A good book for a snowy day

Today there's so much snow here that you couldn't even see the front steps, much less walk down them. (Mama Squirrel fixed that--she's hoping for some packages, and anybody who's ever seen NFB's Special Delivery (a piece of animation for adults, not children) will know why you have to keep things clear for the mail carrier.

Anyway--if you're looking for snow books and your kids are a bit past The Snowy Day but maybe not ready for The Long Winter, here's a book that our Squirrelings enjoyed at that age: Oliver and Amanda and the Big Snow. How could we not identify with a snow book that starts out with "Digging Out?" (The Oliver and Amanda books are structured like Frog and Toad, with four or five short stories in each one.)

And if you're really an expert on snow stories, you can always go back to our Carnival of Homeschooling: Snowed-In Edition, and see if you can identify the bits of books there. (Answers here.)

A ketchup kind of meal (What's for dinner?)

Dinner's from the freezer--we're low on fresh things.

Frozen cabbage rolls (a small package--they were on sale at Giant Tiger)
Frozen mini-sausages
Baked potatoes (last of the bag--they were getting soft)
Carrot sticks, sour cream, applesauce etc.
Fruity Oatmeal Muffins and Mango Freeze (recipes below)

Fruity Oatmeal Muffins, because the oven was already on at the right temperature:

2 scant cups flour
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup rolled oats
2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1 egg
1 cup milk, swished with the bottom bits of two jars of peach and strawberry jam

Mix dry ingredients. Mix wet ingredients. Correct flour if needed (I added a bit more.) Combine gently, scoop into muffin pan and bake 20 minutes at 375 degrees.

Mango Freeze:

Part of a bag of frozen mango cubes (frozen fruit was on sale a couple of weeks ago)
3 small fruit yogurts

Run through the food processor until smooth and fluffed up. If you do this ahead of time, scoop into small dishes or one larger bowl and put back into the freezer until you want them.

What's for supper? (Hold the tomatoes)

That subject line wasn't referring to throwing them--just eating them. To avoid the distress that pasta sauce causes to some Squirrels, Mama Squirrel made a spaghetti dinner tonight without tomato sauce. General recipe: brown a pound of ground chicken with chopped celery and mushrooms. Cook half a box, or a whole box, of spaghettini. Drain the pasta and put into the slow cooker. Top with the chicken-vegetable mixture, including all the pan juices. Season with pepper and oregano and add some cheese on top (we used uncoloured old Cheddar). Cook until the cheese is melted (if everything's already hot, it only takes an hour or so in the slow cooker). (If you'd rather put the whole thing in the oven, you can do that instead. Or just serve it immediately from the pan, if you're ready to eat. We weren't. We were busy shovelling snow.) Scoop it all out as is, or scoop the top part out into a serving bowl so that you can pull the pasta out separately.

If you don't want to dump everything in together and then have to unmix it afterwards, then just keep the pasta separate from the chicken and vegetables; cook it separately when you're ready to serve it.

We had this with the Hillbilly Housewife's Garlic Bread Sticks (leaving out the extra salt), carrot sticks, and sliced kiwi fruit for dessert.

Just read the story already

I was asked to do a story-and-craft session with the preschoolers at co-op tomorrow. I came across one book I liked, and thought I'd do a quick browse online to see if anyone had come up with fun activities to go with it. The book's been around for a long time, right? Some preschool teacher somewhere has probably used it for storytime.

This is the first thing that came up for it.

And that's why we homeschool.

(That also reminded me of the DHM's recent conversation with her young friend Blynken, where she refused to define a big word that she'd used. Sometimes we need more story, less explaining, right?)

P.S. I'm still deciding on a book. I'll let you know what I picked tomorrow.

Happy 5th Blogiversary to Us

And now the morning news with Mr. Koala (and his bag of milk)...


On February 18, 2005:

It was discovered that the tsunami resulting from the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake uncovered an ancient city near the coastal town of Mahabalipuram in India.

A man was arrested by Gardaí in the town of Passage West in County Cork, Ireland, after he was discovered attempting to burn sterling bank notes.

The UK Food Standards Agency orders the withdrawal of over 350 food products from sale following the discovery that a batch of chilli powder used to produce a batch of Worcestershire sauce subsequently used to produce processed foods was contaminated with the possibly carcinogenic dye Sudan I.

And we launched Dewey's Treehouse!

In the past five years we've had big messy snowstorms, big messy rainstorms, and one really big messy windstorm.

Our apple trees have gotten big enough to have real apples on them.

