Sushi even your child would eat!

I love love love to try new and unique items, and when I came across Kracie candy sets, I knew that I just had to try it!

When I ordered my Popin'cookin' sushi candy set  it had to be shipped from Japan, but that was a part of the fun and adventure to us!  I try really hard to encourage my future Renaissance Man to explore different cultures and what is more fun to anticipate a package from Japan.  The packaging is all in Japanese, and so are the instructions, but do not fear, there is always youtube to the rescue.  So I simply went to, KraciePopin'cookin' Japanese Sushi candy and followed along with the video.

I helped my son follow the directions, and I thought that the little roe was fascinating to make because you had to add droplets to a solution.  Then after in the tray they make the candy, they have to form the little sushi candies.

And EAT!  

Fun, interesting and he got to explore a different culture in a fun way!  

I also have a Bento Box candy kit and a donut kit.  I am looking forward to seeing how my son handles trying to deccifer the instructions on the box.. They are visually set up, step by step, and I want to see how he will draw on his past experiences  to figure out the challenge.  I know the results will be fun and actually they were enjoyable to eat!

I LOVE LOVE LOVE being a geeky mom!

Spring is in the air, and being the Renaissance Mama that I am , I have an experiment that still gives me the giggles!  I have been doing this experiment for years and considering I have been in Early Childhood Education for almost 30 years, that IS a long time!  And I daydream of the day that I am holding my dear little grandchild and we are giggling at this little experiment!  Yes, everyone loves the flowers in the dye experiment.  What is not to love?!? Flowers, color and science! What a awesome combination!

This year we decided to go with white tulips, some years I have used daffodils or carnations, or even celery.  We used lots of food coloring in a little water to make it go faster, you could see the changes within 15 minutes and we let it sit over night.  I also added leaves, to show veins in those also.

And WAHHHLAAAHH!!!

You have a beautiful centerpiece!  I have to admit, every Valentines day I say no to the store bought flowers.  But I am a sucker for hand picked flowers and these very special bouquets!!!

BUT that's not all, there is more!  As a Renaissance mama, I try to get the most for my buck, so then we open one up and dissect and label all the part of the flower.  We have tried this year to hand pollinate them, add food to the water and see if we can get the ovaries to continue to grow and we will dissect that too!

But of course, as always.  I just love spending the time with my son building loving memories.  I hope that one day my children will look back on their childhoods and get a kick out of such goofy but fun experiments!

H.S. Point of View; Schedule, What Schedule?

H.s. Point of View: Schedule,  what schedule?

When you get a more experienced home school parent talking to a newbie,  schedules always come up.  I’m about to wrap up my third year of home schooling,  I homeschool all year long and I am beginning to see a pattern emerge.   I understand, all of our lives revolve around a schedule.   Most of us had gone to school, so we are used to schedules, and many are obsesses with them.  I find when I CAN stick to a schedule, that I personally fell more productive!  Every person and every schedule is different , so I thought that I would share my strange and unique schedule with you in hopes that I can find someone just like me or to let newbies know that some people are quirky or you can be grateful that you can stick to something that others OBVIOUSLY can’t! 

Fall is in the air, time for the public school parents to wrap up their bundles of joy and put them on the bus.  I am always in high spirits too!  Refreshed after spending months outside I am on it, I follow our schedule precisely.  We begin the day with PE, dutifully start first session at 8:30; reading, math and science.  Break.  Dutifully start session 2; math lessons, Language Arts, and more science reading. Break. Session 3; history reading,  math drill, Latin, thinking skills and other.  Everything is done on schedule,  5 days a week!

December!!!  I really lose interests in schedules, when there is so many fun holiday things to do!  Homemade grandparents presents take up a lot of time, cookies, parties, etc.  I tell myself that it’s not a bad thing, think social skills, art, and cooking.  Plus we have the tradition of reciting “T’was the Night Before Christmas”. So we are learning holiday style.  Then 2 weeks off for Christmas……

Jannnnn uuuuuaaaarrrryyyyyy.    It starts out strong, for about 2 weeks, but then the blahs set in ( here is where I should mention I live in the freakin middle of nowhere Alaska- AKA Delta Junction, yes we are a part of the USA and no I cannot see Russia)  So we trudge through homeschooling, but we argue a lot, and I really just want to hibernate.  So what used to be done in 5 days a week starts to be 7 days a week again .

