We are still trying to figure out how to balance our longish school days with our park day meet ups with other homeschooling families, mornings at the library, field trips and mommy group meet ups with kids closer to Wee One #3’s age. So far, we have decided to do formal school 4 full days a week with a half day on Friday. Every afternoon we break for 45 minutes of fun and sun and exercise in the pool. Wednesdays are both library day and homeschoolers in the park day so that is not a formal school day, however since we don’t have to leave the house super early for Wee One #3’s story time at the library, we’ll do a French lesson and then maybe practice our new French words as we stomp around LA. Friday will be a half day so we can meet up with some little ones for fun in our neighborhood, but considering what time we get up (way. too. early.) stopping early is more like 3/4 of a day instead of a half day. Right now Saturday mornings are for the farmer’s market and the rest of the weekend is for chilling out, but as soon as I find a YMCA we all like, I suspect weekends will belong to ballet and karate and the like. We’ll see how this first term shapes up and what adjustments we will have to make to our schedule and our books and our goals.

We started the school year with pink (read: beet) pancakes with grated apples and adverbs! Fun! Haha.
Mid-day I made cookies for them as a treat and managed to knit a couple of puffs while supervising cursive. Science for our littlest was food coloring-tinted vinegar in baking soda. She was mesmerized (I kinda was too).
Yesterday ended with an art session involving homemade puffy paint and today began with stacks of buttermilk pancakes.
Every afternoon is celebrated with a dip in the pool, no matter how short lived!
Today art involved glue and table salt and food coloring and Q-tips. I know, I know, we’re amazing. Very high brow.

What a wonderful, wonderful week it has been!!

sister love and palm trees	sparkles and Hello Kitty are a match made in toddler heaven
Polliwog Park and Manhattan Beach in general are my new favorite places
after five months of having a pool, none of us can imagine not having one & the same is true for these palm trees
white peaches and cluster tomatoes at the Torrance farmer’s market
loot from this Saturday’s farmer’s market	homemade vegan dragon fruit ice cream

When Wee One #1 was still wee (he’s 12 now), I had big plans to homeschool him and any other children we’d have. I thought it was better than traditional school for so many reasons – I could tailor the lessons to make sure it sinks in, I could spend extra time on concepts that are harder than others, blah, blah, blah. So when school age started creeping up on us, I was voted down – overwhelmingly – by my husband and both our families. As the only one who thought this was a good idea, I wasn’t winning anyone over. Over the years, I got into the swing of school and though I always supplemented their educations with lessons to drive the point in at home, I started to agree with everyone that traditional school was better, at least for us.

Fast forward eight years from when our first child started kindergarten, we now have a 7th grader, a 2nd grader and our wee-est one is officially preschool age.

As anyone who reads this blog is painfully aware, we have all moved from Canada to the States and we did it 3/4 of the way through the school year (and the school year is different in these countries too). For reasons ranging from ease of transition for the kids, to initially thinking we were only going to be down here for 6 months, we decided to homeschool while in California and then put them back in their tiny rural school of 35 kids when we moved back to Canada. Now that we know we’re going to be here for a few years it would make sense to put them in school, right? Except the homeschooling experience has been so wonderful we have decided to keep it up the whole time we’re down here. And interestingly (oddly too, maybe) that my husband, and both our families are encouraging me to homeschooling. Telling me all the things I told them six years ago. Ha! Well, whatever the reason for the collective change of heart, I’m happy to have everyone on board with this.

Gym in the pool? Yes, please!

We are following Ontario curriculum even though we’re in California because technically we are here on a temporary Visa and we are permanent residences of Ontario, with permission from our local school board in Ontario to homeschool. The nice thing about that though is the flexibility it provides. We will keep French as our second language and keep Canadian geography and history, but we are also adding in some Spanish and American geography and history as well.

I think the best thing about this decision are all the options for styles of teaching and books to use and extra subjects to cover! Ontario curriculum lists learning sheet music, but the instrument you use is up to you, same goes for the core subjects. The kids will use math textbooks for learning math, but we will learn all of our science curriculum through experiments and field studying and I have added nutrition and environmental awareness to our list of subjects as well. The kids love all of it – they get to choose their books for free reading and pick from a list I chose for literature. Win-win!

Here are some of the books we are using this term, I don’t love classic textbooks for most subjects because they all assume that kids know nothing about the subject at all or that they need to be drilled the information in a way that most kids (at least my kids) find frustrating. I have no doubt we will be adding more to this collection, but these are the ones we are starting with. Some are general enough for both of our older kids, but most are for one or the other.

