Grandma Jan and Cousin Ruby got the children Perler Beads last week.  I have fond memories of making Perler Bead crafts with friends as a child, and was pleased to see how much the children enjoyed them, too.

Hal spent the first few minutes just running his fingers through the beads in the pie tin.  As a 3 year-old, he really enjoys the process of tactile play more than completing a project.  When he settled down and started to work with the form, applying each bead one by one, fine-tuning his hand-eye coordination and fine-pincher grip.

The girls, being 7 and almost 9, focused on the design element, and did the ironing themselves.  And we all helped clean Perler beads up from every corner of the living room floor afterward. 

For more on tactile play for the preschool child, please come back and check out tomorrow’s post here on sensory play, and also this thoughtful post by Not Just Cute.

The children are really enjoying this book.  It’s those days where we have “nothing to do” that the kids engage in deep, meaningful learning on their own terms.

This week we’ve been playing a lot of card games (Bea’s favorite), which reinforce cooperation, strategy, addition, subtraction, memory recall for the girls, and help Hal ( age 3 1/2)  with number recognition.

Our friend Dr. Ellie gave the children this paper punch-out book, and Hal has particularly been enjoying the city play mat in it.  It has been really neat to see him maturing in his play, and listening to the detailed conversations his toys have with each other. 

In the mornings, when it’s been too cold for the kids to play outside, and we have down time, all of the children have been sculpting with Bendaroos.  Bea likes to create her own designs (a “long neck” dinosaur, above), while Ruth prefers to follow the directions in the pack (a Toco Toucan, below)

What learning are your kids engaging in when they have nothing scheduled to do?

Many thanks to my mother for getting the kids a subscription to Highlights Magazine’s Top Secret Adventures!!  Ever issue brings a new mystery to solve in a new country.  It’s one of the best structured homeschooling activities we’ve ever worked on as a family.

We’re currently making our way around China attempting to solve a crime, and in the process learning geography, history, anthropology!  We’re solving logic puzzles and mazes, and breaking secret codes!

We can’t wait to solve the mystery, and look forward to next month’s adventure!

Just a quick post to share the recipe for my favorite childhood snack.

We were given 40 lbs of honey (albeit, crystallized, so I’ve had to de-crystallize it in batches), so I’ve been trying to come up with ways to use it in my cooking.  We’ve made several batches of jam, substituting honey for a portion of the sugar (more on that later this week.), and tomorrow we’ll be canning peaches with honey instead of sugar and also starting a batch of mead.

I wanted to pass along a recipe that my mom used to make me for an afternoon snack – it’s super simple and quick to make, uses whole, natural ingredients, and kids love it.

Larksong’s Energy “Candy”

Time: less than 10 min start to finish - no baking!

1 cup natural nut butter (we use the grinder at the grocer’s – no added sugar, just nuts – peanut, almond or cashew – all are yummy!)

3/4  cup dry powdered milk

1/4 cup wheat germ (I keep mine in the freezer – it goes rancid easily)

1/2 cup honey

Additional 1/4 cup wheat germ (to roll balls in)

Directions: 1)  Combine first four ingredients in a bowl and let your kids use their hands to knead them together until a homogeneous, non-sticky dough forms.

2) Pinch off scant tablespoons of dough, roll them in your hands until they form a ball, and then roll the ball in additional wheat germ to coat.

3)Enjoy now with a big glass of milk, or store in the fridge up to 3 days.

We’ve been studying a lot about map reading and map making, and yesterday afternoon I brought out a huge sheet of posterboard and let the children create and label their own “treasure map”.  (Little Hen’s idea is to re-create the map in real-life in the backyard and then use their map to find the “treasure”.   Pretty clever idea, actually.

My only concern is creating the “grape soda lake” they drew on the map…  

If the rain holds out, I think the girls will have a great time with their treasure hunt this afternoon.

I was feeling a bit under the weather, so while the kids worked on the map, we all listened to some Grimm’s Fairy Tales on book CD, and I had a chance to sit down and rest and work on the wheel.

The roving is some Brown Sheep mill-end roving we dyed with leftover Easter egg dye (for instructions, see here.)  I’ll ply the singles and it’ll make a nice pastel sock yarn.

Here’s what I got done yesterday.  Not too shabby for my second attempt at using the wheel (after some serious practice with scrap roving), don’t you think?    I hope to get some more done later today as we listen to the rest of Grimm’s:

It’s hard to believe that Tum Tum will be TWO next month…he’s outgrowing so much of his sweet baby-ness.  I loved watching him drawing intently and singing to himself all the while – he’s growing into such a big boy so very fast…bittersweet, really.

We scrapped all other plans for today,

and simply played in in the dirt.

As Firecracker said, “There’s nothin’ more natural than gettin’ dirty.”