SPRING!!!!!  I can never really give you a date, even Alaska refuses to stick to a schedule!  So we had trudged through the winter pulling ourselves along and NOW it is SPRING!  I personally think it should be considered TEACHER ABUSE to force me to stay inside!  I think that this is why I garden and at this rate my son will have his bachelors in horticulture by the time he is 14! Any excuse to  stay outside!  School continues to be 7 days a week, a mixture of inside and outside learning, things get done mostly in the morning! Or fit whenever we are forced inside!

AHHH the long (again Alaska, almost 24 hours of daylight) days of summer!  Let us just say that if my son gets a bachelors by 14 in horticulture, he will surely have a entomology degree by 15 and a geology degree by 16!  Summer is the time to heavily explore outside and my philosophy becomes that if my son appears bored, refuses to entertain himself or being naughty, we do school work.  It is amazing how well that works!  So schooling becomes 7 days a week, fitting things in along the way.

I would love to know how other people work their school year, someone, somewhere,   has to be as crazy as I am, but life is a journey, not a destination!  And believe it or not, even with my erratic schedule, he is still advanced!  At the end of the day, the truth speaks for itself, LEARNING IS A PASSION!

Peeps tradition

It is that time of year again where you walk down the seasonal isle of a grocery store and find a colorful selection of Peeps, and it is that time of year that I get to enjoy a Geeky Mom tradition!  Blowing up Peeps in the microwave!  You know, even if you are an adult with no children, you should give this a try at least once in your life.

1. Buy Peeps, take home and unwrap them.  I add the unwrap them because apparently in America some people can  not figure that out, I have seen warning labels on packages of bread, sheessshhh!

2. Place on plate, I am not a environmentalist, so I prefer paper.  Much much easier to throw in trash than scrub off microwaved on sugar.

3. Place plate in the Microwave, depending on the microwave set to cook at full force for about 20 seconds.  this is where your kids come in great, and make sure you get them a stool to stand on first.  I like to ask my kids to think through the process of telling the microwave "what to do" or go step by step if they are really young, and let them be apart of the process.  We experiment with this, sometimes I do more than 20 seconds so I can try to get that hard "Lucky Charm" effect, but the burned effect is no good!  The children LOVE to watch what happens and love to eat their experiment even more!  All the while you give them a little science lesson.  Me, I am no expert, so I basically say " Matter, when hit with the microwaves vibrate and get hot and they bounce off each other and cause the Peep to expand"  But you brilliant minds out there can really expand, depending on the age of the child.  There are usually several Peeps and honestly we do this a few times a season, and they release Peeps several times a year (yeah I am a bit addicted to candy), after you begin to teach them what is happening, then start asking them what they think is happening and guide their answers.  The tough part about learning is that you have to teach over and over again to get ideas through, thankfully Peeps are cheap, and yummy!

You can expand on this by having toothpick fights with them (google it) and another thing you can do is use marshmallows.  Put a few drops of food color on a plate, give them a toothpick for each color and tlet them use the tip of the toothpick to paint their marshmallow.  It is really cool to see your design expand!

So have fun, explore, think, grow and love your kids!  Trust me, it means the world to them when you take the time to do dorky little fun stuff!  Fill their lives with fun and rememberable moments!

