Jubelbars

This is the original recipe I found but in parenthesis I've written what I actually use as a substitute.

Granola Bars

2 C oats
3/4 C wheat germ (or ground flax seed, sometimes both)
3/4 C sunflower seeds
1/2 C honey
3/4 C brown sugar (or 1/2 C real Maple Syrup)
1 C crushed nuts
4 Tbsp butter (or nut butter of any variety)
2 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp salt
8 oz (about) any dried fruit

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Mix nuts, oats, seeds and wheat germ. Toast about 10-12 minutes, stirring every few minutes to keep from burning. Meanwhile, line 11x13 baking dish with wax paper and grease lightly (cooking spray, etc.) Simmer honey, brown sugar, butter, vanilla, and salt in a sauce pan (this is just to get the brown sugar to dissolve, but since I use maple syrup and peanut or almond butter, I just heat it until the nut butter is runny and call it good). Mix everything in a large bowl (or the sauce pan) and add the dried fruit. Mix very very well so as to get the "glue" on everything. Put mixture in prepared baking dish (and don't forget to taste it because it's really good). Cover with greased wax paper and press down really hard.  After a few hours (when it's completely cool) remove top layer of wax paper, flip it over on a cutting board, remove bottom wax paper layer and cut into bars by pressing down hard, not by slicing. Wrap individually or keep in an air tight container. They should last about a week. I wrap mine up and stick them in the freezer and then take one out when I want to eat one. They don't take too long to thaw. WARNING: although these are healthy, they are probably much healthier in moderation - I wouldn't exactly call them a diet bar. But hey, they're so good, whenever I eat one, I shout for joy. Jubel!!

so far I've used almonds, almond butter, and craisins to make Almond Cranberry Jubels
I've used peanut butter, almonds, cashews, pecans, dried apricots, raisins, craisins, and sesame seeds just for fun to make Triple Fruit and Nut Jubels
And I've used 3 C oats, 1/2 C cashews, raisins, dried apples from the cannery, and lots of cinnamon to make Cinnamon Oatmeal Apple Raisin Jubels. I probably could come up with better names for my flavors - honestly, besides the cinnamon, they all kind of tasted the same, which is fine, because they're tasty.

The letter K

Crown, King, and Queen all start with K in German. This was a perfect opportunity. And it went along well with our "Horse" and "Yellow" theme too. You know, the whole knight in shining armor deal. We colored and glittered our crowns, and I finally talked Joshua into letting me get rid of his Hase Hut (from Easter and the letter H) so we would have a spot for his crown. However, he wasn't quite ready to part with his Hammerhai Hut (Hammerhead Shark hat) from January! Here are the crowns.

And we made letters out of play dough (OK, I made letters out of play dough) but the kids were good to guess which letter I was making. We reviewed our letters and then focused more on K. Thank heavens there are many more K words in German than J. However, just for future reference, next year I should include Jack and Jill when we hit J. That would be fun.  I did photo all of our play dough letters and I think I'll make cards out of them and come up with some sort of game - Memory but with a twist or something.

And our K snack? Kiwi.

The Farm: Horses

After we went to the farm at Thanksgiving point I asked my kids what animal their favorite was. They both answered "Horse."  Good answer, kids. A+. because that was the plan for the next week: Horses. Here is what we did and saw.

First the horses at Farm Country.

This little calf kept nudging the foal, as if telling him to get up and start performing, the kids were here.

I think the foal got up just to get away from the calf.

This was near the end of the afternoon and Abigail wasn't too interested in anything by that point except her sippy.

We took a "hay ride" (uh... where is the hay?) and enjoyed these horses, named Holly and Bell.

Enjoying the hay ride.

We also got to ride on these horses.

Abigail screamed - I'm talking really screamed - when it was time to get off, so instead of making a horse craft on a flat piece of paper, we made these so that the kids could ride horses at home too. The first one I made, Abigail's, looked way too much like a hippie dog, so after thinking it over in my mind while trying to fall asleep that night, I came up with a better horse head.

At first the kids didn't really want to play with them, but after I randomly would pick up their horses and start prancing around the house, they got the idea. They don't LOVE them like I was hoping, but I've decided it wasn't a complete waste of time. (plus, sometimes they read horse books to their horses, which is cute.)