Somehow, in the midst of playing “dirt fairies”, “cruel dirt queen who makes her workers dig all day”, “climb dirt mountain”, “search for worms and buried treasure”, and “fill and empty buckets of dirt over and over”, we managed to spread just shy of two yards more compost over the front beds, finally completing them.

Tomorrow – chard, beets, kale, mustard greens and potatoes are sown out front.  The coming weeks – finish backyard beds, plant more veggies, mulch paths, plant a few fruit trees, and finish chicken coop/run.

Our front yard before this weekend’s garden work day:

And this afternoon:

Many thanks to all of the volunteers who helped on Saturday!!  We are excited to see the garden grow and develop in the coming months!

We’re working on a converting our front lawn into veggie beds, and the unseasonably warm and dry weather has helped us get a jump start on sheet mulching.  Goodbye lawn, hello permaculture landscape!  While Tum Tum and I spread cardboard, straw, manure and compost, Little Hen and her Daddy were busy building cold frames out of scrap wood and old windows from the ReStore. (Firecracker was either resting inside, or resting curled up in a nest of blankets on the driveway, since she not only had strep throat, but then a head-to-toe reaction to the amoxicillin meant to cure the strep.  Poor kid. )

(Collage posters Little Hen made calling for Garden Volunteers – I wrote the words, but she went to town with the scissors, a stack of old issues of Mother Earth News and a glue stick.)

Last year we worked at Penelope’s Garden, but this year, we’ll be hosting a community-building garden of our own.   It will be years before our seedling fruit trees and berry bushes obscure many sunny patches of our yard, so we thought we’d make good use of it all and put in veggie beds to grow fresh, organic produce for families of limited means.  This weekend, a team of volunteers will help us finish installing the front yard beds and create many more in the backyard, so that the organic veggies grown here and cared for by volunteers can be delivered to the families at Birch Community Services, a local non-profit serving needy families in Portland.

We saved a little time for planting poppies and sweet pea seeds, rhubarb and asparagus crowns.  We also started tomato, artichoke, and cardoon seeds in pots in the basement.   The dry evenings allowed me to plant blueberry bushes, dozens and dozens of strawberry plants, and a red currant after dinners last week.

As Little Hen’s sign (which she hung on the front door) says -”Gardening – You want to sign up?”  If you’re interested in volunteering to grow food for needy families in the Portland area, and teaching those families to grow their own nutritious, organic produce, please e-mail me at

angela(dot)baker(dot)knits(at)gmail(dot)com

I’m working on setting up a little blog dedicated to the garden this year.  More on that soon.   If you have any ideas on a name  for the Birch Community Services’  educational and food producing organic garden hosted at the Baker’s house, I’d LOVE to hear them (short, sweet and whimsical is best).

Happy gardening!  The rains and cold weather are on the way, so I’m sure I’ll be posting more from indoors later this week!

This photo pretty well sums up our morning literary activities of late.

First thing this morning, we had to get a bit pot of chili blanco going on the stove, and batch of brownies in the oven, since it’s our turn to bring dinner to our homegroup.   While Firecracker helped measure out the spices and crush the garlic, Little Hen was in the living room, practicing some yoga with her Yoga Pretzels cards (she says “Warrior 1″ is her favorite pose).  She does 3 or 4 cards each morning, when she remembers.

After the brownies came out, we sat down for a little reading.  We are trying to read two stories a day, and the children all really enjoy and look forward to our snuggle time on the sofa while we read and discuss the stories from Scripture.

For Christmas, my mother surprised us with a copy of my favorite book of children’s poems – Tirra Lirra: Rhymes Old and New, published in 1932 and now out of print (I have scoured used bookshops for it for years, but she was able to quickly find a copy used on Amazon.com for next nothing.)  It is a wonderful, whimsical book fo children’s poems, and the girls got a big kick out of reading some of the poems today.

The poems in this book are full of delightful imagery, tell rich stories, and crack us all up.   I think we’ll keep reading a few every day for now – they enjoyed them so much.

I’ll leave you with the poem from this book that was my favorite as a child – Eletelephony :

Once there was an elephant,

Who tried to use the telephant -

No!  no!  I mean an elephone

Who tried to use the telephone -

(Dear me! I am not certain quite

That even now I’ve got it right.)

Howe’er it was, he got his trunk

Entangled in the telephunk :

The more he tried to get it free

The louder buzzed the telephee -

(I fear I’d better drop this song

Of elephop and telephong!)

– Laura E. Richards.

The dolls hosted a little Christmas tea party for their sparrow, cardinal and swan friends yesterday morning.   Pretend mint tea, fruitcake, gingerbread, and bird seed were served under the Christmas tree.

The girls were inspired by my favorite childhood Christmas book – Tasha Tudor’s, A Doll’s Christmas.  If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it.  It is out of print, but you may be able to find it at your local library.