We've raked an awful lot of maple leaves.
We've also seen our Squirrelings grow much bigger, the Squirreling parents grow a few years older, and Dewey lose a little more of his nose. We've had some rocky times. We've had many reasons to give thanks.
We've won a Homeschool Blog Award, and some lovely reader-nominated ones.
We've made great blogging friends, even those we'll never meet in real life.

It's been a blast.

Photo credits: Mr. Fixit and Ponytails

Lent Devotions

This is a book we've had since the Apprentice was about Crayons' age. I remember going through it very faithfully one year in particular--I think it was nine or ten years ago--and making all the symbols, trying a lot of the recipes and crafts. I think we might still have some of our symbols in the bottom of a box of decorations--I'll have to pull the box out and see.

The only "funny" thing about this book is that there are no devotions or activities for the Sundays of Lent. If you follow it straight through ("Day 2," "Day 3," etc.), you'll wind up short. The reason? Sundays aren't technically part of Lent--they're "little Easters." So on Sundays, you're on your own. But I think that might work out all right here, because we usually skip family activities on Thursdays when the Apprentice is working.

Today's activity is supposed to be carving a bar of soap into the shape of a cross, a reminder that our sins were "washed away." We usually use liquid soap, so I was thinking about decorating the pump containers instead. We'll see how it goes--everybody is still feeling a bit tentative today after a couple of Very Yuck sick days.

Just for Crayons: Mama Squirrel's favourite horse story

Someone else has been thinking about the hard-to-find Pamela and the Blue Mare.

Catching up (and Happy St. Valentine's Day)

Last week wasn't a very bloggish week. The weather stayed mostly dry (around here, although not in a lot of other places!) and we did all the usual Squirrel stuff. Mr. Fixit has continued to work on cleaning out some of the dark recesses of the Tree, coming up with some of the most amazing stuff that had dropped down down down. He even managed to find our kids' harp which had gotten (for some reason) put up on one of the joists of the furnace room ceiling (where we keep kites, leaves for the dining table and things like that).

Mama Squirrel went to a church social and played Mennonite Golf, which you don't find mentioned online too much because its proper name is Ten Card Golf. It's one of those very social games like Uno or Cheat that you can learn in a few minutes (because it's easy for other people to help you if you don't have a clue what you're doing), and it can take all evening if you want it to. Although it was cards instead of marbles, it reminded me of the big wooden Aggravation boards that my own Grandpa Squirrel made maybe thirty years ago, much like these. I still have one of his boards, and remember long evenings spent eating snacks and playing "the marble game" with my grandparents and whoever else was around.

Crayons and Ponytails both used the sewing machine, Crayons for the first time by herself. Mama Squirrel helped her make a felt doll pillow and then a fabric book cover--Crayons sewed all the seams. Ponytails experimented with the fancy stitches that Mama Squirrel never has time for, and dressed up a dish towel with machine-embroidered scallops. (An afterthought about that...we have two volumes of a popular children's sewing machine series, which spends a lot of time having kids follow mazes on paper and do non-fabric crafts to get them used to the machine. Crayons and I read through the first book, but she was distinctly uninterested in anything that didn't actually involve "sewing something." The Real Thing. Mama Squirrel had no problem with that.)

We went to a library sale which wasn't at a library, it was at one of their "service buildings," which basically means a warehouse, and that's what it was--boxes of books all over the place, stacked up on racks and in big wobbly piles, with strollers blocking the aisles, toddlers running in between the boxes, and little kids crawling under the racks with parents calling things after them like "do you see any books on renovation under there?" We did find a few books, but it wasn't the sort of place where you wanted to stay very long.

Monday is the Family Day holiday in Ontario. We're not sure yet how we're going to spend it...stomach viruses are still making their way around this area and have criss-crossed through the Treehouse more than once, so we're keeping things open.

How come your kids don't know that?

The Review Crew has started a sort of mini-carnival each week, with a homeschooling question to answer. The question for this week is "How do you know if your kids are keeping up with their peers?" (Click on the ship to see more entries--they will be posted on Tuesday.)
I guess you could rephrase that "How do you know they know what they're supposed to know?"

I've never worried much about that. First of all, it depends on who's making the list of what kids are supposed to know. Maybe their list isn't the same as mine, but who's to say that theirs is better, even if "they" might be the provincial government? Better for whom? I was never that interested in having standardized kids.

