http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/thecuriouscottage/ en-us Homeschool Blogger Mon, 16 Nov 2009 13:38:00 -0600 Mon, 16 Nov 2009 13:38:00 -0600 Well, Emilee and I decided to try out LuLu.com and publish our own book.  We worked on it these past months in our spare time (Which was very little), but we made it through the process and published it.  Check out the link in the sidebar with a picture of the cover.  It looks good online, but I just put in my first order for a copy to see how it looks in our hands.  I'm anxious to get it.  This was an experiment to see how this self-publishing website works from start to finish.  Has anyone out there used LuLu or a similar self-publishing site before?  Your feedback here would be most helpful.  Laura   http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/thecuriouscottage/745110/ Mon, 16 Nov 2009 13:38:00 -0600 http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/thecuriouscottage/745110/   2009 Kentucky Storytelling Conference November 6 - 7, 2009 Eastern Kentucky University Richmond, Kentucky "Whether you love to hear stories or tell stories, you need to be there." Workshops   Story Store (things to buy) Door Prizes (things to win) Freebie Table (things to take) Open Mic Stories (when anyone may tell a story)   Schedule Kentucky public librarians-Earn up to 1.05 CRP toward certification for the entire conference. (see CRP credits in schedule below. Sign in required at each session.) Teachers-please check with your district to learn what professional development credit may be earned through your conference participation. All Events are included with your Conference Registration Fees are: Postmarked by October 25: $15 KSA Member, $20 Non-Member Registered after October 25, or at the door: $35 To attend Evening Storytelling Events: Pay at door each night: $5.00 per person, $10 per family http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/thecuriouscottage/740917/ Sat, 31 Oct 2009 08:32:00 -0500 http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/thecuriouscottage/740917/ The lighting quality in this video isn't the greatest, but there are only 2 drawings to show the technique of overlapping.   http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/thecuriouscottage/732587/ Fri, 4 Sep 2009 10:00:00 -0500 http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/thecuriouscottage/732587/   http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/thecuriouscottage/723864/ Fri, 4 Sep 2009 09:33:00 -0500 http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/thecuriouscottage/723864/ Have a good time and I'll see you next week!     http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/thecuriouscottage/721498/ Fri, 28 Aug 2009 05:39:00 -0500 http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/thecuriouscottage/721498/ Featured Artists This Week Zach L.   JMM   And here are the videos! I want to give credit to Ryan, Derek and Emilee for their assistance with the videos.  Since Emilee started classes at the college, she has provided more consulting and the use of her equipment, whereas Ryan has done the hands-on video editing.  Derek has been a real motivator and help with the actual drawings and encouragement.      http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/thecuriouscottage/721272/ Thu, 27 Aug 2009 13:22:00 -0500 http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/thecuriouscottage/721272/ Featured Artists This Week (AKA -A few students who did their homework!) Faith C. Andrew D.     These videos are a much simplified summary of Mark Kistler's lessons from his book, Draw Squad.  They are a repeat of the drawings we did in class, so the students can check back again, or review what was missed. (Including the homework!) If you love the drawing techniques and want to go to the source, I encourage you to get Mark Kistler's books or even search for him on YouTube.  There are videos of 'himself' going into greater detail.  I also have a link to his website under the "Fantabulous" section of the sidebar of my blog. http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/thecuriouscottage/719892/ Fri, 14 Aug 2009 09:59:00 -0500 http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/thecuriouscottage/719892/   When our daughter Emilee was very young, a friend of mine challenged me to consider the importance of homeschooling.   Homeschooling was very new to me and completely unheard of among my family and much of the church.  Thankfully, there were dedicated pioneers that fought the battles that kept it LEGAL,  but there were still battles with the voices of disapproval that seemed to try to undermine or sway us away.  It's a great encouragement to see others choose this route.  I used to think that everyone must choose their way: public school, private school or homeschool, but I don't think like that anymore.  