DIY Family Recipe Book: Whole Wheat Bread

One of my favorite aspects of unschooling is the time I spend with the girls cooking in the kitchen. We have many family favorite recipes and this year I want to put at least 52 recipes into a Mohler Family Cookbook. The girls are excited and are going to help with the process!

This week we are baking whole wheat bread. This bread is incredible and Olivia can now make it by herself as well!

I think the best lesson my girls learned through watching me bake bread is that failure is not an option. I guess you could say my bread baking skills were sub-par! Believe me no one in my house thinks my bread should be fed to our chickens. Actually I have listened to arguments over who will get the last slice!

This bread is made two or three times a week at our home. I hope you enjoy it as much as we do.

Ingredients:

Whole Wheat Bread Flour

Molasses

Sugar

Yeast

Salt

Vegetable Oil

Warm Water

Step one:

• Add 3 ½ teaspoons of yeast, 2 tablespoons of molasses, ¼ cup sugar, 2 cups whole wheat bread flour, 1/3 cup oil, and 1 & 1/3 cup warm water into a mixing bowl.
• Using the paddle attachment mix together for 5 minutes.

• This will create a sponge. The sponge will need to be covered with a moist towel and allowed to rise for 60 minutes.

Step two:

• Add 1 teaspoon of salt and 1 ½ - 2 cups of whole wheat flour to the sponge. Mix using the dough hook for 10 minutes.

Your dough should form into a ball. If you are impatient like me, do NOT cheat and try to mix for 5 minutes, or even 8 minutes. You will get the best results if you truly allow the mixer to knead the dough for 10 minutes.

• Pre-heat your oven to 350 degrees.

Step three:

• Roll dough into a log and place into a large greased loaf pan. Let rise for 30 minutes.

Step four:

• Place loaf pan in the oven for 33 minutes. That is the magic number for my oven. J

Let bread cool on a cooling rack, or slice right into the warm bread and slather on the butter! Whatever floats your boat.

I hope you enjoy this recipe. It is a definite family favorite in our home.

DIY: Happy Book Project

I spent some time with my girls talking to them about a new project I wanted to start this year. I really thought it would be a fun project for us to work on together, and could be a great part of our unschooling life. Two of my three girls decided that they wanted to do the project with me.

What is the project? Creating a 2015 Happiness Book out of an old used hard cover book. A bit of upcycling, creativity, time, and happiness are required to make a Happy Book, but doesn't that sound fun?!

Here is the premise of this project:

• Create a book full of happy thoughts, moments, images, and quotes.
• Create at least one page each week of the year.
• Upcycle an old book as part of the project.
• Use only what you have on hand.
• Goal is to focus on what makes you happy, even on difficult days.

The girls and I took a trip to our local used book store, and found our own hardback books to use for this project.

Next, we used an exacto knife and a piece of chipboard to cut away 4 – 6 pages of the book and then saving (not cutting away) two pages. 

We repeated this process throughout the entire book. When we finished we had books that looked like this.

We are cutting pages from our books, because we plan on adding bulky items to our happy pages. This will allow our books to bulge open a bit less. J

This week we created the title page and our first page of happiness for 2015!

The girls and I are excited to be doing this project together.

• We can keep each other accountable. Which will help me stick with my word of the year (BEGIN).
•  Creating with others is more fun than creating by yourself.
• It is simply FUN to spend time together on a creative project.

Maybe you want to create a Happy Book? I am extremely happy to have started mine. Hope you share your Happy Book pages here with me and my girls. 

2015 is the perfect year to focus on Happy!

A Novel Concept: Learning to Write

As a former public school English teacher, I can't believe I am going to say this, but here it goes. I do not believe kids need to be taught how to write. There I said it! Wow, it feels good to get that off my chest. I do believe that children will learn to write by being good readers. 

How do my kids learn how to write? Simple. When they feel like writing they write. Let me show you what I mean.

Ella is nine and when she writes it is normally a script for her My Little Ponies and Webkinz animals, because she likes to create movies with her animals.  Also, she will write letters to friends, because this is what she is interested in writing. When she writes she will share her writing with me and we discuss capitalization, grammar, and spelling. Super simple and it works because she is writing something that is important to her. 

Natalie is almost 12 and loves creative lettering. She has spent a lot of time working and developing her skill this year. Her writing this year consists of copying her favorite quotes into her notebook. Copy work is a great skill for learning how to write well. She has done more writing in past years, but this year she simply is focusing on copy work. She may write more later this year, or maybe not. The main reason this works is because she brings me her quote book and we talk about why punctuation is being used a certain way, and why specific words are capitalized and others are not. We will also talk about theme, mood, and descriptive words.

Olivia is 15 and has been a writer and story teller since she was 3 years old. At the age of three she would draw or paint pictures, describe the story and I would act as her scribe and get her stories onto paper. She still LOVES writing. Olivia wants to be an author. We worked together and found fantastic books, groups, conventions, and mentors to work with and ultimately create her own novel writing program.

Writing is a skill everyone needs, but how it is learned can be different for every individual. My three girls have all learned to write through their own methods and means. It didn’t require a classroom with boring material. It did require them to share their writing with me and for us to have a discussion about what and how they write. Writing really can be that simple. 

If you are interested in what books Olivia chose for her writing program I have them listed below. I have read about half of them, while she has read them all. These are wonderful books for any aspiring author.

Writing Irresistible Kidlit: The Ultimate Guide for Writing Young Adult and Middle Grade Readers

Olivia really enjoyed this book and felt it helped her focus on the genres and audience she is interested in writing for. 

