Hello, everyone. I trust you’re having a wonderful week.
Here are this week’s questions. As ever, make sure to head on over to Everyday Ruralty to join the linkup yourself or read answers to these questions from other bloggers. [Read more…]
When I was trying to think of what I wanted to write about today, a couple of things kept entering my mind. They all have to do with our current family situation, which I’m not going to go into here. What I decided to go with ideas for free (or cheap), simple family activities. The list definitely won’t be all inclusive, and it may or may not include things that work in every town. But they’re things our family does for fun, and hopefully at least some of them will inspire you to slow down and find something simple to do today. [Read more…]
I mentioned on Tuesday that we celebrated Small Fry’s birthday recently. I, of course, made him a gift instead of buying him one, and I wanted to share here all about it. I’d seen around the web recently the idea of fabric books for little ones, and some of them are specifically designed for toddlers to work on their fine motor skills. I wanted to make one of those. (This one is much better than the one I made, but I’m pretty pleased with mine nonetheless.) [Read more…]
Well, it’s Wednesday afternoon here on the West Coast, and that means it’s time for another Wednesday Chat. As ever, thanks to Patrice at Everyday Ruralty for hosting and providing questions. [Read more…]
A certain little boy in our family had a birthday last week. That’s right – Small Fry is now officially 2!
This little guy is a real treat to know. He has his moments, like any of us, but as a rule he’s a wonderful child. He loves fuzzy critters of all kinds. Whenever we’re out walking and he sees someone with a dog, he always stops to point it out to us. His favorite place to be is outside – he doesn’t care where outside, just out in nature! He doesn’t seem to mind whether or not he wears clothes, but he adores his shoes. He would probably wear them to bed if I’d let him! But as much as he loves his shoes, he’s also perfectly happy to go out without them if it means he can get out of the house. He prefers vegetables to meat, but he does like chicken and fish when we give it to him. I don’t think he’s ever met a fruit he didn’t like! He also likes his sweets, though, so we have to be careful with them. He’s been known to turn into a bit of a monster baby if someone has ice cream and he doesn’t! [Read more…]
In case you hadn’t noticed yet, it’s summer! I don’t know about where you live, but where we live, it’s been really hot, too. Miserably hot. The kind of hot that reminds me why I don’t really care for summer and makes me look forward to the fall. The fact that our house (apparently) wasn’t built to handle the heat just makes that even worse. You see, the top floor of the house is where the main living areas are. The lower level just has the kids’ playroom, one bedroom, a “half” bathroom, and the laundry area. The top floor is absolutely unbearable in the summertime. We just dealt with it last year, but this year we decided we weren’t interested in doing that. (The windows all open sideways, not up and down, so putting an air conditioner in is very tricky. Especially since it’s the second floor, not the first.)
So on July 1st, we moved most of our stuff – the stuff we need every single day, anyway – to the lower level of our home. Will gave up his office so that we could put our bed in the bedroom. The playroom is now the kids’ “everything” room, which really isn’t a big deal; most kids have only one room for sleeping and playing in anyway. The only times we go upstairs are early in the morning before it gets too hot and when we’re cooking or bathing.
We’ve done this partially to keep our sanity and partially as an experiment: Can we live in a smaller space than we currently have? The answer has been a resounding “Yes!” Why are we using this time as an experiment like this? Because Will has his mind set on us living in a “tiny house.” He’s been very interested in the tiny house movement for years, but we were never sure it was logistically possible – or feasible – with children. Now we know that, within reason of course, it is. He’s gone out and priced tiny houses, and depending on where you live, they’re really not so “tiny.” The one he’s looking at is 18×24 feet with a loft. That’s about the amount of space we’ve been living in the past two weeks.
We knew that in order to pull it off, we’d have to simplify even further than we already have. We’ve moved some of the boys’ toys to Will’s office at the church, and they play with those toys when they’re stuck there late on Wednesday nights while Will talks to his dad. A lot of Small Fry’s outgrown clothes are going either to our new nephew or the consignment store. Come fall, almost all of the quilts I’ve made over the years are going to go to a social service agency that can get them to families in need. Same with our extra bedsheets. The kitchen is probably the main “problem” area, but since we’re not planning to move for a few more months (or longer…), I’m not ready to think about that yet.
