Monthly Archives: December 2006

Best Gifts for Homeschoolers, Books, Food and Drink, Fun Educational Stuff

Cookies and Books

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Possibly the nicest things ever invented, no? Cookies and books? Here’s my contribution to Jenn’s Awesome Virtual Cookie Exchange: my Aunt Cindy’s Saucepan Cookies.

Aunt Cindy, for the record, is my great-aunt, and her real name is Cinderella. I am not kidding.

These yummy morsels aren’t really holiday cookies, but I love them, and they’re easy (no baking!), and with oatmeal and peanut butter as the main ingredients, you can eat them for sustenance while you’re making Christmas cookies.

I couldn’t actually find my copy of Aunt Cindy’s recipe (Hush! I just moved in!), but I googled "oatmeal peanut butter saucepan cookies" and found several identical recipes. This one is from About.com (and I didn’t know that bit about making sure it boils hard for one minute, so aren’t you glad I Googled?):

No Bake Chocolate Peanut Butter Cookies

There’s just one trick; you have to make sure that the
sugar mixture boils hard for at least one minute, otherwise the cookies
will be sugary instead of creamy.

INGREDIENTS:

  • 2 cups sugar
  • 1/2 cup milk
  • 1/2 cup cocoa
  • pinch salt
  • 1/2 cup butter
  • 3/4 cup peanut butter
  • 3 cups oatmeal

PREPARATION:

In
large saucepan, combine sugar, milk, cocoa, salt, and butter and mix
well. Bring to a boil and cover saucepan to allow steam to wash sugar
crystals down sides of pan. Boil mixture for 1 minute. Then remove from
heat and stir in peanut butter until smooth.

Add oatmeal and mix well.
Drop mixture by spoonfuls onto parchment lined baking sheets or Silpat
sheets.* Let cool until you can touch the mixture; then reshape the
cookies to make them more a ball shape. Let cool completely; store at
room temperature. You can also pour this mixture into a 9" square pan
that has been greased with unsalted butter, let cool, then cut into
squares.

*We always dropped ours onto waxed paper.

As for the books, I thought new readers might like a look at the "Books We Love" series I ran on Bonny Glen last year. Lots of gift ideas there, which ties in with the "Best Gifts for Homeschoolers" thing I’ve been doing.

Books We Love, Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

And don’t forget to drop by Jenn’s Journal for a list of all the other Cookie Exchange participants!

Family Adventures

Too Much Partying?

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Patioboy

Alas, no. Our poor birthday boy spent his (and Daddy’s) big day battling a respiratory infection.

Rugboy

Rilla attempts to muster up some birthday excitement, but Wonderboy isn’t buying.

Ah well, it was a snuggly birthday instead of an energetic one. "Hey kid, what do you want for your birthday?" "Antibiotics!"

Our big ole three-year-old is doing much better today. And our 38-year-old is fabulous.

Food

Quickie About Chickie

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This week, in our ongoing efforts toward Getting Settled, I resumed my old (sporadic) practice of jotting down quick notes about what we did/read/discussed/made each day. I do this in blog form* because that works better for me than paper. Yesterday I added the new chores & meals schedule the girls and I drew up. Chicken is a staple for us, and it’s on the menu twice a week. Tonight, Friday, is grilled chicken night. I have a big bag of frozen boneless chicken breasts, and I’ll thaw a few, slather them with Tastfefully Simple Raspberry Chipotle sauce and cook them on my trusty George Foreman grill.

(Have I gushed about my George Foreman here? I love him. He is my friend. He makes my life much easier. He feeds me panini sandwiches, and there’s pretty much no faster way to my heart.)

Anyway, I was reading Genevieve‘s delightful blog this morning and saw that she has linked to an article full of recipes for grilled chicken.  Very useful. I’ll have to give some of these a try, especially the nut-crusted recipe. Yum.

*As blogs go, my daily journal is nothing special. I ignore it sometimes for months at a stretch. It isn’t really fit for public viewing, but I share the link in the spirit of putting people at ease. It’s so easy to read people’s blogs (real blogs, I mean) and feel overwhelmed by how much Great Stuff everyone is doing. I think it’s useful, once in a while, to see how much (or as is often the case, how little) REALLY happens in the course of a real live day. And what I love is that even on the days when I have comparatively little to record, there is always, always, some great conversation or moment of discovery to remember.