Dedicated to the Future Musical Genius's

Any proper "Renaissance Man" enjoys fine music, right?  Play classical music and you become instantly refined, right? And as your Grand Renaissance Mama, it is my duty to expose my son to the finer things in life!  Yeah, well thankfully we both actually do enjoy classical music and Opera!
In my husband’s very musical family children start playing musical instruments at 8.  I have though spent the last 3 years trying to develop a love and appreciation for music.  I once read a book by Amy Chua “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom”, who gained notoriety by pressuring her children to excel at playing masterpieces on the violin.  Please do not get me wrong, I am an insanely tough mother on my children to excel academically.  But our lovely author wrote a piece that white mothers are the worse mothers in the world. Honestly I did not read that piece, because I have already read her book and I already know what her attitude is!  Because OBVIOUSLY she thinks the Chinese are so superior to us white slacker folks!  BUT, my goals with my “Renaissance Man to be”  is not to have him REHASH the masterpieces of our WHITE Genius’s over  and over and over again, but to BE THE GENIUS!!!  My goal with my son’s musical teaching is to INSPIRE CREATIVITY, NOT to JUST rehash others creativity over and over and over, like some folks think! Because us Neanderthal like white people honor and value creative thought, we value originality and ingenuity!  THAT is what sets us apart!
To try to properly musically educate our “future Renaissance Man” we really enjoyed a DVD series called Wunderkind Little Amadeus, it did not have as many facts as I would have liked, but for a 5 or 6 year old, it excited and inspired him.  My fondest memories was walking into Barnes and Noble and my son was telling everyone that he was going to be just like Mozart when he grew up.  We of course listened to a lot of Mozart’s music and I felt really proud to be somewhere and my little guy could pick out Mozart’s pieces.  We read “Famous children, Mozart” by Ann Rachlin and “Getting to know the World’s Greatest Composers, Mozart” by Mike Venezia.  A very interesting find was by Classical Kids called Mozart’s “Magical Fantasy” and we got Mozart’s “Magnificent Voyage”.  These were Mozart’s operas simplified and in English on CD and my son loved to listen to them over and over and OVER again!
Then one day….   “I don’t like Mozart anymore, I like Beethoven” said my little guy.
But I got to enjoy weeks and weeks of listening to my son hum Mozart, pretend to be Mozart and pretend to write masterpieces.  What a gift I got watching my son internalize his experiences!

The joys of being a mother and to get to educate my son!  Such a gift.  Please join me on my Facebook page “Raising a Renaissance Man” and we can grow together!  I love homeschooling my son and watching his passion for learning grow!  If you are new to homeschooling I would love to be there as a friend, and help to inspire you.  Homeschooling is so fun, but a little overwhelming.

Dead Language Society

Do they speak Latin in Latin America?

Latin?!?  Why teach Latin?  It’s dead!

True, no one speaks “High Class Latin” anymore,  but  “Vulgar Latin” is spoken every day!  Romance Languages are versions of Vulgar Latin, like French, Spanish, Romanian, Portuguese,  and  Italian.  And a “Renaissance Man” is often multi-lingual.  When we left Spanish to teach Latin, my son would find that a lot of the words he learned in Spanish were the same in Latin!

You know some Latin already and probably do not even realize it, like pro and con, vice versa, via, and status quo.  Did you realize “am” and “pm” are Latin, and our government uses many Latin quotes like on money “Annuit coeptis”  which means “he favored our undertakings”  or “Novus ordo seclorum” which means “A new world order.”  Latin (and Greek, but that is another post) is also a common language used  in medicine and science.  My son was having a hard time keeping the Revolutionary war and the Civil war straight and it helped him to look at the meanings of the Latin roots of these words to try to remember which war was which (he is only 7).  Learning Latin roots(and Greek) will really help them in the future with advanced science and history classes.

We started Latin when our son was in first grade and this is our second year.  I really enjoyed the first book “Song School Latin” by Amy Rehn.  It teaches approximately 100 words in 32 lessons, through songs and jingles on an accompanying  CD.  We personally only teach Latin to English, since we do not expect him to speak it for now.  In addition to the book, we make flash cards and you may not agree, but we keep a bowl of jelly beans and reward him for his correct answers.  But the flash cards help to retain the old words, and the jellybeans help to motivate.  We are now on the second book in this series.  In addition we have some playing cards called Rummy Roots.  These are a mixture of Latin and Greek roots, though they are made to play Rummy, which I do not know how to play, with young children they are great for a version of “Go Fish” , memory, and drill.  We try to spend atleast 15 minutes a day doing Latin, on weekends because of the jelly beans, it is easy to get my son to drill.

I hope that this might encourage you to consider Latin, and if you have any thoughts or suggestions, please feel free to contact me!  Song School Latin is available on Amazon    Song school Latin