization of Homeschool Children while working on his Master's degree at Radford University of Virginia. He used the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales to look at social maturity of 20 homeschooled students and 13 traditional schooled children matched demographically. His research showed that homeschooled children were more socialized and mature than children in traditional schooling. Homeschooled students scored at the 84th percentile while traditionally schooled students scored at the 27th percentile. He concluded that "In the public school system, children are socialized horizontally, and temporarily, into conformity with their immediate peers. Home educators seek to socialize their children vertically, toward responsibility, service, and adulthood, with an eye on eternity." Here we see the grouping of children by age is not the ideal method for socialization. Homeschooled children tend to socialize with all ages rather than children who are in their grade.

Okay, but what about adults? Are these homeschooled children able to go into the workplace successfully? Most homeschooled children are socialized vertically so their exposure is to all age groups. The workplace does not resemble the controlled age grouping of schools. In the workplace the worker is expected to interact with all ages and types of people. The homeschooled student is exposed to a cross-section of the world with different ages and types of people instead of a group of children the same age from the same neighborhood.

There has been discussion recently about how homeschooling neglects one of the most important roles of the school system - training to become a good citizen. Are these homeschooled children able to be good citizens? Let's look at the research...

Dr. Brian D. Ray completed a research study on the topic of adults who were homeschooled. He surveyed over 7,000 adults who had been homeschooled at least 7 years and compared that information to the general US population. This is some of what he found:

* 74% of home educated adults had taken college courses versus 46% of the general population.
* 71% of home educated adults participate in a community service activity versus 37% of the general population.
* 88% of home educated adults were members of an organization versus 50% of the general population.
* 4% of home educated adults thought politics and government were too difficult to follow versus 35% of the general population.
* 76% of home educated adults aged 18-24 voted compared to 29% of 18-24 year olds in the general population
* The home educated were more likely to work for a political candidate, contribute money to a candidate or political cause, and stage a protest than the general US population. Data was looked at in different age groups and each age grouping in each category showed the home educated were more likely to be active politically.
* 59% of home educated adults are very happy in life versus 28% of the general population.
* 73% of home educated adults found life to be pretty exciting versus 47% of the general population.
* 61% of home educated adults are satisfied with their job versus 40% of the general population.
* 49% of home educated adults are satisfied with their financial status versus 23% of the general population.
* 95% of participants in the study were happy they were homeschooled.
* 82% of participants in the study wanted to homeschool their children.

So what is the problem here? Research shows that homeschooled children grow up to be contributing members of society. In fact, they are more involved in their community than traditionally schooled peers. Could it be possible that the family unit ordained by God is the most valuable method to train and teach children to be valuable members of society? The research supports it. So do I.

I'm trying to post a video of a trebuchet that Cor made with Molly's tinker toys...after Molly was in bed. He had a lot of fun though, as you'll hear from his maniacal cackling in the video. He gets a big kick out of things like this.

Tinkering with Tinker Toys

We headed down to DFW this weekend to pay a visit to my Grandpa and the rest of my family. He's not doing terribly well so it was important to get to see him sooner, rather than later. That's about all I'll say about it since my Grandma is feeling pretty sensitive about word getting out and people talking. I'm not totally sure why, because to me, the more people know, the more prayers there are, but it's how she's feeling so I'll respect that.

Molly had a big time and got to get her Christmas presents. She got a nice, fuzzy fleece jacket from her great uncle Mark that is pink camo. She LOVES it. She kept asking to wear it yesterday while it was 80 degrees out. She also got a set of girly colored Tinker Toys from her great aunt Marylin.



She and Daddy had a lot of fun playing with those this afternoon and Daddy got to teach her a little bit about gravity and momentum after "they" (meaning Daddy) built a "gymnast."









Again, ignore the state of our house. We've lived in a state of constant chaos for the last week since we got back from CO, and then having run out of town again we are just a mess. I swear I am a better house keeper than it appears! Also, Molly is in a pajama top, purple "lipstick", no pants and is eating a PB sandwich. I swear, she lives up to the expectation of her age everyday.

So the little guy swings back and forth and had the equivalent of shoulders and hips and it was pretty neat that his body swung just like a human body would, like we've seen in gymnastics.

Daddy scaled up after this and built one that was about twice this big, but I didn't get pictures (yet). He would hold the tinker-guy's feet up to his nose and ask Molly if, when he let go and it swung back to him, it would go all the way up to his nose again and hit him. She said yes, but of course it only made it up to an inch or two below his chin. Then he explained that gravity was making it swing slower and slower each time because gravity was pulling it back towards the ground. They tried it several times and each time she was surprised that, as Daddy said, it didn't conk him in the nose. 