Second, even people who have gone through a whole education system have often missed something. Or a lot of things. How else to account for all those surveys that show how many of us don't know the most basic facts of geography, or physics, or about the Bible? I was reading something just this weekend from someone in New Mexico who kept having phone order takers insist that New Mexico wasn't a state. Someone else added that they'd had similar trouble living in Delaware.
Third, even if we do miss something, it's usually fairly easy to fill in or catch up. I may have posted before about Ponytails' teacher last year (when she was in public school) having a "thing" about graphing--it's not something we spend a lot of formal time on here, but it doesn't take a lot of time to explain. When The Apprentice started tenth-grade math in public high school, we had covered most of the elementary algebra topics at home (mostly using PurpleMath.com and a couple of library books), but again hadn't done much co-ordinate geometry. She knew the concepts as far as quadratic equations; just had somehow missed out on the "rise over run" part. But no big deal--have you ever known a high school course not to start with a quick review of last year's work? She caught up quickly and has gotten high marks in math ever since.
Finally, the Squirrelings (and most other homeschooled kids I know of) usually know about a lot of interesting things that aren't on the "standardized" list, or sometimes aren't even in the homeschool plan. Crayons just called me a few minutes ago to say that a whole bunch of chickadees were outside the window. She got all interested awhile back in John Haywood's Atlas of Past Times. (She's also one of the youngest kids I know who can tell you about "a master bedroom with an ensuite." Too much experience with open houses?) Ponytails' grade seven curriculum includes logic, money management, photography, nineteen-century world history, French verbs, and Plutarch's Life of Poplicola; but she's also following her own interests, right now mostly in things like design. She also made us ham and cheese crepes for lunch.
So do I ever get worried enough to look through the provincial standards and wonder if we're doing it wrong? Honestly, no--well, hardly ever. With Ponytails being home right now for one or maybe two more years before high school, yes, I did have a look through the middle school topics. I printed out the guidelines for French, and considered whether or not it would be worthwhile adjusting our history and science to include what the public schools were doing. (We decided not to.) But we were more interested in using this time to work on what Ponytails needs to work on. And what she's interested in. And what our homeschool curriculum suggests. That's more than good enough, in Mama Squirrel's opinion.

Math Mammoth (TOS Review)

Treehouse Review Week

Math Mammoth Home Page
Free Samples Download
Placement Tests
FAQ (including ordering information)

"Fully reproducible math workbooks
and worktexts for grades 1-12.
Incredibly affordable!"
I mentioned a few weeks ago that we would be trying out Maria Miller's Math Mammoth series with Crayons this term. We received both grade 3 books in the Light Blue Series (more specifics on the grade 3 books here), and I printed out the first chapter.

"The first chapter in this book deals with addition and subtraction strategies. The student does a lot of mental math, learns addition and subtraction terminology, touches on algebraic problems in the lesson about addition/subtraction connection, practices borrowing, and more."

What else do you do in Grade 3? "Then we tackle the multiplication concept in chapter 2. After that come multiplication tables in chapter 3, so multiplication does take a big part of book A. Then comes a chapter about clock and time (chapter 4) and a chapter about money (chapter 5).

"In part B, we study place value with thousands (chapter 6), then measuring and geometry (chapters 7 and 8), followed by division in chapter 9. In chapter 10, we study a little about multiplying bigger numbers, and finally in chapter 11, it is time for some introductory fraction and decimal topics."

Why do I like this so far? As I've said before, I like the three-year curriculum we've been using with Crayons, but in its final year it does get a bit esoteric with Fibonacci numbers, measurement, and graphing concepts--and I've felt that she really did need more work this year on basics. I wanted to be sure that those arithmetic "acorns" she'd stored up didn't get buried under a lot of other leaves and nuts--nice leaves and nuts, but not what she most needs right now.

It might be that Timmy-Tiptoes part of being a Squirrel: dropping those nuts down deep through the hole in the tree, but not being sure exactly what went down there, or how you're going to get them out again later.--previous Treehouse post

I also like the balance we're getting between a bit of "mom teaching time" and then a reasonable amount of problems for Crayons to do alone--this works very well with the way we like to learn here, and seems to go at about the right pace. I like the uncluttered feeling I get when we work through these pages--they're not fancy, but they offer enough variety to keep things interesting, and include self-checking activities like finding all the answers in a long line of numerals. (If the answer isn't in there, you did it wrong.)

"When you use these books as your only or main mathematics curriculum, they can be like a "framework", but you do have some liberty in organizing the study schedule....This curriculum aims to concentrate on a few major topics at a time and study them in depth....This is opposite to the continually spiraling step-by-step curricula in which each lesson typically is about a different topic from the previous or next lesson, and includes a lot of review problems from past topics. This does not mean that your child wouldn't need occasional review. However, when each major topic is presented in its own chapter, this gives you more freedom to plan the course of study and choose the review times yourself."