Everyone "homeschools", but each family chooses from whom they receive their direction in education.   The public school option never looked appealing to me to begin with, but it has only gotten worse as the years have gone by.  Random drug testing and mandatory vaccination are deal breakers for me now, as are the gender issues.  Getting the kids to adulthood,  responsible, Godly and whole is definitely a major challenge with the political control over curriculum and the pressure to think about moral issues the "right" way, and for our kids and their friends it didn't really hit home until this year that getting to adulthood alive was a another matter entirely.  In this , a lot MUST be said for the influence of other kids in the microsociety called "school".  After 12 years of homeschooling, I still have people asking me if I'm planning to send the kids to "school".  For me, it's like asking if I plan to send them to prison.   I'm thanking God this year that we have moved to an area with a very large and active homeschool group.  The support and organization is really wonderful, considering where we had been for the previous 7 years.  The isolation in the rural area we lived previously did help us to be more creative, but this new adventure in a larger town with lots of homeschool activities is very refreshing.  One of the big things that is a challenge as a homeschooled family is to keep the busy-ness to a manageable level.  There are so many 'good' things to do, that they can distract the parents and the kids away from our first love: Christ.  Emilee is 17 this year and she said today that she has a burden for stressed families.  When she was in 5th & 6th grade, she attended a private school and the pace and stress on her was heartbreaking. I never did nor do I plan to put that kind of burden on the kids.  Oh sure, there were moments where I was feeling the pressure because of something someone said to me that made me feel inadequate as a mom or teacher and I wrongly tried to rush the kids through learning to read or finishing 10 math pages a day or  read through a stack of books in record time, but the overriding theme of all of our years homeschooling has been to learn what is at hand.  When my daughter was 7 years old, I had a lady sternly ask me  how in world I thought I was going to teach her calculus.  Was calculus at hand when Emilee was 7?  10 years later, calculus is still not here. As this blog site shows, Emilee is very involved in storytelling.  I've written a lot about that and that was one of those things that was "at hand" over the last few years and it has propelled her into the world of reading, writing, recording and vocal performance.  She has learned about a great number of things from other storytellers.  This is where her passions, talents and abilities lie.    Last Saturday, I drove 4 hours away to the Rubiks Indiana Open 2009, to take our 13yo son Ryan to join the festivities.  At this time, this is one of his passions.  This was his first attendance at an actual competition for all things Rubik's Cube.  He has been solving, unsolving, speed solving, blind-fold solving, taking apart, breaking, putting back together and collecting Rubik's puzzles for the last year, or so.  I had an interesting conversation with another mother at the competition about being a supportive parent for these kinds of things.  She had the challenge of dealing with teachers at school over her son bringing the Rubik's cube into the classroom.  I don't have this problem, per se, as I am the teacher and there is always a Rubik's puzzle of some form in Ryan's hand, pocket or on a table somewhere in the livingroom or diningroom.  It's not a "problem", because it has become an important part of Ryan's passion for learning.  When he works on his Rubik's Cube skills, he says it inspires him to pick up his guitar.  In a year, he has far surpassed my skills on the guitar...okay, I admit that isn't hard to do at all, but he reads guitar tabs and listens to a song and can play enough of the song EXACTLY for us to stop what we're doing and say, "Hey! That's Sweet Home Alabama! Turn it up!"  As for our youngest son, his passion at the moment is drawing.  As an art teacher, I am thrilled of course.  My other two kids used to do quite a bit of drawing, and I'm not sure if Derek will continue to draw as an adult, but he has put out reams of drawings in the last few months.  After a hiatus from drawing classes these last few years, I will be teaching again starting in a few weeks and he is just ecstatic.  I took him to Blick Art Materials and took some pictures and video to share with the class.  He has been literally counting the days until class starts.  His passion for drawing is a perfect example of how teaching things that are at hand will take care of the other areas.  Derek has been slower in the reading and writing than his siblings were.  He is very active and physical, and found reading and writing to be interesting for a limited time only...until he started drawing.  