Molly's garden is growing really well. We planted it last Monday and today it looks like this:

As you can see, some things are taking quite a bit longer to sprout than others. The middle two are L: sunflowers and R: cucumbers. I don't remember what the far left and right are. I guess I should go to an earlier post and refresh my memory. I'm thinking in a week or two they'll be ready to transplant...maybe. How strong/big do plants need to be before you can safely transplant them outdoors?

Also, does anyone have a great ideas for bible lessons? She goes to her class at church, although currently we haven't been to church in about a month because of traveling and exhaustion. She also reads bible stories with Daddy before bed, and occasionally with me but I think I'm ready to find something put together with activities to reinforce lessons etc. Online stuff would be fun too (hint, hint...you know who you are! ).

We had a big time reading before bed tonight. These are the books we read. I really like these little Amazon boxes because you can look at the book and see reviews of it and sometimes even look at a few pages inside the book. I find that helpful, so maybe you do too.

A book about sportsmanship and having a good attitude.












Sea sums No picture, but its a book all sorts of ocean creatures, but also all during the book they are adding and subtracting while giving facts about each creature. Very creative way to work in math with science. 



I didn't read this one, Cor did, but he said it's about socks that grow and grow and grow. No moral, just a fun story.












Is a story about a spoiled princess who is unhappy with all the things she has. I didn't read this one to Molly either but Cor said that the spoiled princess gets eaten at the end. That shouldn't make me LOL, but it does.

A day off

Nothing to blog about tonight. We did some Molly school this morning and I got a video of Molly doing her reading lesson which I will try to post before the weekend is over. We drove to DFW this weekend to have a quick visit with my grandparents since my grandpa isn't doing well health wise. I'm blogging from the hotel at midnight and Molly is STILL talking in her bed, and not asleep. The last thing she said was "Daddy, 4+6 is 7." Hmm not quite, but still cute and funny.

Goodnight!

This and that

Molly went to preschool this morning and came home saying she went to music AND science today. She said they learned about plants today, but that's all I could get out of her. At not quite four she already tells me "oh, nothing" when I ask her what she did at school. I though that didn't start until they were at least 5 or 6.
We ate a very healthy lunch at McDonald's on our way to a play date with my friend, Monika and her sons, Ben and Timothy. Ben is Molly's age and Timothy is 16 months old. On our way to the park to play Molly was playing with the dragon she got in her happy meal. At one point she said "the dragon can't escape from the puma!" I have no idea where she learned about pumas. She spent her lunch counting and subtracting fries in Spanish. I didn't know she could count in Spanish, well, I should clarify. I knew she could say the numbers but I didn't know she could actually count objects and understood the English equivalent of the Spanish words she was using. So watching Dora and Diego does do *something,* let that be a lesson, ha!

We beat our friends to the park by about 20 minutes so Molly and I went exploring the big field behind the park. and I actually learned something. Now this may seem ridiculous to some, but I've never really paid any attention to dandelions, other than blowing the fluff in my yard when I was little and NOT blowing the fluff in my yard as an adult. So in this field there were a ton of dandelions, as well as quite a few other wild flowers. I started picking dandelions and blowing the fluff, because hey, it's not my yard! Then I started to look at all the other dandelions and I saw how they grow and mature and it was actually really interesting. So when we got home I went out in the back yard and took pictures of the dandelions. I told Molly all about it as well, but she didn't find it nearly as fascinating as I did, haha!

So here is what I learned:

Here is an unopened flower, pretty self explanatory.

Now an open flower, as we have all seen at least a thousand times.

Upon closer look, and tearing the flower in half you can see that inside are very immature versions of the seeds and "parachutes." I pulled them out so you could see.

Now here is where it gets interesting (at least to me, mind you I am a bit of a dork).
The flower is starting to close and the little skinny things in the middle called ray flowers are starting to turn brown.

Now the flower has closed up completely and the ray flowers have turned very brown. I always thought, that the flower died here and the seed pod fluffy things were a separate part of the plant that grew at a different time. That doesn't seem very reasonable now that I think about it, but I had no reason to wonder. Anyway I digress. Alas, the flower is not dying, it's changing.

If I tear it apart now, it's starting to resemble the regular fluffy seeds more. The yellow ray flowers are easy to completely separate from the seeds, whereas before they were kind of one unit.

If I tear it in half, it's very apparent what it's becoming.

So after that, all of the yellow ray flowers fall off, and it looks like an unopened fluffy seed thingy.

Oddly enough, I don't have any mature seed pods in the back yard right now, but we all know what they look like.

