Adventures in Home Learning: Episode 3

This week has been marked by a lesson in why cakes without sugar don’t rise as high and aren’t really edible. Also, how to make papier mache paste and create our own Easter egg decorations from what we have. (And a little bit of if we do it wrong the first time, we need to go back and do it again.)

I can’t say we’ve made much progress in buckling down and pretending we’re having school at home. We’re not. Every day I have to kick her off her device in the morning but she does it fairly willingly. She writes down a list of things she’s going to do and then starts doing them. My husband or I check them, and she’s done with them by lunch time.

Last week we started the process of making papier mache eggs for Easter decorations. We had water balloons and Minecraft balloons left over in the cupboard and some newspapers in the backroom. We made a recipe of paper mache paste up from https://artlessonsforkids.me/2011/04/24/papier-mache-greek-vases-in-grade-seven/ and had to let it cool. I decided to try using fabric instead of newspaper on at least one egg. It turned out pretty good!

It was an interesting process. For some reason I actually remembered my elementary school art teacher demonstrating how you wipe the excess paste off the newspaper before applying it and I shared that tip with the munchkin. As usual, she came up with her own way of doing it – using her fingers to apply some paste to the balloon then put the strip of paper on.

She chose to do one big balloon while I did two little ones with either fabric or newspaper strips. I figured it would take 1 to 3 days for the forms to dry completely so we could paint. I hung them up by threading a needle and passing it through the tail of the balloon that stuck out to create a loop that I could hook over a clothes hanger.

The big one turned out much better than my little ones. I liked the fabric, but the little silver one made me think dragons egg more than chicken egg so I decorated it with glitter glue for a jeweled egg look. The munchkin is still adding layers of paint to hers but she says she is going for a yellow egg with purple polka dots.

Today we were experimenting with making chocolate cake with brown rice flour and it was going really well, until we forgot the sugar component. Turns out cake without sugar is really flat and salty. The munchkin said it “tastes like a barbecue gone wrong.” We talked about why, cleaned everything up and started over. 

The plants are doing well, we’ve got tiny flower seedlings, leggy spinach and radishes, with the carrots being slow starters, but the onions never did sprout.

We’ve just finished reading The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper at bedtime and I highly recommend it. I’ll be putting a review up on Friday. It’s an old Newberry Award winner about a boy who lives in England on a farm with his family but finds out on his eleventh birthday that he is the last of the “Old Ones,” come to stop the dark from rising. It’s one of my favorite books and I’ve read it many times over. I was so glad to finally share it with Sammy, though she hasn’t taken to it quite the way she did The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. But, she says she wants to read the next book in the series, The Greenwitch. I’m looking forward to it myself.