Now he's drawing his own comic books at a very fast pace, and must put the words in the captions and speech bubbles.  He had me or his  brother or sister doing the words while he would dictate, but now he's just sounding out the words and writing them himself.  No, they are not all spelled correctly and we correct the words sparingly.  He's reading words all the time and every where he goes now.  Here are a  couple of links that I think are most appropriate to the start of the new school year: This is our Blick Art Materials video: Bill Harley, one of the storytellers that I have linked in the sidebar, has started a blog and I'm really enjoying his writings: http://billharley.wordpress.com/ I read a good blog post recently by one of my friends on Facebook regarding the training of boys to be godly men: http://emsblog.thehairefamily.org/ And I want to add how much I have been enjoying Facebook these past months.  I have been a member for a few years, but I never did much with it until this last April.  That seems to be the story of a lot of people.  Membership has increased dramatically this year.  I keep up with my kids and their friends and my family and I've been able to catch up with old friends I haven't talked to in many years.  I post pictures there and keep a calendar there and our whole family plays farmtown there.  I have my blog linked to my Facebook account, so my updates will post on my profile.  It's really been exactly what I had been looking for to pull everything together.  Have a great day and start of school!...whenever you start.     http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/thecuriouscottage/712672/ Thu, 30 Jul 2009 09:51:00 -0500 http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/thecuriouscottage/712672/ I'm lacking in SO much knowledge about herbal remedies, but I've increased my studies this year and I've been experimenting with more things.  Probably the biggest challenge has been giving up the "bad stuff" so we don't need to work so hard to recover!  Have you ever eaten too much food or the wrong food and immediately knew you could have done without it?  One thing I know for sure I shouldn't do is drink beverages made with high fructose corn syrup when I feel a sore throat coming on.  For some reason,  they accelerate the progression of the sickness, for me.  Even without a sore throat, last night I got a drive thru drink and within minutes, I had a runny nose.  Thankfully, I'm not sick this morning, but this week, we've been battling a few things and I've kept some herbs handy to minimize the sore throats and fatigue.  Catching sickness early gives the immune system a boost to do the job it's already trying to do.  The sickness around here started where it usually does...after being with a bunch of kids on the weekend, our 8 yo woke up with a sore throat a few days later.  I made him a cup of hot tea with yarrow and I made him a throat wrap with ginger, peppermint, sage and rosemary.  Under his feet, I put a garlic poultice and he laid on the couch.  Our older son had just come home from camp and was a little under the weather, so I made him tea and the garlic poultice for his feet too.  By the next morning, they were both running around the house and feeling much better.  The little one had a runny nose and dry throat in the morning, but all was better after breakfast.  In my reading this morning, I came across the following excerpt from a testimony off of the website for bulkherbstore.com: "This morning my Husband woke up with an RA flair up. Early this morning I was in the woods to get some burdock root (because my dried BHS supply is gone). I boiled the root with some plantain leaves in olive oil. Once reduced, I strained out the roots and and poured some into a little spray bottle, the rest I mixed with bees wax. He's been using this for about 3 hours now, and his pain is diminished by 1/2 and he says is getting better as the morning wears on." I have some boiled burdock root cooling in the other room.  I'm going to try it out on joint pain, back pain and a bladder infection.  I'll write back and report how it's working, but I'll have to wait until my "lab assistants" wake up. http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/thecuriouscottage/710592/ Thu, 23 Jul 2009 07:16:00 -0500 http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/thecuriouscottage/710592/ I wanted to write about my experience with making kombucha, as it was all a mystery to me a year ago, even though I  had read about it a number of times.  I just didn't seem to have time to look into it and experiment.  Everything I read said it was pretty easy to do once I got the hang of it.  So, somehow I found the time to do it at the most busy time in our lives, because my chronic stomach troubles were just getting worse.  I started buying the kombucha at the health food store, in 16oz bottles.  