This works for us.

An important question for our family: do you need a colour printer? In the third-grade workbooks I downloaded, the colours do make the pages prettier; but they also seem to work fine in black and white. If you're looking for material for younger children, you might want to check out the samples for those years to see if you want them done in colour. [Update, October 2010: We printed out the 3B book in colour because it has several chapters about geometry, measurement etc. which use pictures of rulers, measuring cups and other things that show up better with different colours.]

What is Math Mammoth like in general?

Math Mammoth offers a whole array of downloadable workbooks, from full curriculum, to collections of worksheets on single topics. At first the different series may seem confusing, but the website pretty much explains the differences, for example, between the Blue and the Light Blue books. The Blue series is more remedial or supplemental; Light Blue is designed as a full, largely self-teaching curriculum for grades 1-5.

What is there for older students? Very glad you asked: check out the middle-school and high-school stuff here, including the Make-It-Real series of workbooks. "Make It Real Learning products are workbooks that contain activities or problem situations taken from real-life, with real data. Some examples of the situations are: cell phone plans, autism, population growth, cooking, borrowing money, credit cards, life spans, music downloads, etc. etc. Each activity-lesson starts with basics and goes into more in-depth and challenging evaluations and questions."

What does this cost? It all depends on how much you want to get at one time. You can get the whole Light Blue series, for example--that is, all five grades plus answer keys, a worksheet maker etc.--for US$99 as a download or $104 on CD. Prices of one year's Light Blue curriculum (including the support materials) vary slightly between the Math Mammoth page (it says there they are $29.50) and the Kagi store download page (it's listed there as $33.36). You can also order printed workbooks through Lulu.com. General ordering information is here.

Final Take: Over the past few years, I've often noticed Math Mammoth's generosity in offering samples and prizes (I've won a couple of their other products myself), and their interest in working with homeschoolers. I think it's their flexibility that seems to make them a good choice for homeschooling--you can get what you need to start with, get more pages or more help if you need it, and even make up some of your own stuff with the support materials. There is no fancy encryption or stuff that makes printing limited or difficult. And the book we're using has been pretty much print-out-and-use--there's no big learning curve for the parent. I don't know how the materials for the upper years compare to other curricula, but I'd certainly include them in the possibilities for math in the years to come.

Dewey's Disclaimer: This product was received free for purposes of review. No other payment was made. The opinions expressed in this review are our own.

Barchowsky Fluent Handwriting (TOS Review)

Today, January 23rd, is National Handwriting Day.

Do you enjoy writing by hand?


We have been reviewing three products from Barchowsky Fluent Handwriting.

But let's go back for a minute to a turn-of-the-last-century couple named Bridges. Robert Bridges was a poet laureate. Mary Monica Waterhouse Bridges (otherwise known as M.M. Bridges) was an expert calligrapher who wrote A New Handwriting For Teachers. You can read some of her notes and see images from her book on the Ambleside Online website.

Charlotte Mason appreciated what "Mrs. Bridges" was trying to do in both simplifying and beautifying the handwriting that children were being taught:

"A 'New Handwriting.'--Some years ago I heard of a lady who was elaborating, by means of the study of old Italian and other manuscripts, a 'system of beautiful handwriting' which could be taught to children. I waited patiently, though not without some urgency, for the production of this new kind of 'copy-book.' The need for such an effort was very great, for the distinctly commonplace writing taught from existing copy-books, however painstaking and legible, cannot but have a rather vulgarising effect both on the writer and the reader of such manuscript. At last the lady, Mrs Robert Bridges, has succeeded in her tedious and difficult undertaking, and this book for teachers will enable them to teach their pupils a style of writing which is pleasant to acquire because it is beautiful to behold. It is surprising how quickly young children, even those already confirmed in 'ugly' writing, take to this 'new handwriting.'"--From Home Education (Volume 1) by Charlotte Mason, pages 236-238.

Although I know there are many styles and systems of handwriting out there, and that several of them have worked well for CM homeschoolers, this is the first one that has appealed to me enough to want to take it on with one of my children, and the first one I've seen that seems to have both the sense of "beauty" that Charlotte Mason wanted, along with an acceptably contemporary style. That may sound funny considering that the Barchowsky style is less "loopy" than even my school-taught cursive, but a simpler style can have its own gracefulness. And who's to say that every letter in a word has to be hooked up to every other letter? (The Barchowsky method suggests a break after every four or five letters, to increase legibility.) There are a lot of handwriting ideas that I've taken for granted ever since my own school days, but they're not necessarily the only way to do things.