Stein on Writing: A Master Editor of Some of the Most Successful Writers of Our Century Shares His Craft Techniques and Strategies

Cool information from a master editor. Good information to know for any future author.

Plot & Structure: (Techniques And Exercises For Crafting A Plot That Grips Readers From Start To Finish) (Write Great Fiction)

This was Olivia’s FAVORITE book of the year! She wants more from the Write Great Fiction Series.

Rivet Your Readers with Deep Point of View

She found good information from this book.

The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer's Guide To Character Expression

She uses this reference book often!

Outlining Your Novel: Map Your Way to Success

This book was really helpful and gave good ideas for different ways to outline a novel.

Enjoy learning to write in  very natural way!

My 8 Year Old Chooses to Learn

My youngest who detests anything that has to do with physically writing asked to learn cursive this week. Out of the blue she requests not only to learn cursive, but she wants a cursive book.

I immediately ordered a book and it is set to arrive this next week. I am not certain why she suddenly has this interest, but she does. I simply roll with it and encourage her.

She spends most of her day playing, reading and watching videos about animals, adding videos to her Youtube channel, doing a bit of math, and this week we will add in some cursive. Love how this little one chooses to learn.

Those Who Judge Our Choice to Home School

It is the time of year when I get asked one question over and over again. Where do your children go to school?

I quite simply answer, "They don't." Most often people ask if I home school and then spend the next fifteen minutes explaining to me how they would love to be able to home school, but they could NEVER do it.  

Today was a new day, yet the questions about how we school were the same, but my response was answered with raised eyebrows, many questions, and a look of disapproval. When a child sitting near by started to share how much they wish they could home school, the mother who raised her eyebrows stated, "Think of all that you like about school." 

Needless to say the child shrugged, and no longer participated in the conversation. 

I get that not everyone can wrap their head around the idea of home schooling, let alone the idea of unschooling. I simply ask that if you can't wrap your head around a concept please refrain from casting judgement and squelching others curiosity. 

I understand why some believe that they could never teach their own children, and can not imagine taking them out of school. I completely disagree, but I can understand how someone can believe this. I simply ask those who have difficulty understanding why I would home school, or unschool my children to put down their judgmental glances and comments. 

I ask these people to take some time to read and learn about the topic of home schooling or unschooling. Don't squash inquisitive children, because they are curious about a topic you are fearful of. Most importantly, don't judge with words or body language. I am not judging you for keeping your children in public school. 

Time and Unschooling

TIME is the most joyful part of unschooling. My house often looks like this, because my kids can spend an entire day working on something they love without worrying about being interrupted. They have time to dive deeply into topics. 

I also enjoy the TIME we spend sharing and discussing topics. Olivia is writing and researching a couple of ideas for new novels. She is excited and we have the time to hash out her ideas. Sometimes this will take up most of a day, other times it occurs in fleeting moments. Simply knowing our time is basically limitless allows us to enjoy the writing and discussion process.

I also enjoy my TIME more since we have started unschooling. Working on my own interests has inspired my children to spend more time exploring their own interests. Currently Natalie is excited about all things ocean related and Ella is captivated by wolves. 

I am not sure how long these topics will be at the top of my kids interest list, but it is exciting to know that there is no need to hurry. After all, we are unschooler's and we have as much TIME as we desire. 

A NEW site to us for learning!

Why Don't Spider's Get Caught in Their Webs? A fantastic fall wonder from Wonderopolis!

I have spent the weekend searching and reading the website Wonderopolis. 

This website is an unschooling families dream! Wonderopolis is a site full of information about topics people wonder about. Each "wonder" includes a video, article, links, vocabulary, and more! 

Natalie LOVED the listen button. She doesn't like to read on the computer screen, so listening to the article was a GREAT feature for her.

 Ella has her own "wonders" to ask, but is excited to get answers to some of the most popular "wonders" on the site. 

Olivia liked the site as well. She is interested in exploring it more on her own. 

This website covers so many topics that are fascinating. We will be using this and the app as part of our daily learning. 

I LOVE finding wonderful ways to learn. At my house technology is our favorite method of learning. 

Thanks Wonderopolis!

Technology and Learning

My youngest loves technology. Specifically she loves the computer. I recently read an article about digital tools helping to improve teen writing. As I read this article my first thought was of course it improves teen writing, but then I thought do these teachers and pollsters believe this is only true of teens? Perhaps as a homeschooling mom I have more of an opportunity to see the positive effects of technology and learning. I know that since we have moved to a more self directed approach towards learning I have witnessed the power of technology and learning even more. 

My youngest is teaching herself how to spell and write using email, text, Youtube, Facebook, and Skype. She loves to write to friends and family through email and we send each other notes back and forth. It is a great way for me to see the natural  improvement of her writing. Ella also uses my phone to text friends. She often asks how to spell words she is uncertain of and when she doesn't she gets replies from friends that let her know they don't understand what she is asking or saying. When Ella creates Youtube videos of her Webkinz she likes to use the title and subtitle feature of the movie editing program. Since she is publishing these on Youtube and other people besides mom will read or see her finished product she is very concerned about spelling, and writing mechanics. The instant messaging features of Facebook and Skype are improving her writing skills as she uses my accounts to chat with her friends. 

I see that digital tools can help improve teen writing. I have witnessed how these tools help elementary age children who have an aversion to writing learn to write. In my experience technology and digital tools are a great learning method for all ages.