Until we did this, I was always kind of averse to the idea of tiny house living (I don’t expect that we’ll live in a huge house forever, but a tiny one?). There are times when I’m still unsure, but I know in my mind now that it is possible for us.
Have you ever done anything like this? Tried living in just a portion of your house?
How do you keep your house cool and livable in the summer?
Blessings,
Wendy
Yes, yes, it’s Thursday. That’s okay :). Depending on the week, you might start seeing these on Wednesdays or Thursdays, but I’ll still call them “Wednesday Chats” for simplicity’s sake.
Remember to head over to Everyday Ruralty to read more answers to these fun questions!
Do you like cucumbers? Is there a favorite way you prepare them?
Oh, yes! I’ve never met a cucumber I didn’t like . . . well, except the ones that end up bitter. I don’t like those at all. As for preparation, I just like them raw. Sliced on their own or chopped in a salad, it doesn’t matter. When I was a kid, my mom used to soak them in vinegar so they had an *almost* pickled flavor, but not the same as pickles – more like tart cucumbers than pickles. I’ve never tried that, even though I kinda like it, so it’s been years since it’s I’ve had them that way.
How good a housekeeper are you?
On a scale of 1-5, probably a 3. Given a choice I’ll do anything besides housework. On the other hand, I hate clutter and messes, so I do my best to keep things tidy.
Please finish this: To spend a day _____ would be amazing!
Hm. This is hard for me. I suppose . . .
To spend a day playing on Santa Monica beach would be amazing!
(We got to do this for just a few hours when we were on vacation last year. I would love to go back!)
How do you handle times when you are “down” and “blue” (depressed)?
I just kind of hole up and ignore everyone. It’s not the healthiest way of dealing with it, I know, but it works for me. Fortunately those feelings don’t come around too often.
Have you started using essential oils since they have become so popular?
Nope. They’re a bit out of my price range.
Now it’s your turn! Leave me a comment with an answer to one (or more) of these questions.
Blessings,
Wendy
When I first started this series, one of the things I talked about was how “Simplicity is NOT taking the easy way out.” I want to share with you a lesson I learned this past week based on that theme, and then I’ll share a recipe at the end.
Have you seen those boxed “Simply Pasta Salad” kits in the grocery store? I’d seen them lots of times over the years, but never tried one. One night recently, we were having grilled burgers for dinner, and I wanted a quick, easy, won’t-heat-up-the-kitchen side. Pasta salad seemed like just the ticket. Unfortunately, it was already nearing time to start cooking, so I didn’t have time to make a macaroni salad from scratch and none of my family likes the Reser’s stuff that the deli carries. So I decided to try the box kit. They were on sale for $.99 that day, so I picked up four of them – some for now, some for later.
The concept is simple. Inside the box, you’ll find a packet of dressing powder which you mix with oil and water, and a bag of pasta, which you need to cook. Mix the two items together, and voila! Pasta salad. It was really quick to put together, but it wasn’t great in the flavor department. The dressing was really oily and honestly, pretty bland. The pasta was fine; it was just corkscrew pasta, not unlike what I would be likely to use for my from-scratch pasta salad (my grandma’s recipe). There were no add-ins. I suppose that could be considered my fault – there’s nothing on the instructions that says “don’t add anything to this, it’s perfect as-is.”
As we were eating the second batch of it (with my in-laws over for dinner), I was thinking about how “ho-hum” this salad was, and how I should have just made macaroni salad from “scratch.” It takes more work, but the result is so far superior that it’s worth it. And to me, that’s what simplicity is all about. It’s not about taking shortcuts so you can have more down time. It’s about making the thing you do worth the time and energy so that they’re more enjoyable.
My Grandmother’s Macaroni Salad
(I don’t have the exact proportions anymore, so I’m doing this out of my head. My grandma passed away in 2001, so I can’t just get a new copy of the recipe from her, but I’ve made this enough over the years to know it.)
3 8-oz bags of small pasta – your choice on the shape
You can find these on the Mexican food aisle of the grocery store; you could just use 24 ounces of pasta from “traditional” means, but I like the small bags for this recipe.
1 cucumber, diced
1 bell pepper, diced
6 hard boiled eggs, chopped
4-6 sweet or dill pickles, chopped
8 ounces cheddar cheese, cut into 1/4 to 1/2 inch cubes
Dressing:
1 1/4 cups mayonnaise – store bought or homemade, whichever you prefer
2-4 tablespoons mustard
1-2 tablespoons white vinegar
Relish, optional
Cook pasta according to package directions.
