The Menu

For dinner:

Lamb roast
Mushroom gravy
Mashed potatoes
Roasted cabbage
Roasted lemon zucchini
Carrot ginger puree
Spinach salad
Lemon bars

For lunch:

Challah
Homemade bagels (garlic and plain)
Homemade lox
Fixings: cream cheese, cukes, tomatoes, sweet onions
Curried carrot pear salad
Spinach salad
Fishless shuba
Apple tart
Vanilla ice cream

Learning

Okay, so I didn't do so well with posting about our week, but I'm determined to spend five minutes sharing SOMETHING!

Let's see...

Yesterday we finished reading aloud Caddie Woodlawn's Family. While this wasn't quite as good as Caddie Woodlawn, we enjoyed it. This sequel takes the focus off of Caddie and includes adventurous stories of her siblings. Very sweet. Now we've started Outcast by Rosemary Sutcliffe. It's about a shipwrecked Roman orphan baby that is rescued and adopted by a Celtic family. I've wanted to read some of Sutcliffe's books for a while now. We just read an excerpt in our grade 4 Writing with Ease book, and felt it would make an interesting readaloud.

What else? I pooped out on learning an hour early today, much to everyone's delight, and Amirah and I totally decluttered her room (one of my favorite things to do!). That was nice. Raizel blissfully hauled away her hand-me-down treasures.

I started 16 tomato starts today. Hoping our tomatoes will do better than last year...

There's my five minutes. Wish I could sound more energetic. Zzzzzzzzzzz...

The Menu

Yes, Friday's ten minutes will be devoted to the all-important shabbos menu.

FOR DINNER:

Challah (experiment #7)
Matzo ball soup
Roasted asparagus
Baked potatoes w/pareve sour cream and green onions
Roasted chicken leg quarters
Roasted zucchini/carrots/onions
Sweet potato kugel
Brown rice
Raspberry chocolate brownies
Strawberry kiwi sorbet

FOR LUNCH:
Challah
Stovetop-smoked salmon
Raw vegetable tray
Spinach salad
Chopped liver
Cholent
Veggies and dessert from dinner

Good shabbos, all. I can't believe how much I'm needing this one!

Long Time, No Blog

It seems that as soon as I got four full-time learners on board, my blogging time evaporated. But I want to blog for selfish reasons... I often refer back to this to see what materials we used for a particular subject, or what the recipe was for a certain item I made four years ago, or the name of a park we visited once when we first moved here. It's a sort of storage box for me. I didn't start up again, because there were so many things I wanted to make notes about, so many activities we've done that were great ideas, or meals we've eaten. It was overwhelming, and I couldn't bear to start putting it down on paper.

So, tonight, I decided to just pick up as if I'd been blogging all along, and to try to just do 5-10 minutes a day to jot down the highlights of our learning day. Today I just had to share what the best idea of the year has been so far!

I got each of the kids a 3-inch notebook, with 12 subject dividers.

Secular: penmanship, math, spelling, Writing With Ease, First Language Lessons, poetry, history, science

AND

Kodesh: chumash, Chayeinu, Yahadus, Lashon Hatorah, tefillah, parsha, chagim, and other

Every Sunday, I put in any worksheets, charts, pictures, supplies (2-dimensional!), etc. that we'll need during the week. In the morning after breakfast and davening, they do as much work as they can do independently while I get a few things done around the house. At 11:00 or so, I'm available for answering questions, and doing a couple of the subjects that require my active involvement. After lunch, I have Avi, then alternate between Amirah and Eli/Raizel two times. They complete half the subjects they have left in each of their two turns, and VOILÁ! we're done.

For them, it's mostly grab-and-go, and for me I have one small shelf of books that accompany our lessons. Pretty efficient, and it has worked well for several months now.

So that's my promised 10 minutes, and it really seems to be all I have these days. But if I just do 10 minutes per day, it's a WHOLE lot more than I've been doing! :)