Read Dream Be

Literacy Lifestyle: A is for Apple

One of our family’s favorite fall traditions is apple picking. We do our best to go to a local orchard as a family and enjoy the day picking apples and just being together. Of course, if you go apple picking, you must make apple crisp. It is a rule in our home. 😉

What does this have to do with a literacy lifestyle? I am glad you asked. Cooking together with your children is an excellent opportunity to develop math, reading and even sensory skills. The recipe will need to be read. Even children that are not reading independently can be shown the words and letters on the page. You can talk about the beginning letters or sounds of the ingredients, maybe match up the word on the recipe card with the word on the container, where applicable. Point out letters that the child knows. Older children can read the recipe to you, with or without help. The ingredients will need to be counted, measured, maybe even doubled. (I have two teen-aged boys, lots of doubling of recipes here!) Perfect for practicing math and fine motor skills. While the measuring happens the senses are engaged as well, seeing, smelling, touching, tasting. Talking to your child while you bake will build vocabulary and more importantly, a bond between you.

Such a simple, enjoyable task can mean big learning, no matter your child’s age. Give it a try this week. You will be glad you did, both for the learning and the yummy treat.

Another idea to go along with the apple theme, is to cut apples in half and use them as stamps. Pour some fabric paint (or acrylic will do, but may fade with washing) into a paper plate. Use a separate plate for each color paint. Dip your apple halves into the paint and then stamp onto an apron or t-shirt for your assistant chef. You could also stamp some tea towels or cloth napkins to brighten your kitchen decor. Or even stamp some card stock to make placemats or a picture to hang on the wall.

Want some more ideas? Sign up for my email list and receive a free printable with a “bushel” full of simple, apple themed ideas that you can use to increase literacy in your family.

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Back to School Tips: Feed Your Family in Less Time

Back to School for many also means back to sports and other extra curricular activities. Which also means that time available at home to prepare meals is short. So, how do you feed your family home-cooked meals during this busy fall season? Here are some tips to help you make the most of the small amount of time you do have.

Plan ahead

I know, meal planning can feel like a chore. Heck, it IS a chore. But when it is done, it makes things run so much more smoothly, don’t you think? I struggle with this one myself. Sometimes having a pretty place to write my plan down helps. (Whatever mental trick gets it done is worth trying in my book.) Something else that has helped me in the past is to have “theme” nights. If it is “Soup”er Tuesday, I only have to decide which soup to have. Decreasing the decision fatigue by narrowing down the choice makes a difference for me. Whatever works for you, just get a plan in place. It doesn’t have to be fancy, but taking a small amount of time up front to make these decisions will leave you more time when you need it each evening.

Prepare ingredients ahead

Look ahead to the ingredients you will need for the meals on your plan. Need diced onions or sliced carrots for more than one dinner? Prepare enough for each meal on the menu all at once Then you are only getting out the cutting board and utensils (or food processor) once. And it doesn’t take that much more time to dice two onions than it does to dice one as long as all of the stuff is already out and set up. You will save time for gathering and washing the items you use to prepare your ingredients. (I am all about decreasing the amount of dishes that need to be washed!) You can then store the prepared ingredients for meals on different nights in the fridge or freezer until they are needed. Another option is to prepare all of the ingredients needed for several meals, gather them together into baggies by meal and then store them in the freezer. You can then dump the ingredients into the slow cooker or pan or whatever to cook them. (Some meals do better if you thaw them in the fridge before cooking.) One tip: I have found that raw potatoes do not freeze and then cook well. I just add any potatoes needed to a recipe the day I am cooking it. But usually everything else can already be in the bag.

Cook ahead

You can take this previous tip a step further and cook ingredients or whole meals ahead and freeze. Again, it doesn’t take much extra time to make two lasagnas instead of one. Put the extra in the freezer for another night. Or when you are browning ground beef or grilling chicken, do enough for a few meals and put the extra in the freezer as a meal start for another night. This can also save money since many times you can get bulk pricing by buying larger quantities. A few times a year, I try to get together with a few girlfriends and we make a day of it. We cook and prep as many meals as we can to stock our freezers. Many hands make light work and the company makes the chore less tedious. 🙂

Delegate

This is the toughest one for me, but one that will be essential this upcoming season for my family. If your kids are old enough, they can help prepare the meals. Planning and preparing meals is an important life skill, so why not get them involved now? I feel like if you can read, you can cook. At least to a certain level. (Not to detract from the talent and skill it takes to blend flavors to create new dishes and execute advanced techniques. But for our household, we keep it simple. Reading and following a recipe is enough to get some great meals on the table.) I picked up a book called Start to Cook to help me with handing over some of the responsibilities to my children. In addition to recipes, this book offers instructions of how to handle and prepare different categories of ingredients, how to tell if food is cooked, how to substitute ingredients for allergies and many more tips that are important to know in the kitchen. (You can pick up your copy here). I will use the book differently depending on which child I am working with since their ages range from 9-16.

I hope these tips help you and your family to eat better and have more time together during this busy Back to School (and sports and activities!) season. Do you have any tips not mentioned here? Please share them below.

