Little Josh

So we usually keep this sweet little kitten overnight on weekends now a days. Last Sunday, after she woke up and dressed we headed over to Papa Jim's house for a short visit on our way to pick the girls up from the cousin's sleepover birthday party. I call her Little Josh. Ignore the ponytail and dress and I would swear she is Josh. No mistaking whose baby this is.

COOKIES BE GONE

Oh when oh when will we be done??? In just a week. YAY!!

On a side note, I don't know why I am having so many problems downloading pics on blogger lately. But it is getting annoying to download pictures two and three times sometimes to get them to stick. Google, are you out there???

When Two Troops Collide

So my older girls are growing up AGAIN. They will be bridging over to Cadettes at the campout this spring. We met with a Cadette troop to learn how they run their troop. What is different, what is the same. We worked on the fashion badge together. Shared a snack. Played some Girl Scout games. I got to press the leaders for ideas on how to solve some of life's little Girl Scout problems that show up from time to time.

I came home exhasted so it must have been a successful activity.

Crafty Kids Day

Crafty Kids Day is where a bunch of home schoolers get together with their shared crafting stuff to make whatever they want. There are beads and ribbon, yarn, cardboard, paper, crayons, glue, markers, egg cartons, eyeballs, pompoms, popsicle sticks, and anything else you can think of.

Here are some puppets Brenda made.

The end of the Simple Machines Unit Study

Simple Machines day at Green Acres. So this is how we ended our study on Simple Machines. We headed over to the fabulous Green Acres to learn about the simple machines, the Green Acres way (hands on). We used screws, wheels, levers, wedges, saws. We learned about FLE 123 (Fulcrum, Leverage, and Energy. The kids lifted a horse pulled wagon. A blast of a hands on time for everyone.

Girl Scout Cookies

So you know far too many cookies have passed through my house when we are using them to cook. lol.

People have been telling us... I remember when they were $.50. And I remember when this and that. And I was a leader 35 years ago for my girls. I got a hold of an original 1920's cookie recipe from when the Girl Scouts actually baked the cookies they sold.

Time has changed since then. I remember loving Thin Mints when I was little. I don't know how much they costed at the time. They just showed up in the house I guess. Right? Anyway here is a recipe we used to make Thin Mint Chocolate Cheesecake.

Instant Cheesecake mix. I followed directions for making the crust. Instead of pressing the crust into a pie pan, I pressed it into cupcake cups. Then I made the cheesecake as directed except I used chocolate milk (since I had no white milk) and turned it into chocolate cheesecake. I topped it with crushed thin mint cookies. We all love it. Next time I will mix the cookies into the cheesecake instead of putting them on top. It will make it easier to eat.

Girl Scout day at the City Building

Every year they ask if my Girl Scouts will do Scout day, and every year I think they are too young. But finally I give it a try. Brenda's troop is 5th and 6th grade. They can read well enough to pull it off I think. And they do. They love it. Each girl gets a City Council member to be for the meeting. The city council members sit behind them and tell them what to say and when. One of our girls were missing so even Marley got to sit in as a city council member. She will tell you she got a patch for saying I (aye) twice. lol.

This week's simple machines

Today we worked on levers. True to form, Marley was only one step behind. She worked on her wheels in her maze. This she did all by herself.

After the girls were done with levers, Marley and I went on playing. Here we were checking out which made the wheel move faster and farther, the maze with blocks farther apart or closer together. I thought there would be more momentum with the blocks further away from eachother because they would fall harder. I was wrong. The maze with blocks closer together both times pushed the wheel further and faster. It was also the first maze to get to the wheel.

Pottery Day

Marley has been bugging me to take out the pottery wheel they got for Christmas from Brittany. So here it is. Messy mess mess and all! Getting their hands dirty. And the walls, and the chairs. And the table. And the floor. lol. Now our pottery is drying. Tomorrow we will paint.

Language Arts Game

So yesterday was a worksheet. Today is a game.

So here is my list of words. I cut them out and we display them in a random order next to the second paper.

