Play Dough Portraits

a recent sunny day, I brought out all of the different kinds of play dough that I've been cooking up recently, and Sydney and I had ourselves a private little play dough party, culminating in an etsy play dough photo shoot, complete with light tent and sunny window. It was a Play Dough Portrait Party!

We shot green pine-scented play dough:

 
 Pink peppermint-scented play dough:

 
 
 
 And naturally white, unscented play dough:

 
 
My favorite part of making a big batch of homemade play dough is dumping the essential oil and coloring on top of the finished play dough into my Kitchenaid mixer with the dough hook inserted. I turn the mixer on high and let it knead the dough smooth, blend the color, and infuse the essential oil, which wafts throughout the entire house while it's working. A few days ago a friend came over and commented, "Your house smells so good!"

Yeah, it's from the play dough I made a week ago. Fringe benefits, you know.

From A to Z in the Evening

Willow thought that it would be fun to organize all her library books alphabetically by title:

 
The funny thing is that I remember doing the exact same thing as a kid--I'd drag out all my books and spend a whole Saturday, halfway organizing, mostly browsing and reading and flipping to find favorite chapters.

So I sat down with Willow, and taught her not to alphabetize with "The" or "A" or "An," but mostly she and I halfway organized, and mostly browsed and read and flipped to find favorite chapters. We spent the whole evening that way, and then I sent her off to bed.

The Way that the Writing Gets Written

In longhand.

In a notebook.

In several different colors of inkpen.

For a couple of paragraphs, in magic marker.

Over the course of weeks.

Sitting in the back of the room during Story Time.

Sitting on a stool next to the Grapevine Climber at the Wonderlab.

Sitting on a quiet section of the bleachers, away from all the other parents and all the action, at the girls' homeschool Valentine's Day party.

One page at a time, sometimes one paragraph at a time, sometimes one sentence at a time.

Sometimes not even that much.

In a way that looks like this:

It may not look like much, but it's excellent. And I'll tell you what--following my girls around while I write, asking them to hold on for a minute before they speak so that I can finish my thought, stopping in mid-sentence when I'm called away so that I'll know exactly how to begin again when I have time, putting the period on a final sentence and then startling the child playing next to me by exclaiming, "Finished!"?

Really, there's nothing that beats it.

Homeschool Science: Mentos Takes the Gas out of Soda

This would be a more relevant experiment for children who drink soda. It would help them contextualize the science behind the sensations that they experience when they drink soda, and aid them in internalizing that the laws of science lie underneath even the smallest aspects of our lives.

My girls don't have much experience with carbonated beverages, but we still find ourselves performing this experiment at least weekly, simply because it's cool.

So the idea behind the Mentos and Coke experiment is that soda contains carbon dioxide gas, and Mentos releases that carbon. Mentos has lots of teeny-tiny little pits on its surface, something that I think that we could see on our pocket microscope (I'm not completely sure if that's what we saw, or if it was artifacts from the light source + shiny candy surface). The teeny-tiny little pits have teeny-tiny little air bubbles in them. It's exposure to air--sort of--that releases the carbon dioxide from the soda. Really, since more carbon dioxide is dissolved in the soda than the soda can support in typical atmospheric conditions, it doesn't take much to make the carbon dioxide escape, and so although Mentos isn't much, it is enough.

Mentos drops into the soda, the nucleation points (those teeny-tiny little pits) attract the carbon dioxide, and the carbon dioxide gas goes up while the Mentos fall down, crossing the entire depth of the soda. Add six more Mentos to multiply the effect, and you're in business.

We've done this experiment before by just dropping the Mentos into the two-liter bottle of diet soda (sugar-free=less sticky), but because the effect occurs so quickly, the person who did the dropping was far too busy running away from the spew to actually observe it. I finally sprang for the depth-charge tube from Steve Spangler Science, which our big-box craft store stocked, in preparation for science fair season, I suppose--and I could use my 40%-off coupon!

The depth-charge tube sports a trigger pin system, and that was all it took to convince Sydney, who'd watched the previous experiments from the safety of the house, to actually come outside and run the experiment herself (this video is a little loud, because I'm shouting across the street to Sydney, but I'm about a foot away from the video recorder):

The passerby, whom I didn't notice at the time, is actually my next-door neighbor taking a walk, and just after this experiment she came over and basically asked, "Why are you always doing crazy stuff outside your house?" It turns out that she, too, used to homeschool!

It's a small, small, awesome and small world.

Pumpkin Monkey Bread, Or, Why I Have Heartburn

Trolling for other uses for my last pound or so of pumpkin pie brioche from Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day, I happened upon this pumpkin pie brioche monkey bread recipe from  Something Shiny. It's a brilliant recipe, surprisingly similar to our baked donuts, and the process was easy to make kid-friendly (and vegan!).

