Our HOW II Medieval Feast

Our KONOS History of the World co-op celebrated the completion of the Middle Ages last week by holding a feast.  After weeks of helping us with costumes, Johnnye came dressed in her own Medieval dress.  With a class full of kids with little or no sewing experience, I was totally impressed watching them develop their handy skills under Johnnye's tutelage.

The "board game" the students created was based on the third crusade.  They had three teams set out on crusade from the home countries of Germany, France and England.  They had to follow their path over land and sea to reach Israel, answering trivia questions and completing activities along the way that coincided with events that happened during the third crusade.

When the French King Phillip got sick he was carried along the route.  The action associated with this event was that two members of the team had to wheelbarrow race until the next turn.  Sadly, we didn't get to do all of the activities that we came up with.  Some of the game actions included the Germans having to carry the cross for the entirety of the game because they were the first to take up the cross in this crusade, German's having to bob for apples when their king Barbarossa drowned, and subsequently having to carry their king for several turns before the team dissolved and parted ways.  Some to the English and French while others deserted altogether.

  

The feast itself was fabulous.  We had tons of food served in three separate removes.  Between the removes we gave time for tummies to digest a bit and allow for kitchen details to be taken care of by scheduling in entertainment.  The class made a short Beowulf movie based on the final scene when Beowulf fights the dragon and dies.  They made it into a comedy.  And if I ever figure out how to load videos on the blog without them taking forever, I will post it for you.

The kids displayed their projects all around the foyer of the church where we held the event and we gave time for guests to view their work between the second and third removes.  By then we were all stuffed and needed to move about the building before stuffing ourselves more.

One of our girls is involved in 4H and won awards for her excellent visual presentation she made on Heraldry.

They made stained glass windows when we studied cathedrals and wooden shop signs while learning about village life.

They included family trees that had been created at the beginning of the Medieval study as well as their copies of portions of the Bayeau tapestry.  All of these projects were part of the HOW curriculum.

I wish I had gotten a picture of all the crockpots and roasters that were on the counters and lining the edge of the room. Here is a copy of our menu:

Beverages

Clove-Grape Juice

Pomegranate Drink

Mint Water

Remove 1

Italian Whole Grain Bread

Honey Butter (optional)

Bashed Neeps

Thick Leek Soup

Roast Chicken

Remove 2

Stew of Apple

Venison Stew

Meatloaf Boar’s head

Toads in a Hole

Remove 3

Apple Fritters

Gingerbread

Cream Custard Tart with Fig and Raisin Cream

Most of these recipes and menu ideas came from KONOS History of the World II Medieval Times Week 4 of 13 Medieval Daily Life.  We were also blessed with recipes from a previous feast Johnnye had been a part of.

With all of the work done, I'm glad it is over and I can breath again but it was a great night of celebration with grandparents, friends and loved ones. My daughter (above) with a blessed baby friend and a beautiful couple overseeing the kitchen (below).  Thank you Tony and Dianna!

Spaghetti and Meatball Cake

Inspired by the folks over at Food Network, I had to give this spaghetti and meatball cake a try for a dear friend's 20th birthday.

This had to be a travelable treat so I made it on a cake tote tray.  (Which doesn't make for a very pretty presentation.) Fortunately before I popped the lid on, my 7yo informed me that my lid was too short!  Yikes, my cake would have been ruined before it even left the house!

Mary is a chocolate lover so I made this using a sweet, delicious, moist chocolate cake and a to-die-for, light white chocolate frosting I found on Cooks.com.  For assembly just follow the instructions at Food Network. 

Mary was also the object of my daughter's efforts recently when she made her a friendship bracelet.  The tutorial on that will be coming up soon!

 

Our Solar System Co-op Activities

We spent two weeks studying sequencing, gravity and our solar system during the Orderliness unit.  During week one the kids performed several experiments with gravity, mapped the planets in order from the sun and relative to size and distance, on the big wall I keep empty in my kitchen and they made and ate spaghetti and earth balls.

We used mud as a landing pad for our marble drop, using a couple different weight marbles and dropping them from different heights.  Depth measurements were taken and charted on the backside of some Christmas wrapping paper we taped to the wall.  Many of the wrapping papers sold now have grid-lines on the inside to help cut straight lines and this makes for a nice big graph too.