So same set of groups, except we added "Possessive Nouns" to our definitions. There are 5 words for every box. Choose a word and put it in the right box.

English for the older girls

So these are all things that my girls have worked on. Plus Bret and I have been talking about classifying. I combined two in one. I had a list of words on one paper and asked them to classify each word in the right catagory. They have a notebook of definitions already so if they were to say I don't know what pronoun is, I would tell them to look it up in their notebook. They have the meaning of pronoun in their own words with applicable examples.

Don't like worksheets? Make it into a game. Write each catagory down on a big poster size paper. Then have every word on the list of words on an 8-1/2 x 11 sheet of paper and make it a human sized game.

Or take the premade game board as in the last post and make cards such as this.

"Which word is a contraction?
people try she can't"

How Marley is learning her ABC's

Iwant my girls to learn, but I want them to enjoy their learning? Is that too much to ask out of life?

So as many of you know, I used to help out with the Reads program at the local school. I would sit for half an hour, listen to a child read, look up a couple words in the dictionary, talk about what she/he read. If there was time left ver we would often play a learning game together.

This is a game board I made up from a set of games which all shared the similar board at Reads. This is just a generic board game for a multitude of games. Each plain colored spot is just a spot to land on or jump on. The holiday spots are go-agains. The rainbows are slides.

This game is one Marley made up, which works pretty much the same as mine, except that you can climb the ladder to skip all the start stepping stones. And I follow Marley to see how far I can move at any one time, since she pretty much makes up where we go and when. lol.

Here are three cards, one card of each of three different games that go with the board. One is a "Bb". This is a game where we recognize the letter. If we get the letter correct we turn the card over to see how many spaces we can move.

The next one reads "It snowed on the grass." Reading is not a requirement of this game. All we are doing is counting words. It gives her an understanding of how letters form words and how you can tell what a word looks like being separate from another word. Again, if we are correct we turn the card over to see how many spaces we can go.

The last card reads "pillow". For this game there must be at least one reader. The object of this game is to say the word and figure out how many syllables are in the word. So I would say pillow. Marley would clap pil-low and say 2. We would turn the card over. If two is the answer the card will tell her how many spaces to move ahead.

The first person to reach the end of the game wins and the exercise is over. You can do this with basically any basic english or math skill.

For a 4th grader, you might do a game using cards for affixes for example...

"Which means to pay again?
repay unpay copay"

You could use this game for times tables, or practicing addition facts. recognizing shapes, etc.

You could practice sight words.

You could work on history facts.

The list is endless how you could use a game board like this to make memorizing or learning into fun.

The library

Mr. C. would be so proud. Marley made a block library. She thought out all the things that a library needs. There is a bookshelf with books. There are two tables with computers. There is a front desk for checking out books. There are two tables with people reading. And the last thing we made was a door to come in and out. She hasn't figured out the roof issue yet, but everything else is there.

Oh yeah... The blue round blocks, those are people.

This week's word game - Compound Words

$0.25 for every 100 compound words they can find.

Brenda found a couple ideas. Googling compound words. And picking one word such as micro- and looking it up to see what other words connect to it...
microwave, microorganizm, microscope, etc.

The Shun Game

This week we played a word game. Competing for a $0.25 for who can make the most "Shun" (-tion)words. Brenda won with 45 words. Some good ones..

palpitations

dictionary

aspiration

abbreviation

declaration

fertilization

My Favorite Part

This is my favorite part of all our Service Unit activities, our huge Girl Scout circle. When we have 80+ women circling together to do our Girl Scout hand squeeze. This picture is maybe 1/4 of all the girls and women who joined to sing Taps with us and share the experience.

Thinking like a Junior/Brownie

No picture for this since I am Bret's troop leader. Maybe someone will send me a pic. But here is the letter we read from our Canadian Scout Family...