Combine dressing ingredients in a small bowl. Set aside.
When pasta is cooked, drain the water and rinse with cold water until you can work with it with your hands. Combine pasta, vegetables, eggs, and cheese in a large bowl. Add dressing and toss to combine. I find that my hands are the best tools for this job. It’s messy, but effective.
Eat immediately or chill before eating. (It should be pretty cold already since you rinsed the pasta.) Refrigerate leftovers.
I think my favorite part about this recipe is that it’s so incredibly versatile. Don’t like cucumbers or bell peppers? Use carrots and celery instead. Don’t like vegetables at all? Add more eggs and cheese. Not in the mood for macaroni salad? Substitute potatoes for the pasta, and now you have potato salad. The cheese cubes add a little something special, too, in the midst of the soft pasta and crunchy vegetables. It’s a texture right in the middle. Yum.
I’ll never buy “Simply Pasta Salad” kits again!
Blessings,
Wendy
Do you love books? Do you love teaching your children about all sorts of subjects using “real” books instead of textbooks? Are unit studies your cup of tea? Then Moving Beyond the Page might be right up your alley! We recently received for review two of their unit studies in the 7-9 age range. The first was the Language Arts Package – The Whipping Boy, which included an online teacher guide and a physical copy of the novel. The second was the Science Package – Sound. This included a physical teacher guide and a life-size model of the human ear.
Let’s dive into the literature package first. I remember having read The Whipping Boy as a child, and I thought my boys would enjoy it. They typically love books set in the middle ages. They love anything to do with “knights in shining armor times,” actually. Had we made this book a read-aloud like we normally do with our school literature, I’m convinced they would have loved this one too. But part of the focus of Moving Beyond the Page is building kids’ reading skills, not just “getting it done,” so I did the program the way it was designed and made the boys do their own reading. They weren’t thrilled with that, but it was good for them.
Because the literature unit was an online guide, I didn’t have an actual book to teach from. But that was okay because the guide was mobile-device friendly, so I was able to use our Kindle Fire and wi-fi to get the job done. The online guide includes everything you need to teach the unit. You get the online teacher manual (this resource is completely online, not a downloadable PDF), a physical copy of the novel, and a 3-month license to print the downloadable student pages, all for $18.92.
The teacher guide has comprehension questions and several different activities to choose from. These range from worksheets to discussion topics to doing research related to what was read and more. Normally I create the boys’ worksheets by hand (no printer at home), but this coincided with my tendinitis, so we ended up getting them printed this time.
Execution of the program was very straightforward each day. The boys would read the book – sometimes together, but usually one would read and then the other. The chapters in The Whipping Boy are very short, so they were assigned three per day. We would go over the questions very briefly (more on that, and why we did them only briefly each day, later) and then do as many of the activities from the guide as worked for us. The boys’ favorite was when they got to design a crest (coat of arms) for each of the main characters. Most of the activities in the literature unit were worksheet-based, so I bought them each a folder (the kind with metal clasps in the middle) to hold all of their papers in. This worked really well for us; it’s a lot more budget-friendly and space-friendly than binders.
Each unit in the Moving Beyond the Page curriculum package concludes with a final project. For The Whipping Boy, this was a monologue. The boys each planned out what they would say and then recited them for Will and me. They were instructed to include all the different kinds of speech patterns they’d learned about during the study in their monologue – idioms, similes, metaphors, and hyperboles.
Remember before when I mentioned that we did the comprehension questions only briefly? That’s because I saved them for the end of the unit study and we played a Jeopardy! style game with them. I split the questions into five categories (Vocabulary, Chapters 1-5, Chapters 6-10, Chapters 11-15, and Chapters 16-20), and chose five questions – or words, in the case of the vocabulary category – for each category. I wrote one question on the lined side of an index card, along with its answer (the kids never saw this part, so having the answer there was just fine). Once the questions were all written out, I mixed them up within their own categories, and then assigned each card a number, 1-5. With the cards all laid out, we played the game just like Jeopardy! except that we did questions and answers instead of answers and questions. At the end of the game, we surprised the winner with the ability to add his points to his “good behavior point chart.” (Seahawk won, 27-25.)
