Homeschooling Jump

My husband and I took the homeschooling jump this week and took our oldest son out of the public school system. Our two oldest daughters are still in public school. Our son just needed some time at home were there are less distractions. He is very bright and rather ADD and works very well one on one.
We had fun today working out our schedule and starting in on our "class work".
I have searched the Internet for months, trying to find information on homeschooling and curriculum and have been very frustrated. I have a degree in early childhood and elementary education (don't ever look at my spelling though) so I have never doubted my teaching ability. I just don't trust my self discipline to keep up with a program.
In searching the web I found it frustrating that I couldn't find what I wanted. The curriculum's were either incredibly expensive or so far off the deep end that there wasn't much usable info in them. I know there must be good programs out there but they really are hard to find and you have to take their word for it. I also found that the religious based curriculum, while doing a pretty good job of teaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the children, they were very soft on other subject matter. I already work on teaching my children the Gospel, I want help in teaching math, reading, social studies, and science.
I got some good advice from my mom. She told me to go talk to the principal so I did. I am so glad that I did. I called her in advance and let her know what my plan was and that I wanted to come in and talk to her. That gave her time to collect her ideas and be prepared to give me ideas. When I got there, she had gathered all of my son's text books together and and gone into her own resources and found some others that are really fantastic. She let me check these out for the remainder of the year. She also let me know that he is welcome to come back to the school for special classes if we want to, such as art, PE, music, library and computers. He can also attend the after school program which is a lot of fun.
I felt so much better about things after talking to her. I am a little ADD myself and get overwhelmed when faced with too many things to think about and decide all at once. Now I have a plan that we can follow and can deviate from without upsetting the apple cart. He can work on special projects as the mood strikes which is something you need to be able to do with and ADD child. They have an incredible ability to hyper-focus on things that interest them which is to your advantage if you can direct it and help them harness that drive.
We are so excited. He has already found a pet project. I will have to post more about that as it develops. I might have to let him create his own Homeschooling Blog about his adventures and his conservationist projects.
I hope I am not just typing this to fill space out there in cyberspace and that someone can actually get some ideas from this. I started the week feeling good about this decision but very stressed. Now I feel good about the decision and very excited about the plan that we have to accomplish it. I think the whole having a plan thing is what is going to help me.
This homeschooling thing is forcing me to organize a few pockets of my chaos that I call a life and home.
One of my son's great comments today was that now he gets an afternoon recess EVERY day. The poor kid has been missing them for several years because he had detention for behavior (talks way too much) or because he hadn't finished is work (couldn't stand another worksheet).
Well that was long but it has been an eternity of a week here at our house.
I am excited to be looking at the start of a new week soon with so many new projects to get into.

Baby Shoes

I did it! I did it!
I have loved the leather baby shoes I have seen all over the interenet but they are so expensive.
Alisa told me about stardust shoes and I love them. I downloaded her insteructions and made my baby some really great shoes.
I used the very last scraps of his big brother's dinosaur fabric. This is a great way to showcase your favorite novelty prints.

Here is the link to the blog with directions to make your own.
http://stardustshoes.blogspot.com/2006/10/cloth-shoe-pattern.html

Here is a pair I made for my niece Claire.

I love the sock monkey fabric out there. Bryan just found some in Yellow. I am going to have to get some of that!

Uh-Oh

Jeddie said his first recognizable word this week Uh-Oh. He pulled the lid off a babyfood container and looked up at me and said Uh-Oh with a very surprised look on his face. He talks a lot and is the Jabber King. It was fun to recognize something he was saying. He is such a cute little bug.

Grandma Wood's Brownies

These are a classic. This is the quick dessert my mom always makes when a crowd is coming. It is comfort food for all of us adults when we get together and remember good times with mom. It is a simple recipe and requires no frosting. That was the rule as children. NO FROSTING. Now we can't think of putting the stuff on it now. They are perfect the way they are.
Here is a photo of one that Hannah did frost :o) after doing her self portrait. It looks like mustard on top.

(yes I let her break our hard fast rule)
Grandma Wood's Brownies
In a Mixer beat well:
3 large eggs
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup melted butter
1/2 tsp vanilla

Sift, add, and mix well:
3/4 cup flour
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tap baking powder
1/3 cup cocoa powder
(you can use 2 squares baker's chocolate instead of the cocoa powder - if you do, melt it with the butter)
1 cup chopped walnuts (in really big pieces)

Pour into a buttered 9x13 cake pan. Bake at 350*F for 20 minutes or until done. (you can tell they are done if you touch the center and it springs back)

These are great served warm with vanilla ice cream. They are best after they are cooled off served with a glass of cold milk.