Special Education, Special Needs Kids, Speech Delay, Wonderboy

Post-Eval Update

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Yesterday’s speech evaluation went very well. Wonderboy was obligingly talkative, so the speech/language pathologist (we’ll call her the SLP) was able to get a good idea of the range of sounds he can make. She was delighted, really excited, about the extent of his expressive and receptive language—his sentences seemed to thrill her as much as they do me. Of course, she could not understand much of what he says; his intelligibility to strangers is maybe 80%. But by the end of the session, she was catching a lot more of his words.

I had all the girls with me, of course, and they set up camp with their books and drawing materials at a table in the same room. They proved most useful in keeping the boy chatting; every time the SLP tried to get him talking about an object, he picked it up and trotted around to show his sisters, addressing them each by name.

"I can see you’re a big help with your brother’s therapy," said the SLP, which is absolutely correct. As we were leaving, she actually thanked the girls on Wonderboy’s behalf. It was a great moment. You always wonder what public school employees are going to think about your homeschooling brood, and it’s nice to leave feeling like you made a good impression. I really think she grasped the tremendous impact on Wonderboy’s progress (in both speech and motor skills) made by the constant interaction with his sisters.

All four of them! He considers the baby his special charge; he is always looking out for her welfare, bringing her toys, putting a pillow behind her when she is sitting on the floor. At the evaluation, some of his clearest words were about Rilla and the stroller.

We talked about the scheduling challenges, and as Peggy suggested in yesterday’s comments, the SLP is eager to accomodate our needs. There’s one 8 a.m. small-group session that currently has only two children in it; since my girls can come and hang out on the other side of the partitioned room, we should be able to make it work without too much disruption to our schedule (such as it is).

Next step: the Goals meeting. This is where the SLP and I will sit down with the district audiologist and the district psychologist to draw up the language for Wonderboy’s IEP. It’s scheduled for January, after the school break. Until then, we’ll just keep on doing what we’re doing, which seems to be working!

Comic Books

Comic Books Again

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Not long ago I wrote about how hard it is to find kid-appropriate comic books these days. Zack Smith agrees.

In a much-publicized keynote address
at the 2004 Eisner Awards, Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Chabon argued
that in the quest to achieve respect as an adult medium, comic books
had abandoned children.

Well, yeah.

Marvel and DC have become so oriented toward teen and adult readers
that material construed as acceptable for 8-12-year-olds is set in an
outside universe, usually labeled as ‘Adventures’. There’s some
excellent work being done here, but it’s not going to find an audience
with the readers of the mainstream books.

My hubby was the original editor of the Adventures line. He pretty much created the genre, though he would say he was one of several people involved. During his time as editor of Batman Adventures, books he edited won something like five Eisners and two Harvey Awards—those are the biggie awards in comics. When I was packing for our move, I found a box of award plaques hidden away in the darkest corner of the basement. He also wrote a three-year run of Gotham Adventures, which are some of my children’s favorite things to read. Funny, funny stuff, and great art.

Smith continues:

Let us also be thankful for the fact that there are once again Disney
books being published in the US (and that poor Don Rosa can finally
read his stories in his native tongue), that John Stanley’s LITTLE LULU
is back in print after all these decades, and that there are still
collections of TINTIN and ASTERIX in print.
But it’s worth noting that those books are either major licenses, or
they’re reprints of 50-year-old material.

What if someone wants to create something new for kids?

The independent market is already pretty treacherous on that score.

The latest issue of POLLY AND THE PIRATES, a superb all-ages comic by
Ted Naifeh, sold 2,400 copies, according to Diamond sales figures.
Issue #2 of Marvel’s CIVIL WAR, by comparison, sold 240,000 copies.
Without speaking to CIVIL WAR’s quality, it’s clearly not a comic for
kids. Someone going into a comic shop is 100 times more likely to find
a copy of that than POLLY AND THE PIRATES.

Not only that. Today’s comic shops are NOT places you want to take little kids. Ohhh, no.

But there is a strong market in bookstores for all-ages material. Manga
is the obvious example, but there are others. JM DeMatteis and Mike
Ploog’s excellent ABADAZAD was rescued from the implosion of its
publisher, CrossGen, and recently revived as a series of illustrated
books from Disney/Hyperion. These volumes combine heavily illustrated
text with sequences of the original comic and – one can assume – new
comic book material as time goes on. Mark Crilley’s AKIKO has enjoyed a
second life as a series of illustrated novels. TRAVELS OF THELONIUS, a
new hardcover by Susan Schade and Jon Buller, takes a route similar to
ABADAZAD by combining comic book sequences with passages of text. This
may very well be the new route for children’s comics – comics as books.