So there's the life cycle of a dandelion, I hope I haven't bored anyone to tears, haha. I did learn with some internet research that the flower can turn into the seed head overnight! That is much quicker than I thought it could be.

Molly's little indoor garden is starting to sprout, well at least the lettuce OR marigolds are, I didn't mark which end was which, but all of the seeds on one end are sprouting.

I have no idea what tomorrow will hold, but I'll keep ya posted :-)

Stuff we use...

I'll preface this by saying two things...1) There are a lot of pictures in this post. 2) We don't use ALL of this stuff ALL of the time, in fact many days go by where we don't pick up any of these books at all. She is only three and I don't force her to do "Molly school" everyday. I understand her learning capacity and her attention span and trying to make her sit down for hours like a 3rd grader would be like...well, like torture, for both of us! 3) (I realize that I said only two things, but I thought of another) we don't do things ONLY from these books either, we read tons of library books, we watch videos, we play with legos and we do lots of things informally that still have educational merit, but you don't find in any book. Like yesterday when we counted bunny grahams individually and by 5's, then subtracted them as she ate them. We had lots of fun.

You can make the pics bigger by clicking, I had them much bigger but then my layout cut off like 1/2 the pic so I made them smaller. 

Anyway, onto the stuff.

Here is our kitchen table, covered in stuff.

Clockwise from top center is: Brain Quest workbook-1st grade version, a bunch of cheapo Carson-Dellosa workbooks, don't know the brand workbooks from Wal-Mart sight words and math 1st grade versions, Kumon write/wipe off word cards, Kumon cut/sticker and paste book, Highlights High Five (Highlights for pre-K) and Highlights Puzzle Buzz magazine, Handwriting Without Tears Get Set for School workbook and teacher's manual, Explode the Code reading books 1 and 1 1/2 with teachers manual, (center left) The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading, (center right) Singapore Math Earlybird Kindergarten math textbook A and matching workbook.

Now I'll go into a little more detail about some of my materials.

Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading is an excellent book that starts out teaching basic phonics and advances up through 4th grade vocabulary. It teaches a very short lesson and a list of words that apply to the lesson that you read to the child, then read with the child and then the child reads to you. Then there is a short story for the child to read that includes words from that lesson and all the lessons up to that one. It also sometimes has extra games to play to reinforce what the child has just learned.

Here's a pic from inside the book

Next up is Explode the Code, a reading curriculum. It does things in a very systematic manner, much like OPGTTR. We have the teacher's guide for books 1-2 and we have books 1 and 1&1/2. 1&1/2 is just more repetition of what you learned in the first book. Instead of just teaching the lesson it gives activities to do with it for reinforcement. The books go on up through book 8 which is a 4th grade reading level I believe. It also involves writing which is a little harder for Molly since while she can writing all the letters, doing so repeatedly is pretty tough. Here's a pic from the book.

A pic from book 1&1/2, which we haven't started yet, though reading alone I think she could easily do the work.

Next up is Handwriting Without Tears, which is obviously a writing program. Again, Molly already knows how to write her capital letters, but she still doesn't have the coordination to do it neatly or consistently. Her fine motor skills are not really advanced, I think she's pretty average. So even though she knows *how* to write she still needs the lessons and the repetition to practice. HWT comes with lots of other supplementary activities in the teacher's book including songs, which we really like around here.

The last of my actual, real curriculum is Singapore Math. I just got this in the mail this afternoon so we haven't done much with it yet, though we did do the first half of chapter one. This particular book is Kindergarten book A, which is supposed to be the first half of the year but flipping through the book Molly knows almost everything in it already. We'll still go through it though, because at her age she thinks it's fun and it will be good practice, both for her skills and for practicing sitting still and working through something. I really like this particular curriculum because it's bright and colorful and fun, which is a pretty big deal when working with a little kid and also because I like the rationale behind it. It's the way they teach math in Singapore (hence the name :-P). They put an emphasis on mental math and going through each concept and building towards mental math. Their structure is Concrete> Pictorial>Abstract. It seems really logical to me which is why I like it :-)

This is the concrete phase

This is pictorial on the left, abstract on the right.

This is the reinforcement for the above lesson from the activity book supplement

The rest of the books I've collected and we use from time to time. They are good for carrying around to keep her busy when we are out and about. I like them because they are simple, but they don't have any teaching in them, just activity which is where they fall flat compared to the textbooks. Still they are fun for Molly and we enjoy them. The highlights and Puzzle Buzz are especially good for keeping Molly busy and they have stickers and all sorts of fun pencil activities.

And a few pictures of Molly dancing around while she ate cantaloupe this evening, silly girl.

Not sad like she looks, just working on a mouthful of cantaloupe.