I would post some of the horse books we read but I didn't care for any of them - they were basically all about little girls who dream of having a pony but since the ponies are too expensive they just have to pretend. As a little girl I never really fantasized about having a horse. I never loved horses like some of the other kids, so I guess I just didn't relate to these books.(confession: I always thought those girls were a little weird. If any of you reading this out there were horse adoring little girls, I don't mean you, I mean the other horse adoring girls :)

And then we took a walk to the little farm right outside our front door and admired these horses.

Just the kids at the farm down the road. When I look at photos like this I feel like I live in the most beautiful part of the world. (But I might feel differently if I actually had to do the work on the farm.)

A little farther down the road are some ponies. I don't know the people who own them, so we just looked at them from the street.

This pony was so cute, its a shame the photo is so bad. He was shorter than Joshua.

This is a farm Joshua stamped. He's decided to take some liberties with the animals. Except I'm pretty sure he really does think farms are supposed to have tigers. He asked me before we went to Farm Country if the tigers would be in cages or not, because he wasn't interested in petting them.

And as a grand finale to our Farm unit, we enjoyed a farm breakfast. Derek took a look at it as he was running out the door this morning to go to work and asked if we could have a farm breakfast tomorrow too. I'm pretty sure I can accommodate that. I may mostly fruits and vegetables and even it the majority of them raw, but there is no way I am vegetarian. Bacon! Yum!

Farm breakfast. Get it? Pigs, Chickens, Cows, and Wheat!

The Letter J

You would think Joshua would be all over this letter, seeing as he was jealous when we learned the letter A because Abigail starts with A and Joshua does not. Nope. Here is how it went:

"Hey, Joshua. We're learning the letter J now. Let's practice by writing your name because "Joshua" starts with J!"

"NOOOOOOOOOOO"

And then I decided I would at least have him write down a few Js. That only kind of worked.

If it looks like I wrote some of those, it's because I did.

OK, how about we get into those old magazines and you guys can find Js, cut them out and glue them on some paper?! That was fun last time we did it, right?  Apparently not as fun as just cutting the magazines up into tiny little pieces, throwing them all over the floor, and laughing at mom when she tells you you'll have to clean up the entire mess when you're done. (Lest you think my home-school "preschool" is always successful, cheerful, educational, here is the proof.

So what do you do with the letter J. In German, there isn't much. J is German sounds like a Y. And there aren't many J words I could think of. So we cheated. First we made Jam - well, I made Jam with my mother-in-law. The kids have to learn English too, right? Jam starts with J. But Joshua didn't want to eat the J Jam because, he said, he wasn't finished with the store bought jam in the fridge. Here are 23 jars of our 26 jars of freezer jam.

OK, lets cheat again. Jubeln starts with J. It means "to cheer." So what can we do with that? How about I make home mad granola bars with the kids, but I tell them they are called Jubelbars because they will be so tasty that each time we want to eat them, we will just cheer and shout for joy. Hurrah! A Jubelbar!

cranberry almond Jubelbars

next time I think I will make a peanut butter variety. so yummy.

Yes, they are delicious - and there is no wheat and no refined sugar in them to boot. But Joshua refused to acknowledge that Jubelbar starts with a J. Oh well. Goodbye J. Tomorrow starts another week and another letter - K - which will be so much easier, provided my students cooperate.

Hurrah!!

The Farm: Sheep

Living amongst farms gives us good opportunities to talk about farms whenever we go somewhere. So besides the activities below, we did a good deal of talking about not only sheep, but farms in general and what they do, why we have them, and how much work they are!

Sheep was easier and for some reason more fun than pigs and cows. Perhaps because I had better books. We checked out the Sheep Story Kit, and although it didn't have any fun crafts or games, etc., the books were fun. Here are our favorite from the kit and another I checked out.

Farmer Brown shears his Sheep is illustrated by my new favorite illustrator (sample illustration below - check out the rosy cheeks) Where is the Green Sheep turned out to be really good too. It's not boring, like the title suggested to me. I highly recommend them both.

Here is our sheep craft. This was actually the first craft we did in this unit. I drew some sheep on the page and the kids got to glue on the "wool" and googly eyes. I thought it was fun.

We've been watching a lot of "Snow White" lately.

And I suppose the last thing we did just in particular to sheep was the Sheep and Wool Festival at Thanksgiving Point. Here are some pictures of the sheep shearing and a few at the end of the sheep dog demonstrations.  The kids also got to make sheep wool bracelets.

I told the kids that man was Farmer Brown.

This photo may not make sense. The sheep's head is between the farmer's knees. The sheep is sitting on her bum and we're looking at her belly.

This is the sheep dog demonstration.

You can tell the kids were fascinated.