Years ago, The Apprentice tried out an italic system of printing; her handwriting still shows the scuff marks of that battle. Since then the Squirrelings' copywork has been rendered in their version of Mama Squirrel's best "painstaking and legible" fifth-grade-style cursive. For actual handwriting instruction, we've used a very standard workbook series and some online freebies. Still, our results have been something short of "beautiful," especially outside of handwriting lessons.

But it was time to try again.

I have to say that Barchowsky isn't an open-the-book-and-teach program. And what makes it especially difficult to start a whole new handwriting system is that most of us already write some other form of cursive--so when you're first checking out the program, you're having to retrain your own brain as well as figure out what your student is going to do. At first it seems that there are no set lessons--it's designed that way so that it can be useful to students of all ages and be used at your own pace, which makes it flexible but a bit confusing at first. The teacher has to do some homework ahead of time; but there are ways to get started without too much pain--see below.
We received all three Barchowsky products, and at first I wasn't sure what to do with the BIG package of wipe-off practice sheets. (They're coated so you can use them with a wipe-off marker.) My youngest is in the third grade, after all. But one of last year's Review Crew mentioned that she had used them with an eight-year-old, so I decided to give them a try along with the main program. We use the suggested little chants (things like "down, bounce up, down, bounce up") to get the feel of the letters, and we're just working through them, one per lesson. (We're a bit beyond the suggested cornmeal and shaving cream activities, but they'd be helpful with younger ones.)

This manual is the key to the whole program--especially the CD-Rom included in the back of the book (one each for Windows and Mac). The theory of the program is all in the manual; but the worksheets--a great variety of them, some of them customizable--are on the CD-Rom, and we've been combining those with the large Beginners sheets. There are also brief videos of students' hands--both right and left handed--writing, holding pencils, etc., along with comments about what they're doing correctly and what could be improved. The book itself contains lots of ideas and examples for continuing handwriting practice, which will probably make more sense once you've gotten started. You can also order a download of the font itself, which would allow you to make your own worksheets.
So although you'd have to buy both the Beginners and the main package to get this combination, I think it's a good option if you have a mid-elementary-age child AND you need a kickstart to begin teaching with the program. Younger children would probably be fine with just the big sheets--you do get a helpful little teacher's guide with them, and I've been using that more than I have the main book.


We also received the "adult" or "remedial" package, Fix It Write. The Apprentice had been asking me if I could find her something that would help her write her high school notes faster and clearer, and this sounded like a good possibility. Between end-of-semester exams and everything else lately, she hasn't had much time to do more than look through the package; I think I'm going to have to write a separate review for that one. She did comment that she also would have liked to see more reproducible pages instead of instructions to draw lines so-far-apart on paper and then practice patterns on those. I told her that there were probably some sheets she could print out from the CD-Rom that would make it easier--but again, this is going to have to wait until chemistry and physics are done. UPDATE: there's a special Fix It Write site with sample pages and some interesting animation.
The price of all this: BFH Fluent Handwriting Manual with CD-ROM (the main package) is US$65.95. Beginners' Handwriting with Teacher's Guide (the booklet I mentioned) is $29.95. An extra set of large sheets, sold only with the purchase of a complete Beginner's set, is $20.00. (One comment--I don't understand the reasoning behind that. If our sheets were worn out after one child and I wanted to buy another set a couple of years down the road, why couldn't I buy just the sheets?) Barchowsky Exemplar Fonts (Download) are $25.00. Fix It... Write (the adult program) is $19.95.
Final Take: I'm happy we got to try this--this seems to be the year of improving our spelling, improving our handwriting. I wish Crayons would have had the chance to start it a couple of years ago, but since she is still only partway through learning the "regular" cursive letters, I don't think she'll have a problem trying to relearn some of them--and in fact, the hard ones are the ones that Barchowsky simplifies (like lower-case S). I'm not sure how I feel about the price--it sounds high, but it's probably comparable to other complete programs out there.

Dewey's Disclaimer: These products were received free for purposes of review. No other payment was made. The opinions expressed in this review are our own.

JUMP Math Scores Again

We posted before about John Mighton and his JUMP Math program, back in 2007.