Favorite Resources for Morning Time

Favorite Resources for Morning Time

It is getting dark out earlier and it will be time to go back to school before we know it. (Where can I get 4 more weeks of summer? Oh, how I wish!) As the first day of school looms closeby, you may be wondering what are my favorite morning time resources. Well, I would love to share my favorites with you!

For our Morning Time, I mostly use a Loop schedule. What that means is that I schedule a list of resources and then we just do the next thing on the list each day. I do not have a particular resource tied to Monday, Tuesday, etc. This way we can cover each area consistently and evenly no matter what else happens. For more information about loop scheduling, check out this helpful article by Sarah Mackenzie here.  (Hint, this method can be applied to more than homeschooling.)

The first resource in our loop is The Story of Science which highlights many of the greatest scientific discoveries in a narrative form. There are fun illustrations and additional facts on the margins that make the text more approachable. I use this to give us a taste of scientific achievements and if we are particularly fascinated with a topic, or have more questions about it, this book is internet referenced. There is a list of websites connected with this book that we can access on the Usborne Quicklinks website that give us more information, or even puzzles, games and quizzes relating to the topics covered in the book. We often use our Science Encyclopedia for further research as well. The Story of Science also includes a glossary and a timeline to help put the material into context. When we finish this book, we will move onto the Story of Inventions. (Also available is The Story of Space and Astronomy.)

Next, we are working through the Usborne Book of Famous Paintings . This book includes 35 of the best-known works of art from Monet’s Waterlilies to Escher’s Relativity. We examine each work of art and then read the information about it to add to our discussion. This book is internet linked, which means that there are specific links that correspond to each page of the book rather than to broader topics in the book. The links include closer looks at the works of art and also additional works or information about the artists. After this, we will work through the Usborne Book of Famous Artists .

Continuing on through our loop, another day we use the Usborne Famous Composers Reference Book . One of my favorite features about this book is that it includes QR links to samples of music from each composer. (If you do not have a tablet or a smartphone to scan the codes, you can find the links at the Quicklinks site as well.) This is so much easier than trying to search online for the pieces myself, which is what I was doing before. This book is also internet referenced, so more information can be found online. Another favorite feature is the rich illustrations making this a beautiful volume that will be brought out and examined by the children on other occasions as well.

Usborne Illustrated Grammar and Punctuation is a great resource for brushing up on all of the rules needed in writing and language arts. The fun illustrations and bright colors on the page help make sense of the language rules and even make it less of a drudgery to learn them. While we do cover a topic or a portion of a topic each time we get to this loop in our Morning Time, we also use this book as a reference if there are any questions about usage while the children are writing other assignments. I added this book to help keep the rules fresh in our minds for our standardized testing, but found it useful beyond that as well.

The last book in our current loop is 100 Things to Know About Science . My kids are obsessed with science facts and always have been since they were very little. “Mom, did you know…?” All.the.time. I love it! This is perfect to continue to feed their appetite for facts. I have even learned some interesting things that I did not know before. The facts are presented in infographic form which makes this an especially great resource for a reluctant reader. The facts are not watered down, but they are broken up into small pieces of text on the page which can be less intimidating in appearance. Once we finish this, I will let the kids choose whether they want to read 100 Things to Know About Space or 100 Things to Know About Food next.

In addition to our loop schedule, we do have some activities that we complete every day in Morning Time. These include our Memory Work, our current read-aloud, Geography and Shakespeare.

For Geography, we are working our way through The Geography Encyclopedia . We use it as a reference to complete our map work (the kids do this during their individual work time). Together, we read about the people in the area they are studying on the map. This book is also internet linked so that we can find additional information online. The pages come alive with brilliant photographs and illustrations that make this an enjoyable volume to sit and look through on one’s own as well. We have just started this near the end of last year and will continue the study this school year. I am thinking about adding the Flags of the World to Color since they love to color while I read aloud. I am also considering the addition of Illustrated Fables from Around the World to give more depth to the study of different cultures.

And last, but definitely not least, is my absolute favorite volume in our library, Complete Shakespeare . Heavy, substantial, lavishly illustrated and filled with the brilliant stories of the Bard, this is a beautiful book that will be treasured in our home library for years to come. I love that this book includes stories from all of his plays, not just a few. While some of the stories are told in a shorter form, all are included. The plays are told in story form and are not the original language of Shakespeare himself. I find this to be an excellent stepping stone to reading the original language though. I read the story from this volume and we enjoy and discuss it. Then, I will choose a few plays to read in their original language as well. By already being familiar with the story line, my children are taking more from the original version. Not only are my children not intimidated by Shakespeare, but they have grown to love his works. There are some quotes from the original plays included in this book and we love to compare the wording from the adaptation to the original. We also use the original quotes for copywork from time to time. Another Shakespeare book that has been enjoyed, especially by my youngest is called Where’s Will?  It is a seek and find book where you find Shakespeare and some characters among the setting of their play. Great to extend the learning and appreciation for the Bard!

Well, those are our current favorites for Morning Time in a nutshell. While these resources work well for Morning Time, they also are great to strew for unschooling or to use for homework helpers for children who go to school. What are you using for Morning Time in your homeschool? What do you love about what you use? Please share below. I love collecting new ideas!

Would you like some personalized recommendations for your homeschool? Or recommendations for homework helpers for your home library? Comment here or message me on Facebook.