Making Candy

We made our own 'pulled taffy' the other week using pure honey and just adding a few essential oils for flavour and it was so fun! I'll be honest, my kids did not particularly like how it felt on their hands, but I had a lot of fun and they were so proud of their finished products.

If you want to have a go it is super easy. Just boil some honey with a candy thermometer until it reaches 140c for at least five minutes. Then tip it out on a non-stick sheet and use spatulas to move it around until it's cool enough to touch.

At this stage you need to grease your hands with butter and then you just pull and fold, incorporating as much air as you can. When it's only barely warm add a few drops of your favourite essential oils (we used, peppermint in one batch, lemon in another, orange in a third and left one plain). Essential oils are volatile, so it's best to add them as cool as you can get away with if you want the flavour to last.

When you've twisted and pulled as much as you can and the candy is pretty hard, you can cut it into shapes, wrap it in waxed paper and store in the fridge.

Even though they didn't like getting messy (there were tears over butter on hands) the kids enjoyed watching the process and learning how candy was made.

The second time we made some honeycomb. I adapted this recipe I found, but boiling the honey again, but I added a mix of 50:50 bicarbonate of soda and ascorbic acid (vitamin C powder). The acid in the vitamin C ensured we got a good reaction from the baking soda and we had a slightly chewier than I'd have liked honeycomb. I think next time I need to boil the honey a little longer.

Still, the kids really liked this one. 

DIY.org

Maybe this isn't news to some of you, but I have only recently discovered the awesomeness that is DIY.org.

From what I've gathered so far, it's kind of like the online answer to why I went to brownies - to earn badges. Only these badges are way cooler. They're chunky, hexagonal, embroidered patches, and you earn them for completing three tasks in a skill area. 

You simply upload a video or photo of yourself completing a task, someone reviews it and validates your reward. 

Badges are awarded for all kinds of stuff, my kids are keen for the backyard farmer, Lego master and minecrafter badges; but the range is as diverse as architect, bee keeper and dancer to mycologists, geneticist and sys admin!! 

Here's a video my kids made for one of their 'backyard farmer' skills.

The only downside to this whole thing is that it's based in the USA. Although their postage charges are very reasonable ($2 to ship to England) it obviously takes a while to get over here. Long enough that Cosmo is questioning me about whether there is a real badge or if it's just on the website (which incidentally, would still be fun to so if you didn't want to invest in the patches...) 

Each kid gets their own "stream" of activity which other people can follow, and they can follow others, either to keep up with what a friend is doing, or for inspiration. 

The best part is that as a parent, you get a log in too. The site emails me to approve everything my kids upload, so there is little to no chance of anything stupid being naievely posted online - unless you naievely thought it would be okay too, which you can't really blame your kid for... 

We think this is awesome, and it's a great boredom buster when you are scratching for ideas to do with the kids. A lot of the skills don't require much equipment and are pitched at several levels, so whilst my backyard farmers are planting celeriac, someone else might be caring for livestock. 

Definitely worth a poke around in your free time, and if you do sign up, message me your user name; the kids and I would like to follow you :0)

In unrelated news, lychee has enjoyed drawing cats this week. 

The World Peace Games

The World Peace Games looks like such an incredible learning tool. Matt plays something similar (although less detailed) called 'the trading games' with his geography students. I'd love to find a way to get enough homeschooled children together that we could take a few days and play this out properly.

The rules state that you can't win the game unless all 50 global problems are solved (issues like global warming, racial inequality, famines etc...) and all of the countries increase their assets (naturally the poor get poorer unless there is some form of coalition/intervention which the children have to come up with by themselves).

The website is here if you want to know more, I personally cannot wait until my children are old enough to take part in something like this. This kind of learning is why we home educate.

Termly report

Part of belonging to the PLACE scheme that we are a part of involves writing up a termly 'monitoring' form. It's one of the complaints I've heard from other home educators about the scheme. They don't want anyone else to keep a record of their child's progress.

I don't actually mind doing it, in fact, today was the first one I've written and I rather enjoyed it. It was amazing looking back over the last term and seeing how far we've come.

This was the term we started the GAPS diet to see if it would improve Cosmo's ASD, and the results have been astounding. When I think back to the differences between Christmas and now I'm filled with joy about how far we've come.

Termly reports are going to be a great way for me to sit down and review; on days when I feel like we haven't done anything, I realise we really have. It may not feel like we've done a lot today, or even this week, but when I look back over a term, it really is a shock to see just what we've managed to cover.

Even if you aren't part of a scheme like PLACE, if you home educate, I'd recommend writing a termly report. Not only does it provide a record for future admissions etc... If your child chooses to go on to college etc... But it's good for your soul to see just how much you really have achieved. A state education just cannot come close.

The enchanted sculpture trail

We love stanwick lakes, it's one of our favourite places to go, and I'm so glad we were introduced to it early on when we moved here.

As members, they send us emails when they are doing something fun, and this weekend they were making a new installation for the enchanted sculpture walk called 'mosaic trees'.

It involved cutting and gluing little tiles all over the thinner parts of the tree, which were going to be grouted later.

It also had some sections where you took a hammer and chisel

Cut out a small square

Glued

And pressed in a tile

To make a cute little window-type thing

Cosmo was nervous at first, and just watched for a long time, but then he was keen to get on and have a go whilst I finished off tiling a bit further up.

And we couldn't have a trip to stanwick lakes without a quick loop of the adventure trail

Will loves climbing to the top of this rock and then leaping off into his daddy's arms.

That's faith!

Milton Keynes

This week Matt's class at school were doing a project on Milton Keynes. It came up in conversation at the dinner table, so Cosmo decided that he too would like to do a project on Milton Keynes.

 

Unsure of exactly how to proceed I decided that I would ask him what he'd like to know about Milton Keynes and see if we could find out the answers using google. Some of his questions weren't answered exactly (e.g. 'how many parks are there?' turned into 'how much area is devoted to parklands?') and some of them I flat couldn't find the answers to ('how many cars are there in Milton Keynes?') but there was plenty there to work with.

 

I'm also really proud of his drawings. For a long time he has refused to draw anything other than '1's or 'l's. I think this is a real confidence issue. He has just been unwilling to try to draw anything he wasn't confident he could succeed at.  He drew a railway track and a bridge (unfortunately I wrote on the picture upside down, but once he told me what it was I realised it was actually pretty good!) and trees that were incredible. I still had to talk him through how to draw each bit ('draw some brown lines to make trunks, not do some green scribbles at the top') but once I had taught him to draw a tree, he was drawing them all over the place!

 

We also found someone called the 'Milton Keynes Guru' who answers (publically) any questions you might have related to the city. Will composed a lovely email for him including questions like 'Are there any cars in Milton Keynes that are as fast as Lightning McQueen?' and 'Are there any car companies, like DinoCo, based in Milton Keynes?'

 

We put it all together in an A3 presentation to show Matt and Cosmo talked him through it when he got home.

 

You can see our booklet here.