After this the kids dropped a book off the front porch (second story) at the same time as a piece of paper to see which would land first.  Then they dropped that same book with the piece of paper on top of the book.  They continued with items of varying weights and then moved on to action figures which needed to land more slowly so as not to cause damage to the "person." So they came up with several parachute ideas and tested them to find the most effective.

For lunch the kids made earth balls, following a recipe from the KONOS inquisitiveness unit.  We did make one adjustment. For the core we used peas instead of walnuts.  I shredded some cheese ahead of time and made the hamburger mixture for meatballs.  The kids used the cheese to surround the peas one at a time.  Next the cheese balls were moved down the assembly line where another child wrapped it up in the meatball mixture.  All the meatballs were spread onto a baking pan and baked until cooked through.

Now some of the cheese will melt out through the meat but they are so yummy anyway.  And the kids LOVED them. :)

After lunch the team got together to start the wall-size solar system.  Each planet was scaled down so that with the sun as big as almost half the height of the wall the rest of the planets would be relatively sized.  Then they were taped onto the wall at the same relative distance they would be from the sun.  This was such a fantastic visual.  I never realized how seemingly close the first four planets were and how very far out the final planets are.

Mystery Dinner and Cake Auction

In January our church women's ministry hosted a mystery dinner and cake auction fundraiser.  I just wanted to share some of the photos from the event.  All of the people serving were required to dress in CRAZY outfits.  It was such a fun time, lots of people are asking for another.

I was on kitchen duty and my daughter was a waitress, a rare chance for her to wear jammy pants out of the house.

Our pastor helped his wife with the little kids.

One of our beautiful waitresses and another in the background.

Our event hostess and cake auction organizer.  We made up fun names for ourselves too.

The thing about a mystery dinner is that if you don't order silverware, you have to eat without it.  My hubby fashioned a spoon out of his baked potato foil.

These guys figured out the code for silverware early on.

Another one without silverware uses a chip to eat her meatballs.  I love the ingenuity!

The cake auction proved to be entertainment in itself.

It was supposed to be silent but I think the bidders weren't very.  LOL

Africa Week 2 of 3



Chin Chin

We thought this week's lessons would be a little shorter due to the snow on Friday but we still managed to have a 3 hour co-op and squeeze in 4 weeks of planning afterward.  Which the kids loved because it meant they were allowed to go sledding outside while the moms poured over our KONOS volumes.

Now that I think of it, we did not get to everything we had planned for the day but probably we planned too much.  LOL  Here's a rundown of our day:

• Open with Pledge of Allegience and prayer
• Watch a 3 minute Youtube video about salt mining in Africa and have discussion about why this trade is vital to the region.
• Mapping - Mauritania, Mali and Niger  Discuss Timbuktu and its location in relation to the salt mines in this art of Africa (pg 84 Activity # 205)  Also discuss exports from Mauritania (pg 94 # 263)
• Mapping - Nigeria, Liberia, Dem. Rep. of the Congo and discuss rubber tree plantations, share pictures of latex harvesting and discuss Firestone lease in Liberia.  Hand out city maps of all of our represented cities/towns and figure up the acreage in each of our towns.  Combine and then decide how many more of these towns we would need to have to cover one million acres.  More than eleven of each of our represented towns would make up 1,000,000 acres!!! (pg 94 # 264, 265)
• Mapping - Sierra Leone and discuss how this country and Liberia had its beginnings (pg 4 # 262)
• Map Senegal and show peanut butter with the oil seperated.
• Make ground nut soup (pg 92 #244)
• Make chin chin (pg 91 # 243)
• There was also a reading done about Africa but unfortunately, I do not know which book it was so that I can share it with you.  Generally if one of the moms finds a particularly good book about our unit of study, she will bring it to co-op and if we have a bit of time when the moms need to do some quick behind the scenes work, one of the moms will read the book to the kids in the other room.  We have found this to be a wonderful way of using downtime for unexpected glitches and it keeps the kids from disappearing in different directions between activities.

Since we were supposed to be doing the coastal bulge and the Congo this week we obviously missed quite a few countries but we ran out of time so we agreed to finish our mapping at home this week.  Really we bit off more than we could chew for one co-op session.

