Home-SU-Cool

We are on the sourdough wagon! Thanks to the starter shared by my brother-in-law, we are off to an easier start. I experimented with several methods (no-knead and knead) and recipes, and in the end I gleaned the wisdom of a few people and here is my way of doing sourdough bread now, with a slightly more consistent result. This starter has been in the fridge for half a week. You can see from the hooch (the liquid) that it needs feeding. I take it out 6-8 hours before I want to start making the dough. Sometimes I may feed the dough (using the method below), let it rise, dump out most starter but 113g (Recently I used 50% rye for my new starter and I only use 75g of beginner starter, not 113g), just to get it active again. I stir the hooch in, and discard all but 4 oz ( 113g, or 75g  see above) of starter. Then I added 100g of flour (I have been adding 50% of more nutritious flour like rye or whole wheat for my new starter)  and 100 g of water. Because my recipe...

For Adventures, we did four states' study: Arkansas, Michigan, Maine, Missouri. Other than that we continued on spelling, Language, Math and cursive drills. (and we read Plum Creek) Kindergarten  Made these lovely things because of the idea of Pinterest. BUT! I probably won't make again. The smell was way too toxic.   Jewel Thumbprint cookies. Always a hit. Last time I remember to take the final product picture   Bingo with the jewels   Preschool game. I like it, she was...ok.   Finding the J   Making necklaces of course. And we learnt to sing Lord You are more precious.

Frog...We have been waiting for this unit! Because... Frog and Toad Together is THE book that helped my son read (sorry, MFW). Seriously. This was how it begun. His dear friend (an auntie) gave him the book. First we read to him. WE fell in love with the most humorous book!!! Then we found some videos online!! Oh my. This really started him on the book. Then he watched so many times (and we read so many times...I can't count) that he started memorizing the stories. Then he started to relate to the words. And he started reading. As in REAL reading. Not like a couple words reading. He can read every single word in that book after a couple weeks. Then we got him the Treasury (used one from Amazon). We read again, he read and again he could read everything. From there, he started reading other words from other places. And the phonetic stuff we have been teaching him started to make sense. I remember the days (actually it's just a few months back) Ian would meticulously wr...

We have been WAITING for this unit!! Just because "Frog and Toad" books are our very very favorites. They are the books that "taught" my son to read and spell. SERIOUSLY. I'll have to write a post JUST on these two FUNNY amphibians. Anyhows, because of that I've decided to put up THEIR pictures instead of the real frogs (they look so much cuter anyways). For our unit, here's the plan *Lots of frog and toad stuff (reading and videos) *Frog Lapbook (get ideas here ) and a pop up card here - Difference between frog and toad *Caterpillar and polliwog video *Easy paper frog craft for the preschooler * Origami *Play leapfrog Some fun online games * Frogmania (eating dragonflies) * madlibs (if your K'ner can write this will be so fun) * tic tac toe Snacks/food * Cookies * Frog egg pops * Frog bread (OH MY GOODNESS, this is SOOOO cute. My hubby said "This is getting out of hand") * Frog fruit Booklist From Tadpole to...

B-Butterfly unit was so much fun!! We had tons of crafts, activities and our preschooler was REALLY involved. Well, mostly because she loves crafts. We had great fun with the food too! Here are what we did: *Pasta life cycle ( I REALLY like this...thank you to my friends for giving me the different pastas!) I ended up buying bowties, so we made a lunch out of it. *Dramatizing life cycles. The kids love it too. And Colleen painted the wings beforehand. Can you see we used grocery bags? Got the ingenious idea from the forum *sun-catchers. OOOH...these are so beautitful! *Drop paints using eye dropper and then fold into half for a love symmetry effect *Ian read Hungry Caterpillar and used props from here *For Math this week we made our own weigh balance (such a creative idea!!! I found on the web) and did some weighing. It was fun. *I think we had too many books of the same idea...so it was redundant. *We watched a DK DVD on butterfly . It was fun.