It's not a program we're currently using, although I was very impressed with the downloadable Fractions unit that we tried out at that time. It seemed like a great way to teach kids whose math anxiety makes them shut down before they've even really looked at the problems. They're sure that they won't be able to do whatever it is, but then you show them that, on the first page of a lesson, all they have to do is identify which subtraction problems would need regrouping. Oh--okay. I can do that. Then you build up, step by step. Ponytails also used some JUMP materials last year (when she was at public school) and liked them.

The Globe and Mail ran a good article this past weekend about JUMP. The contrast between a public school teacher's idea of a good problem and the JUMP approach is almost scary:

"[The] curriculum co-ordinator....says research shows that the best way to help kids understand a concept is to come up with a rich, conceptual problem that everyone in the class can help solve.

"Last year, for example, she visited the class of a primary-school teacher who had noticed that all the kids were wearing odd socks. The teacher came up with the concept of a sock factory, and the kids all brought in socks. Each child was given a different number of socks and their task, as a group, was to find a strategy that would combine them."

Teachers get rewarded for coming up with that stuff. It's like that teacher's magazine example Mary Pride used in Schoolproof about suggesting that the teacher find a great big pair of shoes (colourful if possible) and having the children measure feet to see who might fit them, write stories about the shoes, and so on. As Mary pointed out, what the children learned from that experience was probably not worth the trouble of finding the big shoes.

But you know what? I don't even understand that task, as it's described there. Much less what it has to do with primary-school math. Or why all the kids were wearing odd socks--is that a fashion thing, or is that neighbourhood so impoverished that we had better start paying as much attention to underclothed schoolchildren as we do to their math learning?

Contrast that with one of John Mighton's classes:

"Every hand in the class shoots up. The number 121,252 is not divisible by nine, one student tells him, and the remainder will be four.

"'You are brilliant,' he tells them. 'You are all brilliant.'"

Mama Squirrel's take: I would rather be brilliant in John Mighton's class than fool around with strategies of socks.

My mind, my acorn pile: Trying out Math Mammoth

The third (final) year of Miquon Math is always the hardest here--and it doesn't seem to matter exactly how old the Squirreling is. Possibly it's the year with the oddest assortment of topics, coming at an age when more typical third-grade math programs concentrate most on operations (along with some time-telling, money and measurement). As I described earlier in the year, I broke down the year's work by weeks and topics, wrote each week's work on a file card, and added notes of possible supplements. It hasn't been bad--we're on track with the cards, and the Mathemagic book is a real success--but I've still been feeling that, even with computer drill games and Calculadder work, there are still some holes in Crayons' math understanding. Not that anybody needs to panic at this age, but I get the impression from her too that math lessons are somewhat less than delightful. I wonder too if, in one sense, she really does know what she thinks she doesn't know, simply because it's not all straight in her head. I think that's what made All About Spelling a success over the past couple of months: she needed to gain some confidence but also to organize some of the knowledge she had stored up so that she could pull it out and use it. It might be that Timmy-Tiptoes part of being a Squirrel: dropping those nuts down deep through the hole in the tree, but not being sure exactly what went down there, or how you're going to get them out again later.

And besides, I know that, one way or another, we're going to be looking for another curriculum for fourth grade and up, because Miquon will be done. There are so many things out there to try now: Math-U-See, Right Start, Life of Fred, Saxon, JUMP, Mathematics Enhancement Programme--everybody has their favourites.

So when the Review Crew offered us the chance to try out one of Math Mammoth's full-curriculum workbooks, that didn't sound like a bad thing at all. We decided to go with MM's Light Blue series for third grade--starting today with an addition review.

This isn't a review yet, but there will be one when we have shaken up the acorns enough.

What I like about homeschooling (and a thought on instant potatoes)

What I like about homeschooling: that you can CHANGE things if you need to.

It's Friday, we've had a full week, and since I planned out the term's work by days instead of dates, Day 5's work will keep till Monday. This morning we're only going to do math (Ponytails has a DVD lesson to watch, Crayons is doing a placement test) and get ready for this afternoon's co-op. Mama Squirrel has volunteered to do music and a quick craft with the littlest ones, and the Squirrelings will be doing gym and other things with the kids their own ages.

(What's the craft? Take six large, sparkly, star-shaped beads, and seven translucent pony beads. String them on a pipe cleaner and twist the ends together. If you're three years old, leave it at that. If you're old enough, pinch the pipe cleaner in six places, where you put the big beads, to make the points of a snowflake. Use for singing snowflake songs, or hang in the window.)