I liked it a lot for the flavor and it seemed to help my tummy, but it costs nearly $4.00 a bottle!  So, it was time to look into doing this myself. I had been a long-time member of an online forum for homeschoolers and I had frequently seen threads posted about kombucha, where I read a lot of tips and tricks.  So, I went back and read over some of those.  I tried to get a kombucha culture from one of the ladies there, but it was much easier to just buy one on ebay.  I looked on ebay for a seller that came recommended, but you can do a search for sellers of kombucha cultures, as well.  I bought from the ebay member "Stichingtime" and it was a good experience.  She mailed 2 cultures to me by priority mail.  They came in a box, wrapped in a ziplock bag with a bit of the kombucha tea to keep them moist.  The ziplock was wrapped in paper towel and in the box was a set of instructions on making the tea.  The instructions were very emphatic about the use of clean utensils and containers, washing everything with hot, soapy water and then rinsing, with one last rinse in white vinegar.  I did all of that and then I made a gallon of green tea, adding a cup of sugar and letting it cool to room temp.  The cooling part is pretty important.  The hot tea will kill the cultures. Storing the tea to sit somewhere in my kitchen was a challenge.  We were in the process of moving from one house to another and our old kitchen was being packed, but I did have one small, out-of-the-way piece of counter and put up a big sign in the area to NOT TOUCH.  (The kids have taken to calling me an HERBshiner)  I had bought the 2 quart canning jars from Rural King, as it was harvest season when I started this whole process.  I haven't been able to find the jars any other time of the year.  (You could buy the huge jars of pickles at WalMart/Sams and after eating the pickles, use the jars for kombucha.)  I then poured the tea into the clean jars and dropped one of the cultures into each of the 2 jars.  The cultures are round, rubbery patties that are colored any shade from white to brown, depending on the tea strength when the culture was grown.  The culture dropped into the tea will sink to the bottom of the jar and it is now called the "mother".  I covered the top of the jars with an inverted coffee filter and then screwed on the lid rim without the metal top, so the tea can "breathe".  Then I covered them with a towel and put the jars in my kitchen laboratory.    I tried to obey the instructions by not checking too much on their progress, but within a few days, I could see a "baby" forming on top of the liquid in the jars.  I let them form until they looked pretty sturdy.  It took about 2 weeks.  I could have left them longer, but I used the most common advice I had seen in my reading: 2-4 weeks.  I was too excited to wait longer than 2, to see how my experiment turned out.  I washed my hands and then rinsed them in vinegar before carefully removing the new "baby" from the top and the "mother" from the bottom.  Since I wasn't going to use them again immediately, I put them together in a quart jar with a little of the kombucha tea and some extra vinegar to cover them.  The instructions said after refrigeration,  to use the cultures again soon and no longer than 3 months.  I've gone as long as 6 months and had them still work out fine.  Anyway, then I put a lid on the jar containing the kombucha tea and put it in the refrigerator.  I then tasted the kombucha....hmmm.  It didn't have as much of a bite as the one from the healthfood store.  The instructions said that I could add some fruit and/or ginger to the jars, put on the entire lid now and let them ferment for up to 30 days.  I didn't do that.  I just put them in the refrigerator.  I drank the kombucha until it was gone.  In subsequent tries, I let the kombucha ferment a little.  One time, I added leftover apple juice that had already started to ferment after being left on the kitchen counter for a few days.  Now that was a really good batch.  This time, I have 4 big jars on the counter, to which I added shredded ginger root and apple juice.  Out of the 4 jars, 3 of them keep trying to grow more cultures, which I scoop out and put away. I was doing this while my 13yo son was standing nearby.  He wasn't as thrilled as I was.  The instructions say that if the jars grow mold, then they aren't working out and to throw them away.  I haven't had even one grow mold.  One of the jars seems to be fermenting nicely, with small bubbles around the rim at the top.  It's the jar that is the most full.  They all smell wonderful.  Soon, I'll put them in the refrigerator to chill and then drink them.  MMMMM........and much better for the tummy than Coke! http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/thecuriouscottage/704728/ Thu, 9 Jul 2009 09:13:00 -0500 http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/thecuriouscottage/704728/