I hadn’t heard of Thelonius yet, but I’ll have to get my hands on a copy. I love Jon Buller’s illustrations. I first encountered his work in the pages of Aliens for Breakfast and its sequels, which were written by Stephanie Spinner, my boss at Random House back in the day.

Backing up to TINTIN for a minute, an amusing interjection: while I’m sitting here typing this, Beanie is drawing with crayons at the table behind me. A minute ago I congratulated her on using her pencil grip instead of the fist grip she prefers. "Oh!" she exclaimed. "I forgot to show you my NEW grip! It’s my cigarette grip!"

"Your what?"

"My cigarette grip. See?" She demonstrated, holding the crayon lightly between two fingertips in a perfect forties-starlet ciggie pose.

"Um, where did you learn that one?" I asked, trying to sound casual.

"From Tintin!" chirped Miss Bean.

First the Pillsbury Doughboy, now Tintin. Is there no one left I can trust? Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, you stay away from my precious children!

But back to Zack Smith (and this is the exciting part):

This [publishing comics in book form] isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But it doesn’t auger well for those
who might try doing a serialised monthly or bimonthly comic for
children outside of Marvel or DC.

There are exceptions to every rule. One in this case is MOUSE GUARD,
a small press series by David Petersen reminiscent of the REDWALL
series of children’s books. It’s received excellent reviews and plenty
of media attention, and often sells out at shops that carry it. But
it’s still under a lot of people’s radars, and it’s still too early to
call it a breakout hit.

Coverwrap4sm
Have any of you heard of this? Mouse Guard? I hadn’t, and I am psyched to know it’s out there. I’ll try to rustle up some copies for a review. Peeking at the covers, I can see I love the art already. If these are good, my young Redwall fans will be ecstatic. Stay tuned…

Smith closes with a question: "Why is it important for kids to read comics?" He presents some possible answers—that comics are a great medium and ought to be available for all ages, that comics can hook kids on reading, that there are incredibly talented writers and artists in the field and it would be good to share that creative genius the youngest readers. But I find the question itself intriguing. Of course it begs another question—"IS it important for kids to read comics?" What do you think? Are comic books an integral part of (Western) childhood? Do they teach something or inspire in a way that other types of books don’t?

General Homeschooling, Hearing Loss, Special Education, Special Needs Kids, Speech Delay, Wonderboy

Homeschoolers and Special Education

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Today my ClubMom topics, homeschooling and special-needs kids, come together. I’m taking Wonderboy to our local public school—yes! I said public school!—for a meeting and evaluation with the special education office, a speech therapist, and the district audiologist. Even though we plan to home-educate this child like all our others, we can and will avail ourselves of the special services made available to all children according to federal law.

From birth to age three, qualifying children can receive services such as speech therapy, physical therapy, and occupational therapy through Early Intervention programs. Wonderboy received all of the above, in our home, beginning at about four months of age. (For PT & OT, that is. When his hearing loss was diagnosed months later, we added speech & hearing therapies.) The first step in the Early Intervention process is an evaluation that leads to the writing of a big ole document called an IFSP—an Individualized Family Service Plan.

At age three, children age out of Early Intervention and from that point on, the special services they qualify for come through the local public school district. The IFSP gives way to a new document, the IEP, or Individualized Education Plan. The IEP spells out what services the child requires and how the district is to go about answering the need. The whole IEP process can be tricky to navigate, or so I’ve picked up from several friends (public-schoolers, not homeschoolers) whose older children were diagnosed with learning disabilities or autism spectrum disorders. Those parents had to be sharp-witted advocates for their children to make sure that all their classroom needs were being met.

For us, it’s a bit simpler. Wonderboy "graduated" from PT before we left Virginia (amazing, amazing! miracle boy!), but he will almost certainly continue to need some speech therapy during the next several years. His verbal language skills are growing by leaps and bounds—really, it’s so exciting; he’s using long sentences now, like when I hollered "Ladies! Dinner’s ready in five minutes!" and he BOOKED down the hall shouting, "GIRLS! Time to eat! Dinner!" Excellent progress. But of course since he still lacks most consonants, it sounded more like "GUH! I oo ee! Ginnah!"

