Cultivating Childhood

It's October!  Although I'm not a big fan of Halloween, I love autumn and everything else that goes along with it. The falling leaves, pumpkins, the briskness in the air, scarecrows and farms.  Along with our new month, we have new music, art, and Bible to focus on.  I'm looking forward to seeing how the transition will be, or if we even will notice it. We have an artist for this month!  We will be looking at Claude Monet's works.  We are going to be following the Charlotte Mason style of picture study where we will display a work of art, and then discuss what we see or remember about the picture.  (She actually recommended focusing on one artist for either 6 or 12 weeks, but we will only be doing it for 4 weeks).  Each of the four weeks, we will choose a different print to discuss for that week.  This first week, we will be concentrating on Monet's The Terrace at Sainte-Adresse .  In addition to looking at art prints, we will also be reading...

Week three is over and so is September!  This week turned out differently than I expected.  We shuffled activities around, skipped others, and enjoyed unexpected amusements.  I'm realizing more and more how much I'm savoring the time that I have with my preschooler here at home.  I love that days can be flexible and still provide the kind of stimulation that I'm hoping to be able to give my children. Monday  went mostly as planned.  Our sunny forecast turned out to be a rainy morning, so we had fun with our friends indoors instead of out.  We didn't do any nature collecting since we didn't want to get soaking wet when we were so far away from home.  Soon though! Making dinner for our neighbors on Tuesday  was a bit challenging, but not for the reasons I expected.  We decided to make some Chicken Parmesan so Noah helped me place the raw chicken into the egg mixture and coat it then with bread crumbs.  This went pretty well for a time...

This week we made some fabulous apple pumpkin muffins.  I'm a sucker for anything pumpkin, and these muffins really fit the bill.  I adapted my recipe from here , mostly using the helpful suggestions found in the reviews at the end. Ingredients 2 1/2 cups of whole wheat flour 1 cup evaporated cane juice (organic sugar) 1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon 3/4 teaspoon ground ginger 3/8 teaspoon allspice 3/8 teaspoon nutmeg 1 teaspoon baking soda 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 eggs 1 cup cooked pumpkin 1/2 cup applesauce 2 cups finely chopped peeled apples Streusel: 1/4 cup evaporated cane juice 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon 4 teaspoons cold butter Directions In a bowl, combine all dry ingredients.   In another bowl, combine the eggs, pumpkin, and applesauce; stir into dry ingredients just until moistened.  Fold in apples.   Fill paper-lined muffin cups two-thirds full. In a small bowl, combine sugar, flour, and cinnamon.  Cut in butter until crumbly...

As we near the end of our first month on this blog, I'm wondering what people think of it.  So, I'm asking for your input.  What would you like to see more of on here?  Photos of the kids doing the different projects?  Book Reviews?  Recipes?  Something else all together? I'm enjoying the accountability that this blog brings to our lives right now.  I think that it is helping me to actually think through what I want to do with Noah instead of just "winging" it.  But, right now, it seems like it is just a lot of words on a page.  What do you think?

Continuing on our kindness theme, we are going to be talking about serving and helping others this week. This is our last week of the month so we are going to be concluding our time with this month's music and memory verse.  It's going to be sad to say "good-bye", but it is nice that I have the flexibility in our "homeschool regime" to revisit and/or review these at any time.  I know that Carnival of the Animals  is going to always stay a favorite, and I need to buy the book that Noah just can't seem to get enough of. I think we've done pretty well with our memory verse of Philippians 4:13.  Noah definitely recognizes it, and if prompted, he can say it.  Although at two and a half, I'm not certain he understands yet what the verse is saying.  He's not yet into the "Why" stage, so he doesn't ask things like "Who's Christ?" or "What does 'strengthen' mean?".  I hope though that it will help him in t...

This week was so much fun!  Almost everything worked out as planned, and nothing felt too overwhelming. Monday was probably the hardest day.  Our local library system went down for a whole week while they implemented a new catalog.  This was very  difficult for me since I think I log into my library account from home a couple of times a day.  It meant that I couldn't make holds for books I want, and the books I had on hold were not going to come in while the system was down.  This caused some problems for our "sharing" books.  Since most of them weren't available by Monday (still learning my lesson on that one from last week), I had to actually go through the catalog and pick books off the shelves.  When my kids are older, this won't be a big problem.  However, my one-year old did NOT want to stay in the stroller and decided to make some, well let's say "not library appropriate" noises.  When I took him out, he either wanted to pull all ...

This week is sharing week. We are going to be reading a number of books that encourage children to share. I found that there were a lot of books about sharing that focused on fixing a negative attitude. Although we got a few books along that line, I tried to instead get more books that showed kids wanting to share out of a cheerful heart. I think a positive book would accomplish better what I'm trying to convey to my preschooler. For our music , we will continue listening to the Carnival of Animals. My son enjoyed it so much this last week. Playing it during lunch seemed to work really well when I propped up his book to look at while he ate and listened to the music. We are going to wait do our art appreciation until October. I do want to start doing crafts though a couple times a week. One day we will do baking and another day we will do art. I found a great book with the obvious title, Preschool Art: It's the Process, Not the Product . I like that we aren't g...