We're also supposed to be tackling Mount Laundry and putting the rest of the Christmas decorations away (this morning in the Treehouse, not at co-op), but the morning is already going by fast. There was snow to shovel today too.

What's for supper? A pound of stew meat, the end of a bottle of barbecue sauce, and a package of mushrooms. Frozen french fries if we get home early enough, instant mashed potatoes if we don't. (There is only one brand of instant mashed potatoes that I like: Idahoan. It actually tastes like potatoes. I've tried a few others since we temporarily had trouble finding Idahoan, and now I understand why nobody likes instant potatoes. I didn't get paid to say that, it's just one squirrel's opinion.)

We are still here

Deep in school. Deep in cold (you can hear things snapping; the main consolation is it's too cold to snow much). Deep in getting some other real-life small responsibilities ironed out.

Book most recently finished: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (borrowed from Grandpa Squirrel). Not for kids (lots of horrors of war), but otherwise awesome--how could I not like a book revolving around Charles Lamb's Essays of Elia? If you liked 84, Charing Cross Road, you will like this, maybe even more.

What's for supper?

Homemade beef-vegetable soup; Sesame Seed Bread; cheese, fruit, this and that.

I'm not that troubled

Trying to save money in the kitchen this month?

Here are some yummy menu suggestions from Thrift for troubled times, published by the National Training School for Cookery (Great Britain); London, England: W. Clowes, 1917. Available online at the Human Ecology Collection.

Crissy on Christmas

She walked a few steps to the toyshop. She did not know how it came to be there and she thought she was in her St. Agnes's bedroom and it was filled with toys. Then: "Not toys," said Ivy, "a toy," and she was wide awake. She did not even see Abracadabra glaring at her with his green eyes; she looked straight at Holly.
She saw Holly's dress and socks and shoes. She is red and green too, thought Ivy. She saw Holly's hair, brown eyes, little teeth, and beautiful joints. They were just what Ivy liked, and, "My Christmas doll!" said Ivy. --The Story of Holly and Ivy, by Rumer Godden. More here.

What's in your hand? Post-Christmas thoughts, and memories

As I was saying in a previous post, everyone's idea of Christmas is different. And there are also so many combinations of people, houses and events that your ideas of what you DO on Christmas can also be very different--and can change rapidly from one year to the next. I never "spent" Christmas (as in "slept over") at someone else's house, but we spent most of our young-years Christmases being trotted from one relative's house to another, joining in with one aunt and uncle's plum pudding and gifts here, with another person's holiday-in-a-glass there (we didn't get any of that, if you're wondering), and with my grandparents' potluck-and-turkey to end off the day: think Whoville for that last one. Think noise noise noise noise, Dah Hoo Dor-Aze (can't spell that) and roast beast. I totally related to those scenes from The Grinch.

For years there was even a brunch at another aunt's house, although that eventually got moved to Boxing Day. My grandparents had a New Year's Eve card party for their friends (and usually kept us there overnight so that my parents could go out). And the country cousins had a big family dinner on New Year's. So although I remember my mother making all kinds of holiday preparations (baking like crazy), and my dad doing most of the decorating, I don't remember them ever actually hosting The Dinner on one of the actual holidays. In other words, I didn't get much practice at it.

And now it's up to us most years--not a very big dinner, only a few guests (sometimes only one, more often three), but we still want to make it special. Because it's fairly small, some of our preparations and ideas can wait until the last minute--we're not making forty napkin rings or anything. And I've found--because our Christmas Days tend to be kind of quiet anyway--that I actually enjoy leaving some of the table decorating and even crafting until the Day Of. (Did any of you ever watch a Rankin-Bass Christmas special with the song "Save a Little Christmas for Christmas?")

This year, a couple of days before Christmas, I pulled out a thrift-shopped copy of Corinne Clawson's Holiday Orna-gami, a small paperback that includes several bound-in squares of holiday-coloured paper for folding. I pulled out the yellow squares and tried the star in the book--not bad. The other sheets were a sort of dull green and red that tweaked vague memories of Christmases around 1971, in the era of lick-and-stick Christmas stickers (we used to put them all over tissue-paper-wrapped canned goods to go under a tree at church), crepe-paper-wrapped crackers with paper hats (I think they banged better than this year's dollar-store version), and mod-looking greeting cards. Maybe it was just that we'd been working on restoring the 1972 Crissy doll for Crayons, or that I knew Mr. Fixit had also bought the Squirrelings some vintage Hot Wheels tracks (we already have the cars), or maybe it was that 1973 magazine that Crayons had brought home from the thrift shop (maxi skirts, rick rack, styrofoam and metallic sunbursts)...but somehow my mind was back there with those colours from a time before laser printers, when church bulletins were hand-typed and Gestetnered, and posters were lettered with markers and stencils.