I want to make sure he has every advantage. I know his verbal skills will continue to improve naturally as he gets older. But he may need extra help to master certain sounds. And so after we got settled in here, I called the district spec ed office to see what kind of speech program they have. After a lot of faxing (his IFSP and audiology reports) and phone calls—just the normal process!—we set up an evaluation with the aforementioned folks.

Today we’ll be meeting to determine what goes into his IEP. I’m going to blog the process, because I haven’t found too much else out there about homeschoolers and IEPs. I might hold off on attending the speech therapy sessions until next fall, depending on how today’s eval goes. At Wonderboy’s age (he’ll be three this week!), speech therapy takes place in small parent-child sessions at the school up the road. That sounds great—but I can already see that timing will be tricky. I don’t know that I want to chop up a morning once a week with a jaunt to speech therapy. That’ll monkey with my older kids’ schedule.

But we can figure out the logistics later. Right now, step one: the speech evaluation.

Carnivals

Linky

Hey! Look! There in my drafts folder! Between the unfinished book reviews and the reviews of unfinished books. An announcement! About the November edition of the Carnival of Children’s Literature! Yup, that’s the one. The Thanksgiving edition hosted by A Readable Feast. Note to self: If you don’t move it out of drafts, no one will actually SEE the announcement. Whadda maroon…)

Whoops. Really thought I’d put that one through two weeks ago. Well, if you missed the Carnival then, be sure to check it out now, because there’s some great stuff there.

The next edition will be hosted by Kelly of Big A little a. Details forthcoming. I promise!

Other posts of interest, most of which I meant to link to days ago:

The Loveliness of Advent, a gorgeous collection of posts put together by Jenn of Family in Feast and Feria. One of my favorites is Alice‘s simple "Advent cubes" idea—an easy and meaningful way to make the most of the season with your little ones. Alice, as we all know, has a genius way with crafts, but what I especially love about this idea is that it is so do-able for even the time- and craft-talent-deprived like me. A simple bag of wooden cubes ($2.99 at my local Michael’s) transforms into a season’s worth of rich activity and discussion for mom and children.

The Late Autumn Field Day at By Sun and Candlelight. Okay, I admit this one made me homesick for Virginia. But in a good way. All those gorgeous red and golden leaves!

(Don’t worry, I’m not blind to the beauties of Southern California. I’m a thin-blooded gal, the kind who is always cold in her fingers and toes. These balmy December days are suiting me very nicely, thank you! No coats! No boots! Iced tea year round! I’ll be fine.)

In other news, yesterday brought a surprising announcement from homeschooling issues blogger Spunky. She is moving on to other endeavors. Spunky, we’ll miss your coverage and commentary. Warm wishes to you and your family.

Uncategorized

Tune in Tomorrow!

Homeschooling blogger PHAT Mommy will be a special guest on tomorrow’s BlogTalkRadio show. The topic, hosted by Kristen Chase of Motherhood Uncensored and The Mom Trap, is:

School Your Children Well: We’re talking about tot yoga, college-prep
preschool, homeschooling v public school… Featuring Alex Elliot,
PhatMommy and Pundit Mom.

Shannon, aka PHAT Mommy, is also the blogger behind Homeschool Hacks. She and the other guests will be answering phone questions, so if you’d like to call in, just click the BlogTalkRadio link above for info. The program begins at 10:00 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday night, and the homeschooling segment should start around 10:30.

Food and Drink

Bread-Blogging

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It’s all your fault, you…you inspiring bakers, you. YOU got us hooked on baking bread. Hooked! It is flour city around here!

Now that we’re collecting recipes and hunting up breadmaking advice wherever we can find it, Jane and I figured we could use a place to keep everything organized. Which means, yes, another blog. I know, I know. But this one isn’t going to be fancy or formal—it’s more like a big file folder to stuff with recipes and, um, stuff. Contributions will be sporadic and unpolished. Jane will help.

Firstrising

I’m mentioning it here because I’d love you to keep sending me links to bread-related posts. The whole bread thing was a little off topic for this blog (although there is PLENTY of home education happening in our kitchen these days, believe you me), so I thought I’d better take the discussion somewhere else. Come visit! Don’t expect much!