Sea Scouts
This year, C-- and I are in Sea Scouts (here, we call them Marine Scouts because we do not live near the sea)! Our Sea Scouts are for boys and girls that are between 9 and 14 years old. Sea Scouts are different from regular scouts because 75% of the program has to be related to water activities (swimming, boating, scuba diving, fishing...). In our scout association, there are only -- other Sea Scouts troops! There are two age groups for our Sea Scouts. The first one is for 9-10 year-old kids. We call that group "Louveteaux"* and their team name is Sea Lion, but in French it translates to Sea Wolf. The second group is for 11-14 year-olds. They are "Éclaireurs"* and their team name is Shipmates. C---'s in the "Louveteaux" and I'm in the "Éclaireurs" but both groups are together during the meetings. Because we're Sea Scouts, we play games like "Babord-Tribord"* that help us to practice marine vocabulary like "babord": port*, "tribord": starboard*, "poupe": aft* and "proue": fore*... Our troop has also bought a small sailboat which we will learn to sail. In a year, we have four camps: an autumn camp, a camp during which we say our oath, a winter camp and a summer camp. Sunday, the 31st January, we came back from our third camp (it was our winter camp). I slept out in a Quinzee, and C--- slept in a cottage. It was very FUN even if our mom wasn't with us (because she's in Sea Scout with us, but she couldn't come). For our first camp of the year, we slept in a cottage and went canoeing. This summer we may camp on an island. In our group, we're -- "Louveteaux", -- "Éclaireurs" and -- Scouts Leaders. That means that we're -- altogether. I know we're not that many kids but it's a new scout group... Our group is in ----, in ----, in ----, in Canada, in the world, on the Earth and in the universe! ;-)

Have a nice day, M-- and C--

* Louveteaux : Wolf Cubs
*Éclaireur : Scout (We're not sure how to translate Ééclaireur...)
*Babord-Tribord : Port-Starboard
*Babord, port: Left
*Tribord, starboard : Right
*Poupe, aft : Back
*Proue, fore : Front

(names and places have been bleeped out)

This is our Canadian scout family's troop at their parade, and in their quinzee (where they slept!!!)

Thinking Like An Older Girl Scout

Bonjour, je m'apelle Brenda. J'aime La Dame Gaga. Qui etes-vous? This was Brenda's speech for Thinking Day. Then we all sang Alluette together. Which come to find out is a song about plucking feathers from a lark.
French to english translation...
Alouette, gentille Alouette
Alouette je te plumerai
Alouette, gentille Alouette
Alouette je te plumerai
Je te plumerai la tete
Je te plumerai la tete
Et la tte, et la tete
Alouette, Alouette
O-o-o-o-oh
Alouette, gentille Alouette
Alouette je te plumerai

Lark, nice Lark (or Lark, lovely Lark)
Lark, I am going to pluck you
I am going to pluck your head,
I am going to pluck your head,
And the head, and the head,
O-o-o-o-oh

LOL.

"Thinking" with the Little 'uns

So every year Marley sits with her dad and watches her sisters present their countries. This year she one of presenters. Her job was to say that Mexico's flower is the Dalia (she remembers Dolly then adds an "ah" to it at the end lol) and that they sometimes wear and sometimes dance around sombraros. At first she was too shy to talk, but in the end all the girls did well. Marley's first experience with public speaking. She says it was hard to get up there and talk. I say she did fine.

Simple Machines Pt 1

Inclines and wheels. Yes Marley made her own and even told me, when I tried to help her design, that she would like to do hers alone. :-) Brenda's stopped only once, Bret's twice and Marley's went all the way to the end, although she used only inclines on her maze. She was the only one to have her maze veer off in two different directions.

Marley and Her Dad

Marley conned me into taking out the lego tub this morning. So here they are playing around with the legos together. Now she and I are building a castle. It is coming along slowly but surely. :-)

Simple Machines

The project was supposed to make a marble maze using simple machines. When we got there the project was different than what we thought it was. So the girls did have fun making their mazes, but we will be working on simple machines and producing a maze that will actually use a series of simple machines to work.

Check it out...