Basically, you put some Earth Balance in a bowl and nuke it til it's melted, and you put cinnamon, sugar, and pumpkin pie spice in another bowl and whisk it together. Everything else is the same as the recipe at Something Shiny--greased bundt pan, oven set to 350 degrees, pumpkin pie brioche dough ready and waiting.

Tear off a hunk of bread dough, roll it into a ball, dunk it in the melted Earth Balance--

 --roll it around in the cinnamon-sugar--

--and pop it in the pan. Repeat:

 Bake that big ol' mess for 35 minutes, turn it out of the pan, and gasp at the awesomely butter-shiny deliciousness that now rests in front of you:

Normally, at this point I'd show you a picture of us eating and enjoying our monkey bread, but I have to tell you, sometimes something is so delicious that your family digs right in and starts eating it, and you look at them tearing off pieces of monkey bread and shoving them in their mouths, sputtering through those full mouths at how yummy each mouthfull is, and you think...

We'll just not take a picture of people eating like wolverines today. Use your imagination instead, if you must.

And yes, I think that cinnamon-sugar gives me heartburn.

Wet-on-Wet Watercolor Valentines

Having to make the number of Valentines that the girls are having to make this year is a novelty for us. At Montessori, the children were encouraged to make Valentines only for whomever they wanted--instead of 30 mass-produced Valentines, the children usually received anywhere from six to a dozen lovingly hand-crafted Valentines from their dearest schoolmates, and they could make their own Valentines to give to their own dearest schoolmates in one inspired crafting session.

That's not really practical for the homeschool Valentine's Day party that the children are attending next week, of course. Although there are some homeschooled children that the girls have playdates with, just as there are some Montessori children and some public school children and some preschool children that they play with, there will also be homeschooled children at the party who may not know anyone else yet, and so obviously everybody needs a Valentine, not just the special buddies.

A couple dozen Valentines per kid is a LOT of Valentines, however, and so I've found myself setting up little art projects every day, encouraging the girls to play with a fun supply or a method that we haven't used in a while, and in the process doing a few Valentines. The girls, for instance, LOVE to play with their dad's Prismacolor markers, and so several Valentines got knocked out in that art project. Wet-on-wet watercolor is also super fun--

 --and that's how Sydney finished her Valentines:

Will hasn't had her nose out of a book or her face out of a computer (Newest obsession? Jumpstart Second Grade World from the library) long enough to come even close to finishing her Valentines, so I still get to whip out the Do-a-Dot markers, and then perhaps the heart-shaped rubber stamps, and I think I'm going to see if they'd like to send postcard Valentines to their other friends and family, so don't worry, the Valentines aren't nearly over yet.

Pumpkin Pie Baked Donuts

I have a LOT of pumpkin puree.

Several days after Halloween, I discovered big bins of locally-grown pumpkins at our grocery store, marked down to 50 cents each. I bought six of them, stuck them down in the basement, and every now and then I haul one up, chop it into pieces, roast the seeds, cook the rest of it down in a big pot, run it through the food mill, and freeze it into two-cup portions.

I do this every year, mind you, with one huge pumpkin, and the gallon Ziplock bag that the pumpkin puree fills, frozen in its two-cup portions, generally lasts until the next year's pumpkin. And so, with the six years' of pumpkin puree that I now have in stock, I'm trying to be a bit more creative.

In other news, Willow wanted to make donuts again. With pumpkin on my mind, I turned this into a chance to use up some pumpkin puree (and add some healthy vitamins into an otherwise worthless confectionary).

Willow and I mixed up a batch of Pumpkin Pie Brioche from Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day. I ALWAYS have a batch of some kind or other of their bread dough in the refrigerator, but usually it's a multigrain bread dough, and so now I have two different batches of bread dough in the refrigerator--ah, the troubles that do plague us!

After the bread dough had risen and refrigerated (no-knead doughs can be a bit sticky, and so refrigerating them until right before you want to use them is useful), Syd rolled it out--

 --and it's February, so obviously we cut it into hearts:

 
 While the donuts baked, the girls indulged in their FAVORITE baking activity:

 
 
 
It's entitled Scoop out a Bunch of Flour and Make a Big Mess with It. It's a great game, and the girls can play it for longer than it takes for the bread to bake. I should tell you, though, that they do clean it up entirely by themselves afterwards--I empty the vacuum and take another pass with the spray cleaner, and that's about it.

We've done baked donuts before--our original recipe came from Knead it, Punch it, Bake it--and so we've gotten the method down to a point where I far prefer these baked donuts to store-bought deep-fried ones. I melt some Earth Balance into one bowl, whisk sugar and cinnamon and nutmeg (and pumpkin pie spice blend!) together into another bowl, and we dunk, then dip, then munch:

It's not really an expectation that any donuts actually make it to the serving platter afterwards, at least not until you're nice and full and comfy-feeling.