This is the year that Wee One #3 would be starting preschool, but it doesn’t make sense to me to put her in preschool here if the other two are at home anyway, so I’m going to ‘officially’ start her preschool at home this fall. Though honestly, we read and sing and count and color all the time anyway, the major difference with adding the word officially in there is that I’ll be deliberately teaching her specific things. Her books and her materials will be a lot different. I will be making homemade playdoh every other day like I did with Wee One #1 when he was little and now that I know how to make chalk and paint, there will be a whole lot of that going on too. I’m looking forward to documenting and blogging about it in the coming months as well!

		This last one is for me. 😉

As far as scheduling goes, when we first started I tried every subject, every day. It worked for a while but sometimes you just need more time for certain things. This term I’m breaking up the day into 45 minute blocks – with an hour long block for swimming in the middle of the day and the kids will start sports and formal lessons in whatever physical activity they choose at the YMCA this fall.

We have joined two homeschooling groups in LA, though we’ve only been out to meet up with one of them. They are the sweetest and most supportive group of moms I’ve been around in a very, very long time. A lot of them are from out of state also and they are all so welcoming. Most importantly, the kids have made friends which was my only real concern with homeschooling. With that out of the way, I’m hella excited about this year – especially field trips! Here is a list of the places we’ll be going on field trips this year, some we’ve already been to but it’s worth going back!

Aquarium of the Pacific
The La Brea Tar Pits
California Science Center
Museum of Natural History
The Santa Barbara Maritime Museum
Kidspace Museum
Skirball Cultural Center

Every Saturday and Tuesday from 8am-1pm, farmers from over 60 California farms (from Fresno to San Diego) come together in Charles Wilson park in Torrance!

In Canada, our favorite farmer’s market staples were strawberries, blueberries, butternut squash and apples. Here though? Here we were excited about (and not disappointed by) the local citrus fruit. The concept of ‘local citrus’ is totally insane in Ontario, so having local lemon slices in my water last night and this morning was beyond awesome. Better than that, I got to meet the lady who picked them – yesterday morning! How sweet is that?! Same goes for the oranges we got, picked yesterday. Wee One #1 loves oranges, so he was hyped when we had a sample wedge and bought a few pounds of them. We also picked up fresh herbs, peppers, strawberries, pumpkin seeds, a HUGE bag of kettle corn, raw sage honeycomb from Pacifica and vegan sun-dried tomato pesto and basil pesto from Bolani.

This week I’ll make some treats with the honey and the Bolani dips and post about them.

We ended our day by finally (!!) getting LA library cards and discovered there are a zillion different districts and a heap of branches in each district! So many libraries to check out!

The South Bay Homeschool Network meets up today and I am so so so glad we hooked up with them. The parents are all really friendly and nice and my oldest has made a friend with similar interests and that’s defo a win!

My sister challenged me last week to only post photos taken on Fridays for Flashback Friday. I was down until I realized that most of my favorite photies were taken on Saturday nights in my kitchen with my girlfriends.

It’s been a little while since I was blond and just when I was starting to miss it, the California sunshine has started lightening my hair quite a bit. I am on as long a break as possible from damaging my hair, but with any luck (and many hours poolside and at the beach) my hair will be light without any chemicals.

PS – next week new recipes!

Saturday, March 7 2009 – My crazy hair, Gill’s framing hands. <3

As promised, here’s a little peek at some California adventures! Wee One #2’s Godparents were our first visitors since moving down here. They are some of our oldest friends but we’ve lived in different countries for the last nine years. They live on the west coast too and we are all so excited to be able to spend more time with each other! The La Brea Tar Pits was high in our list of places to see and our friends love, love, love museums so away we went. I learned so much!

Here’s a little background for you. The La Brea Tar Pits are a cluster of naturally occurring tar pits in the middle of Los Angeles. If you’ve heard of Hancock Park, that’s the park the city built around the tar pits. The tar here has been seeping up from the ground for tens of thousands of years. That itself is pretty amazing, and of course all the animals that have become trapped in the tar over all this time! The tar keeps the bones well preserved and I was really surprised at the kinds of animals found there like mammoths, wolves, horses, deer, llamas, camels (wait there were camels in LA at some point?!), bison, bears, ground sloths, even a woman (who has been dated at about 10,000 years!!) and of course the California state fossil, the saber toothed cat. Aside from things the general public would find interesting (there are also a lot of really beautiful gems found in the tar), there are all kinds of discoveries relevant to the scientific world like fossilized insects, plants and grains – not to mention 200-300 previously unknown species of bacteria!