As homeschooling has been taking care of itself lately, and I have been knitting myself into a tizzie for the fun of it... I thought why not another blog for that fun and craziness...

http://loopsntwists.blogspot.com/

Girl Scout Day at Miami University Engineering Dept

Girl Scout Engineering Day at Miami University is like no other. Earn 4 badges in one day by going from one area to another learning new topics. The program sets up one Math ,one Computer ,and two Science Badges all wrapped up in a pretty bow. I took Brenda to this activity last year and she still talked of her experience fondly when I announced that I would take Bret this year. We made paper, learned about acids and bases, learned about and made our own cookie form of asphalt; learned math tricks, worked on Geometric Shapes, used problem solving to form words on calculators; learned about simple machines, made goop, checked out our finger prints. We learned about the machines that their school uses to design programs, make cars, stretch metal. We learned to use Windows Word. Such a day like this, all kids could have every week, they would not complain about school.

Also if you remember me talking about how Bret was bullied at summer camp this last summer by some other Girl Scouts who thought no one was looking... one of those bullies were there at Girl Scout Engineering Day. Bret pointed her out to me. I told Bret let that be a lesson. If you do wrong and think no one will ever find out... Someone always remembers.

Back the the Emergency Room Again

It is a joke that we have been to the emergency room now twice in one month. Prior to this month we haven't been to the emergency room since Gaige was a baby. So now it is Marley's turn. She got a 2-1/2 inch splinter in her foot. There was no way I was getting that thing out on my own. What a mess. Poor thing. I wonder if pulling it out would have hurt less than the shots she got to numb her foot! She can barely walk on that foot today.

She brought her own First Aid kit to the hospital. They let her take her splinter home for her scrap book. lol.

10 Cookies Til Christmas

My husband heard about these from someone at work. He has been excited for us to try these out for a while. The lady said to use the round coctail crackers. We went a step farther and bought Keebler FlipSides crackers with one part cracker and one part pretzel. Here with those pretzels again! Again melt the chocolate the same way and dip the cracker, scraping off the excess. Bret sprinkled them with sugar sprinkles as well, but I prefered to leave some plain. I think Big Bret will like them without the sprinkles.

And really, I don't think sprinkles make anything taste better. They just look so much festive. We will sacrifice the looks for the taste today. :-)

Yes my kitchen looks like a mess. I have been up til two, three, and four in the morning shopping for Christmas and wrapping since Bret's new job keeps him all day and night. This plus our activities and meals, laundry, watching Callie (which I love to do... totally not complaining) I am just feeling a bit exhausted. So my kitchen is a bit messy. As is the rest of the house. Soon we will be back to our "clean" ish selves.

11 Cookies Til Christmas

Oh I have wanted to try these for so long. I knew the kids would love making them and eating them! Not really a cookie? But still along the same lines.

We had no recipe so I will tell you what I did. I melted Semi-Sweet Morsels by Nestle according to the package. I microwaved 1 cup of morsels for 1 min. Once melted we dipped the pretzels into the chocolate and scraped off excess back into the bowl and rolled the pretzels into sprinkles. So many of them are gone already!

These are great for a present. Put them in a nice cup or glass with a bow and ribbon. This is what we will probably do.

Hope Is a Verb

So as I am walking Uma this morning, a car passes me by that has a bumper sticker reading "Hope is a Verb". Ok. So. I am a bit puzzled by this information. I agree with the statement. Hope is a verb. But why is it on a bumper sticker? What does that bumper sticker mean? Is this a song or a book? A famous quote that has significance in its context?

So curious why someone would have a bumper sticker that reads "Hope Is a Verb"...

Home Made Christmas Present Ideas

Brenda's Girl Scout troop is collecting gently used childrens books for a local reading program. We are the book hosts so by now we have 7 or 8 hunderd books in our front patio area. We have collection bins all over town. Some of the town people want to donate but they haven't read the flyer all the way through. We are getting adult books too. So in those adult books I came across someone giving us knitting and crocheting books. There was a whole book on Granny Squares. Granny square hats and sweaters, throws and blankets, etc. It totally inspired me to temporally give up my knitting needles and open my crochet bag up. It has been years. But I LOVE the Granny Square!

This was a hat and scarf set for the gift give at our Winter Solstice Drumming Circle last night.