Along with our Language Arts study of The Whipping Boy, we learned all about Sound and the Human Ear with our science package. The boys absolutely loved this unit! They asked every single day if we could do our sound unit. This package was a little different because we received the physical teacher manual instead of the online version, as well as the required manipulative. The price for the physical unit on Sound is $37.99. The physical teacher guide is pretty much exactly like the online one, but there is one main difference: the student pages are included right in the teacher guide, and the copyright doesn’t allow you to make photocopies for multiple children. This wasn’t really a problem for the unit we selected, though, because almost all of the activities were hands-on. That’s why my kids loved it so much. We did some really cool things in our quest to learn how sound works and how our ears hear and interpret sounds. On the first day, we built a large-scale model of an ear. This one was made from things around the house and didn’t really look like an ear (compared to the actual model we received as a manipulative), but it was very effective in showing how the ear works. (Don’t mind the messy kitchen behind the boys; this was before the big meltdown that resulted in stricter tidying up policies.) 
The baseball glove represents the outer ear, the toilet paper tube is our ear tube, the cottage cheese container is the eardrum, and the hammer, spoon, and bracelet are the bones deep down inside our ears. We used a marble to represent a sound wave, and the boys watched in fascination as the glove “caught” it and sent it through the tube where it hit the drum and caused the bones of the inner ear to vibrate.
Another day we tested different sounds by tying a spoon to the center of a piece of yarn, and the ends of the yarn to the boys’ fingers. With the spoon hanging free and their fingers in their ears, I tapped the spoon with objects of varying hardness – another spoon, a plastic fork, and the skein of yarn. Then I had Seahawk tap the spoon for me so I could see what it was like. Let me tell you, it was fascinating! The sound was the same, but different, simultaneously.
After we spent several days learning about our ears, we spent a few days learning about different sounds and how things make sounds. Then we learned all about different instruments, which led into the final project: designing an instrument. The boys were pretty basic with their instruments. Munchkin made a drum using an old shoebox and some plastic wrap. Seahawk made a guitar using an old shoebox and some rubber bands (which apparently I didn’t get a picture of…).
Overall, I think this was a pretty great curriculum resource. Moving Beyond the Page is designed to be a full homeschool curriculum – they have 12 literature units and six each science and social studies units per age level. Each literature unit corresponds with one science or social studies unit (I chose two that weren’t specifically designed to go together, but it worked well anyway), and they estimate that it should take you roughly 3-4 hours per day to get through it. I found that it didn’t take nearly that long. One and a half to two hours and we were done.
Add a math curriculum (and any “electives” you want your kids to have) and you’re done with the basic education. It can get quite expensive to go that route, though – several hundred dollars for the full year curriculum. That can definitely be a problem for many homeschooling parents; I know it would be a huge deterrent for us. If price isn’t an object for you, I would definitely recommend that you investigate Moving Beyond the Page for your homeschool curriculum. If, however, you can’t afford the full-year package, I would still recommend taking a look at one or two of the individual unit studies to get your feet wet. I’ve listed the prices for the units I received in this review, and there are ways to make it even cheaper – pass on the physical book and get it from your library, for example.
If you make the plunge into getting this curriculum (Moving Beyond the Page has packages for ages 4-14, not just the 7-9 I received, so there’s something for nearly everyone!), the next step is deciding whether you want to get the physical guide or the online version. Both have their pros and cons. The main pro to the physical version is, of course, you don’t have to have a computer or mobile device right with you while you teach. The con is that you can’t make copies of the worksheets for your kids; you have to purchase a second copy of the consumables. The online copy allows you to make copies, but you lose your access after three months. The physical book is yours to keep.
As for which I’d recommend, it’s really a tossup. I don’t feel like there’s a right answer. If the access for the online version didn’t go away, I’d recommend that one. But since it does, that makes the decision a lot harder. You’ll just have to decide which way would work better for you. (And honestly, I’d be a little frustrated as a paying customer to have my access revoked; the price isn’t that much cheaper than the physical version to be so limited, even if it is easy to complete the unit in the time they give you. That’s probably my biggest criticism of the program.)
There are loads of other reviews for this program besides mine. Different members of the Crew got a variety of items for all different age groups. Make sure to click over and check them out!
Have you ever used Moving Beyond the Page? Let me know in the comments!
Blessings,
Wendy