All seven of us had a great afternoon wandering around Hancock Park and taking in the sites of all the different tar pits and the gardens surrounding them. We also spent hours inside the George C. Page Museum learning more about how the animals got trapped in the tar – and tested out an exhibit that gives you an idea of what it feels like to be trapped in it yourself!

Today, I’m linking up with The How To Mommy and Organizing Junkie for Menu Monday

After a whole lot of serious discussion, (involving a whole lot of meticulous pie charts made from a whole lot of painfully detailed spreadsheets), we have come to the decision that we’re going to be calling Los Angeles home for the foreseeable future. Of course this decision would have been a whole lot easier to arrive at if all we had to weigh was palm trees and beaches against pine trees and snow. I mention this to both explain my absence and to light a fire under me to post more shots of all we’ve been up to in California. More photos later this week, today is Menu Monday, so let’s get to it.

This Week’s Menu (Monday July 30 – Sunday August 5)

This spiced up version of the buttermilk fried chicken I made a couple of months ago was the perfect partner to these hybrid french fry/onion ring creations, which are really just a potato-ed up version of my favorite Leek Ring recipe. I was originally inspired by this post over at Spoon Fork Bacon but I ended up going in a totally different direction because we decided we wanted more of an onion ring base. I will eventually try the original recipe!

Just as with the original version of this recipe, fill a shallow(ish) bowl with the buttermilk and add the spices. Mix it up and plunk in your chicken. Let it sit in the fridge for about six hours. Once you’re ready to get frying heat your oil in a tall pot and get your coating ready, which is just the standard herbed flour mixture listed in the original recipe.
Shake off the excess buttermilk mixture and toss each piece of chicken in the flour mixture until it’s completely coated and then pop into the oil for about 6 minutes. I put about 10-15 pieces in at a time.
These go over really, really well at our house.
The potato rings are so simple it’s a little ridiculous. Literally mix all of the ingredients in a large bowl and coat your onions before putting them in the oil the same way as the chicken. The big difference here is watch them, do not make the mistake of turning your back for a second. They’re browned and ready in about a minute. That’s it! Then they can join their fried friends on some paper towel while one of your kitchen helpers makes a salad to redeem this meal a little. Unless they make a ceaser!
I had to make french fries too because the concept of these ‘potatoy onion rings’ was just too weird for the wee ones.

Today, I’m linking up with The How To Mommy and Organizing Junkie

Last week, we decided that Canadians living stateside should really do it up for Canada Day. I also promise to do something fun on the 4th!

Traditionally, when making poutine, you’d use cheese curds but guess what? There is only one shop in all of Los Angeles that sells cheese curds aaaand it’s not even really in LA, it’s in Long Beach. Also? I only discovered there was a shop in Long Beach that sold cheese curds immediately after I got back to LA from Long Beach. Insert dramatic sigh. The extremely informative dude at Whole Foods that laid all this out for me explained that cheese curds have to be super fresh and there’s not a lot of demand for them down here. Then he laughed and said ‘yeah, cheese curds aren’t big in Southern California’. Then I told him why I wanted them so he didn’t think I was crazy and since everyone seems to love Canadians down here, he suggested several different kinds of cheese to use in place of the curds and I settled on Doux de Montagne. Best decision I could have made. The cheese was really, really soft and it melted perfectly. However, since my husband is not a big fan of ‘unusual cheeses’, I made three versions of poutine. Soft Mozzarella, Monterey Jack and my amazing new love, Doux de Montagne!

Recipe after this week’s menu (well, if you can even call it a recipe)!

This week’s menu is super simple, there’s a lot of exploring and adventuring to do this week. This is our first week of summer vacation from homeschooling and we’re all pretty hyped about it. I’m insisting we continue with math and of course we will all keep reading, but generally they’re free to play at the beach and have picnics at the park and spend too long in the pool so we all get pruney and play board games into the night and whatever else their little hearts fancy (within reason). Hopefully we’ll have photies up on Sunday of these adventures.

This Week’s Menu

Sunday – Breaded Sole and Rice Pilaf with Ice Cream for dessert

All you need is:
French fries
Cheese
Beef gravy

First chop your cheese of choice into small easy to melt bits, then pop your fries in the oven and make your peameal bacon sandwich( if you’re getting all Canadian).
Aww look, Toronto sandwiches in love! Mr So Very Domestic and I, of course. Sorry, moving on. Plate your super hot fries and make sure your gravy is crazy hot.
Sprinkle your cheese bits on top of the fries and pour the gravy over top.
If you are getting Canadian, you’re going to want to go East Coast and have a Moosehead with this.