Is all that too much to fit into a few squares of paper? Or was it the other way around...anyway, I started folding those sheets into small baskets, and remembered that I'd bought tiny chocolate bars and Swedish berries to fill them. Those became our table favours.

On Christmas, when I was cleaning up used and unused gift wrap, I noticed that we still had quite a long piece of unused wrap in some of those same vintage-looking reds and greens: have you ever noticed that some of the Made-in-Wherever dollar store wrap looks like that anyway? It might be the lead paint (joking)...anyway...the paper was decorated with the word "Noel," and it gave me an idea. I covered our long table with an off-white table cloth (and the card table we use as an extension with a red plastic cloth), and rolled out the gift wrap down the table. The Apprentice fixed the paper to the cloth with some fix-your-dress-strap tape she had (it came in a vintage-looking package, which seemed appropriate), and we added our regular dinner plates (our good ones had too much pink in them), red paper napkins, the red and green baskets, and gold-and-cream party crackers. Not bad.

We still needed a centerpiece, but that wasn't hard. We put the candle jar we'd made in the middle of the table (remember we filled in between the jars with gold wire-type tinsel?), and The Apprentice took her pliers (all girls should have pliers) and twisted and hot-glued some more of that gold tinsel into a couple of groovy-looking little Christmas tree shapes, to flank the big jar.

And that was our Merry Christmas table: 1971 meets 2009.

Oh--you wanted to know what we had to eat? Turkey (and tofurkey for the vegetarians), mashed potatoes, canned cranberry sauce, frozen green and yellow beans (Europe's Best brand tastes better than fresh this time of year), crockpot stuffing, rolls, salads and pies brought by the guests, and a cookie plate. We were going to have homemade vanilla ice cream, but the cream turned out to be bad at the last minute so that was scrapped. But nobody minded much.

Post Christmas Post: A Non-Stupid Christmas

The one thing I've noticed about typical Christmas celebrations is that there are very few typical Christmas celebrations...especially among those whose Christian beliefs have played a larger-than-normal part in how they celebrate. (Think about the irony of that...) Or don't. Sometimes that makes for very surprising variations--devout Christians who don't "do" Christmas at all, or those who celebrate Christmas for fun but don't pretend it's the birth of Jesus, or those who plan the whole thing as a big birthday party for Jesus, or who celebrate the Old Testament holidays in the autumn, or those whose Christmas does center around church but who also include secular customs like Santa and stockings.

And then there are the Charlie Browns who are just tired of the "whole commercial racket," wish the whole thing was over, and take everybody to the beach for Christmas.

Or maybe it's just that I hang out with the wrong people. I'm thinking about something we saw a bit of on TV once called "Christmas Confidential,", about the dreadful holiday excesses and National-Lampoon-style house decorations and inflatable nativity scenes and spangled office-party outfits (makeup to match) and Santa Claus bikinis and church performances with more cast members than a small town and people stampeding at shopping malls and food, food, food...

All that seems kind of far removed from our Crayons' excursion to the thrift shop (everybody got tiny stuffed toys, figurines, and Mama Squirrel got a bell that she's threatening to ring for school time)...or the bead bracelet that Ponytails made me...or the Voskamps' "praying to be a womb for God" around a wooden Nativity spiral...or Bread and Honey's musings on "Pretending to be Mary." Or families who give just one present apiece (because they have ten children) , or three presents (because that's what Jesus got), or no presents.

Or from the reality of those who are having very quiet holidays (or barely noticed them) because of family griefs, illnesses and other stresses. Or people who have to work on Christmas or who are exhausted from the last week behind a cash register or a shampoo chair. Did you know the mega-supermarket was still open into the evening on the 24th? I know, because we had a celery emergency. Should I be grateful because that saved my stuffing, or be annoyed (and guilty) because our perceived needs don't let these businesses just close their doors early?

The fact that we barely set foot in a shopping mall this past month doesn't make our Christmas any holier than anybody else's. It's an everybody-makes-their-own-choices kind of culture now anyway...and I guess in some ways that's good, it means that the Neighbourhood Decorating Committee isn't going to harass us about our lack of lights, and it means that it's okay to have frozen green beans with Christmas dinner instead of that thing with the french fried onions. Who's going to tell? But I will continue to plug for a non-stupid Christmas.

Whatever that means to you.