All references are from KONOS Volume II Inquisitiveness. This is planned from an older edition so my page and activity #'s may not match up with yours but you should be able to find them based on the descriptions. Please leave me a comment if you have trouble finding them and I will be happy to help out.

HOW I Co-op Hebrews Week 4 of 11

Week 4 is all about the time beginning with the judges and ending with Saul.  I am not going to write about everything they studied but DD took some pictures so I figured I would share about those things that she had the most fun with.

She and her friend built floor plan of a Hebrew home out of blocks.  The cooking fire is represented by the red block in the center.  The door to the home is across the courtyard represented by a blue arch block.  On either side of the courtyard are areas set aside for the animals on one side and the storage on the other side.

A large part of this week's lessons involved the Seder meal and what is symbolized by the various foods and materials used for this dinner. 

At co-op the girls made a chopped apple and nut dish that I think was a definite favorite along with matzos, non-alcoholic wine and roasted eggs.  They followed this up by drawing out the entire seder meal on a paper plate.

The KONOS book suggests having this dinner with the family including all of the prayers and father explaining the symbolism as we go along.  It even gives the words to say!  But we were kind of short on time.  Since I really wanted her to go through this process in some fashion I suggested she make up a slide show with pictures of the different items and then just sit together in the living going through the motions and reading the script.  This worked well for us and it didn't require us to take the time to make the food.  Not quite the same but it served the purpose.  My kids now have an idea of why the Jewish people eat this very special dinner.

Fruit Salad Ghana Style

During the yam festivals held all over West Africa, the people eat and celebrate and generally have a great time similar to our own festivals here in the States.  They even make fruit salad very much like Americans do for our summer celebrations. 

This week while learning about the people of Ghana we made a delicious fruit salad. 

It was loaded with juicy pineapple and mango.  The kids also cut up chunks of banana to put in and sprinkled on coconut flakes.  The ingredient we found the most interesting was the tomato.  I didn't even know they had tomatoes in Ghana nor would I have thought to put them in a salad with other fruit.  The entire salad was tossed with a sweetened lime dressing.  You can find the recipe along with several others in A Flavour of West Africa by Alison Brownlie.   This was an excellent resource for young children (and their moms) with clear but brief explanations of the many people in the region.  It is not very in-depth but it will provide a nice overview.  I highly recommend it! 

Africa Week 1 of 3

I am so glad to be back to our regular school schedule and back to KONOS co-op!  We started the new year with our final three weeks of Inquisitiveness focusing on Africa.  There is SO much to learn about Africa that I'm afraid three weeks really is not enough but my kids are young so I'm not going to fret about it.  As long as they can get some basic information about the continent, its people and animals, I'll be happy.  One of my favorite ways to learn about a people group is to try to make and eat their food so of course we included a couple recipes in our co-op day.  This is my very good friend making her delicious rice with lentils.  I'm not a big lentil fan but she makes them good enough to eat.  Actually the kids had a big hand in the cooking by chopping the onions and pressing the garlic and measuring out the ingredients.  We also made baked bananas which turned out scrumptious with peanuts, cream, brown sugar and lemon juice sprinkled on them. (See Pg 92 #244)

Here is a rundown of our co-op day:

• Begin with Pledge of Allegiance and prayer
• Oral presentation about pharaohs given by HOW I students (they leave immediately after to do their own co-op)
• Discuss what the kids have been studying for the week.  -  Northern Africa
• One student shares what she knows about Augustine.  Locate Constantine, Algeria on the map of Africa (Page 79 activity #178)
• Mapping the countries that were invaded by Arab Moslems in the seventh century A.D. (pg 79 # 181) Each child receives an enlarged outline map of Africa that he or she will be using for the entire unit.  We have the kids label the map during discussion at co-op.  They shade in the countries later at home.
• Ramadan: Read about this month long celebration and then try to dance the dance of the gargoulette.  Use Sounds of Africa cd for the music and since we are inside we put rice and beans in our pitchers instead of water.  (Pg 81 # 190)
• Compare Ramadan to Mardi Gras and discuss if huge indulgences before fasting are scripturally sound. (Pg 81 # 191)
• Egypt:  Make a hieroglyphics mural (Pg 77 # 161)
• Begin to prepare snack, moms finish while kids make paper

All references are from KONOS Volume II Inquisitiveness.  This is planned from an older edition so my page and activity #'s may not match up with yours but you should be able to find them based on the descriptions.  Please leave me a comment if you have trouble finding them and I will be happy to help out. 