Hannah in Frosting

Today is my niece Rebecca's Birthday. To celebrate, I helped her children make a birthday cake for her. Of course my daughter Hannah helped. After they left with their cake, Hannah was very dissapointed that the whole cake left with them. She took herself to the kitchen where she found the leftover yellow frosting and as she didn't have a cake of her own to frost, she frosted herslef on a plate.
Here is her "sweet" self portrait and her first atempt at cake frosting.

I think I will have her frost all the cakes from now on. Her humble creations are always better than my grand attempts.

Hot Rolls

My sister-in-law, Holly, visited this week from California and she brought the most wonderful rolls ever! She was kind enough to share the recipe with me.

Here is the recipe:

Mix 1/2 cup warm water with 2 tbsp. yeast and 2 tbsp. sugar. Let this sit for 15 min.

Mix and beat well:

1 cup hot water

1/2 cup sugar

1 1/2 tsp salt

1/2 cup melted butter

3 large eggs

1/4 cup toasted wheat germ (optional)

Add the yeast mixture and blend well.

Add 1-2 cups whole wheat flour and 3-4 cups unbleached white flour. (you want a total of 5-6 cups of flour). The dough will be a little sticky and soft.

Cover and let rise in a warm place for 40 min. Punch down the dough and divide into four sections. Take each section and roll it out on a floured surface to about 1/4 inch thickness in a nice circle shape. Brush the surface with melted butter. (you will need a whole stick of butter to finish the recipe.)

Cut the dough circles into 8 pie pieces with a pizza cutter or a knife. Roll up the wedges starting at the fat end and roll them up like a cresant roll. Cover the rolls and let rise in a warm place for 40 minutes.

Bake the rolls at 375 deg. F. for 15 minutes, or until light brown.

Brush the rolls with melted butter when they come out of the oven.

These are SO good. You will love them.

My Post Card

I finally tried it! I made a fabric post card! It was so much fun. Our quilt guild had a color challenge. We each drew a color out of a pot and then drew a color scheme out of another pot. I picked out Yellow Green and my color scheme was analogous, so my colors were yellow green, green, blue green, and blue. I was so lucky. That was no challenge. I had fun just playing with fabric for weeks. The challenge was choosing something to make. The rules were that we had to use our colors and we could add black, white or gray (neutrals). We had 3 months to do the challenge and of course I waited till the last week to do it! We could make anything we wanted. It didn't have to be a quilt. I did find a quilt called onion rings that I wanted to make in those colors but due to the time crunch I came up with something better. I sat down at 10:00 p.m. and by 11:00 p.m. I had a quilt pieced, quilted and bound. I was so proud. It was only 4"x6" though. :o) My son Joe is into drawing fish so I had him draw me some fish and I chose one I could do and made this post card. I love it! I won't put my bad instructions here but follow the like I put in there and get her instructions. They are awesome. Very well put together.

Here is the back of the post card.

Red Shoe Ramblings: How To Make A Fabric Postcard DebR Style

Red Shoe Ramblings: How To Make A Fabric Postcard DebR Style

Halloween Early

We live out in the country so trick-or-treating isn't really very do-able. As a result, I am afraid that we tend to over do it for the kids for Halloween. The school has a party day, the PTO has a festival, the High School provides a safe spot, the church group get together and have a dinner and a trunk-or-treat, and the communities near by have several Halloween parties going on. I used to feel bad that the kids didn't get to do the whole trick-or-treating thing like I did as a kid but have found that they make off with a bigger haul than my husband or I ever did. LOL! I do try to limit what they get and usually end of thowing away a lot of it. I also funnel a lot of it into the treat box for good behavior and special jobs.
I do try to make the kids fun costumes each year. This year, with the help of my friend Michelle, I made some really beautiful costumes for my girls. They are all Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit fans. My oldest wanted to be Aowen from Rohan and the other two wanted to be Hobbits. The costumes were really fun to make and I saved us big bucks. Each costume would have cost me $125 if I hadn't made them myself. They were really fun to do. They are very excited about wearing them to their class parties.


I am glad I won't have to be sewing anyone into their costumes right before the party.