Lisa, my knitting friend, is jealous. She doesn't know how to crochet. I guess it is time to learn. If for no other reason, just so she can have a hat too. She knits and tats. I don't know why she wouldn't crochet.

Junie B Jones

Marley has a new fascination wtih Junie B Jones. We read a chapter or two now before she goes to sleep, instead of the picture books we usually read. Here she is checking out the selection. I said one, she tried with diligence to talk me into two. We came home with Meanie Jim's Birthday Party. One of my favorites!

Christmas Crafts

I hosted a Christmas Craft day at a local library. There was card making, tree ornaments to decorate, candy cane reindeer, bead stars, and glass bulbs to paint. We all came home with boxes full of crafts to display for the holiday.

4H Christmas Party

So after being snowed out twice, the 4H Christmas party finally came to be. There were games, gingerbread house decorating, White Elephant Swap, snacks to share.





We made up snack bags to go to the Ronald McDonald House. My house is closest so I volunteered my family to drop the bags off after the party.

12 Cookies Til Christmas

This recipe came out of a book Bret checked out from the library we went to for our Christmas Craft activity. She was all excited to find a book of cookies for us to try out.


Cinnamon Spirals

In large bowl, with mixer at medium speed, beat 1 c. butter and 8 oz. cream cheese until creamy. Reduce speed to low gradually beating in 2-1/2 c. flour and 1/2 t. salt until well mixed. Divide dough in half, form rectangles, wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate for 1 hr (or freezer for 1/2 hr.)
Meanwhile in small bowl stir 2/3 c. sugar and 2 t. cinnamon until blended.
On lightly floured surface, wtih floured rolling pin, roll 1 piece of dough into 15"x12" rectangle. Sprinkle 1/2 sugar cinnamon mixture evenly over dough. Starting at the long side tightly roll rectangle jelly-roll style. Brush last 1/2 inch of dough with water to seal edge. Cut log crosswise in half, place on cookie sheet and cover with plastic wrap. Repeat with remaining dough. Regrigerate dough 2 hr or freezer for 45 min. Preheat oven to 400. Remove two logs from frezer. wtih serrated knife cut each log crosswise into 1/4 inch thick slices. Place cookies 1/2 inch apart on two ungreased cookie sheets. Bake until lightly browned 12-14 min. Transfer cookies to wire rack to cool. Repeat with other logs.



So first of all, as you can see here, these cookies are very small. Not a problem. They tasted real good. They would make great coffee cookies too... if any of us drank coffee. But they are good plain too. As you can see the directions were a bit long and tedious for my style. But I thought it would be worth it for these cookies. We didn't cook them but 10 minutes and they were done.

Cinnamon Spirals

13 Cookies til Christmas

These minty wonders were a joy! Marley and I made them together. We got the recipe off the Nestle Dark Chocolate and Mint Morsels Bag.

Mint chocolate Delights

Combine 2 c sugar, 2/3 baking cocoa, 1 t. baking soda and 1/2 t. salt in small bowl. Beat 1 c. butter, 2/3 c. granulated sugar, 2/3 c. brown sugar, and 1 t. vanilla extract in large mixer until creamy. Add 2 eggs, one at a time beating well after each addition. Gradually beat in flour mixture. Stir in morsels. Drop by well-rounded tablespoon onto ungreased baking sheets. Bake 11-13 min at 325 or until cookies are puffed and the centers are set. Cool on baking sheets for two min. remove to wire racks to cool completely. This makes 4 dozen cookies. We cut the recpie in half to make a couple dozen instead.



We took some of the dough and put it into a pie pan and made a pie cookie out of it. We just cooked it a little longer. Maybe 10 minutes more to make this lovely mint cookie pie. This recipe? Totally a keeper. The girls agree.

The First Snow

Well more like the second actual snow... But I find as I get older that I can tolerate the cold less and less. I did finally cave in and take the girls to the hill down the street.



Bret walked home almost right away. I didn't think I would ever get Marley to come home. And what were we missing?? No hot chocolate on this cold cold night. Thank goodness for hot soup and baths. :-)