Cooking Up Some Business Education

Dear Daughter is deep into her Christmas cookie baking for the baking business she's been operating since she was 9 or 10 years old.  Since our first year homeschooling we had decided to take the month of December off from official school.  We wanted to focus on the joy of Christ's birth and really celebrate by doing things together as a family and just relax. We had extra time on our hands and the business seemed a good way to begin a real life lesson doing something she enjoyed.  And it has proven worth while.

Some years have been more successful (and chaotic) than others with orders coming from every direction.  And other years she waited too long to get started and felt the consequences.  Last year she decided not to sell Christmas cookies but to knit hand warmers instead.  They were beautiful handwarmers but she found she wasn't disciplined enough to be knitting every spare moment.  As a result she couldn't knit up as many pairs as she would have liked in order to make the profit she was looking for.  But she was also wise in not taking more orders than she could handle.  It was definitely a good learning experience and I'm glad she tried it.



The Baker in 2007

 So this year she is back to the cookies.  She's 14 now and the cuteness of the 9yo business woman has worn off.  She is at an age where her cookies MUST speak for her.  Certainly there are still family and friends that order just to support her I'm sure.  Thank you!  Though, fortunately for her she has had a few years to build up a name for herself within certain circles and she does bake quality homemade cookies from scratch.  They are YUMMY and they speak well for her!  Which is good because it takes a great deal of effort for her to get up the courage to just hand out her order forms.  She is not a born salesperson but I believe this can be learned.

Over the years she has gone from needing lots of help and guidance from Mom to being able to handle a large portion of the biz with no help from me.  She's not afraid to call me home when she gets in a pinch though, as she did yesterday.  It all worked out fine and I think she just needed me there to encourage her and get behind her and make her some lunch while she continued her work.  I only needed to fold and fill some boxes and she was cool as a cucumber again. 

It amazes me now that I think back to where she was when she started.  Operating a business is an excellent hands-on way to learn from real life experiences.  Aside from the science and math of baking, DD has learned how to choose a good recipe, how to analyze her past sales to see what her customers like and what questions to ask to learn more about what they would like to see from her.  She has gotten free marketing tips from relatives with ideas for bringing out new recipes midyear.  In addition she now knows how to plan for large orders and shop for the best ingredients at low prices.  When DD started in her first year we made up an order form on Excel together.  Her computer skills have improved since then and she is now creating worksheets to keep track of all her orders, income and expenses as well as tithes. I hope she continues some type of business endeavor going so I can show her how to polish up those worksheets to look like professional reports and get her using more of the formulas that Excel has to offer.  A math program we are looking into for next year is Your Business Math.  Although it's geared for 8-12 year olds and she can do everything involved, I like that it incorporates all of the business aspects together to make math more meaningful for her.  I'd prefer and will be looking for something similar that is written for 9th-10th grade level but if I can't find anything I am going to use this program and possibly incorporate her own business into it and add some additional elements to make a full year credit-worthy program.  



2010

 Lastly, for this season of baking, I told her I would be happy to volunteer to help as an employee but that I would not be telling her what I would do.  She has to give me direction as if I were a real employee.  That's a harder transition than I realized.  For both of us!  DD has a hard time telling mom what to do and mom has a hard time NOT telling DD what to do.  We'll have to keep working on that, during business hours of course!

So although she will bake for her customers any time of year, people generally look to her for their Christmas cookie baking.  Today is the last day of baking for the season.  Her last delivery will go out tonight.  And DD is looking forward to tomorrow...and rest.

Gingerbread Day

It was one of those days that starts off as any other day and then somehow turns into a very cool day.  It was a happy kid, happy mommy day and we now call it "Gingerbread Day." 

We baked lots of gingerbread cookies in the morning and finished up just in time for lunch. One thing I normally don't like about gingerbread cookies is that they tend to be hard but these were perfectly soft and chewy and we ALL loved them, and we are a hard crowd to please.

After lunch dd asked me to do something with her so I suggested we read a book.  I really wanted to choose the story but she did too so I offered to read two stories and then ds joined us and we ended up reading three.  Am I the only adult who wants to choose the story just as badly as the kids?  Honestly, if they choose all the time there would be MANY books we would never even get to read because they don't appeal to them at first glance.

So anyway, th ebook my daughter chose turned out to be none other than...

Hello?  I see a theme devolping here and I'm thinking of some coloring pages I printed out from the Jan Brett website a couple years ago that I never threw away because I knew I would use them someday...  I know I'm not the only homeschooling mom that would have jumped on this opportunity to continue the developing trend. 

As soon as storytime was over I ran to see if I still had the printouts.  Low and behold I did.  It was a perfect set of two blank gingerbread houses with all the trimmings to color, cut and glue onto the paper gingerbread house. 

Jan Brett has a wonderful website.  If you have never been, you've got to go right away!  Here are some cool spots on her site if you are going to have a Gingerbread Day of your own:
Video - Make gingerbread baby cookies with Jan Brett
Online Interactive Craft - Trim a Gingerbread Baby House
Video - How to Draw a Gingerbread Baby (Caution:  Spoiler if you haven't read the book yet!)
Printable - Animal Masks
Printable - Coloring Pages
Game - Gingerbread Baby Board Game

Merry Christmas!!!

Egypt Night

As part of their study of ancient Egypt, my daughter and her co-op partner chose to host an Egypt Night.  Here they are wrapped in the traditional muslin (sheets) garb of  the ancient Egyptians with faces done up and everything.  Being teen girls, I think they liked this part best and they spent oodles of time figuring and refiguring their robes, accesorizing and reapplying gobs of eye makeup. 

To start out the evening, they served traditional Egyptian food such as lentils with rice with a red sauce, boiled eggs topped with beans and parsley, lentil soup, bread, beef in a brown sauce (kind of like beef stew), cucumbers in a dill sauce and delicious honey bread for dessert which probably has another name but I don't remember what it was.  Basically it was stale bread drenched with honey.  I was pleased with the younger kids who tried these not unusual foods prepared in very unusual ways.  But there were no rude sounds coming from their table so I was very happy.  Most everything was good albeit not my kind of food and I probably won't make these dishes again.  It was interesting to taste what they would have tasted all the time and considered common.  They ate a lot of lentils!

After dinner the girls entertained us with a short skit.  In this portion of the skit, the girl on the right is ripping her heart out to have it weighed.  If she does not have a "good enough heart" it will be thrown to the crocodile to be eaten and she will not be allowed to go to the underworld.  She will die forever.  Jake the dog played the part of the crocodile.  He did very well too and gobbled her heart right up.

During the weeks leading up to the event they each studied the region, wrote reports on pharoahs, mummies and pyramids and they also put together some great items to display for the crowd attending Egypt Night.  There were short blurbs about Egypt posted on the walls here and there and items such as this hook and flail dd made out of aluminum foil, beads and electrical tape.  She gave it sturdiness using a wooden dowel and a coat hanger.  The fan folded item in the center is a "beard" made of paper to resemble the type the pharoahs would have worn.  Interesting to learn, much of what they wore was not their own.

They also had a couple games to entertain us with.   One we all played together was actually an ancient Sumerian game but we found it to be a good choice for Egypt Night too.  It was played with a game board dd made up a few weeks prior and tokens which had to moved from one oend of the board to the other.  You could play as individuals or as teams.  Although the board looked nothing like it, the play of the game was similar to that of modern day Sorry.

And the other game was pin the pyramid on Egypt.  The kids had fun trying to get the pyramids in the right places.

All of the game ideas, reports, recipes and crafts were from our latest KONOS adventure, History of the World I their high school curriculum in which my oldest daughter is working from this year.

Cool Apple Trick

Oh! I found this neat site today while cruising blogland and a really neat way to make a sliced apple travelable (I'm pretty sure that's a word) without it turning brown.
Check out this Aussie Apple!

Resource of the Day

I found this website while searching for recipes from the 1500's Spain.  Can you imagine?  A food timeline!  How wonderful!

http://www.foodtimeline.org/