I think its time to clear the moorings and set sail for balmy seas and clear blue waters.

Instead, we have entered a doldrums of the mathematical sort that have extended their high pressure fronts into other subjects.

In short, its been hard for Q to concentrate today and get work done. I see this as a natural part of the process and hope that we can both come together to find something that scintillates for her, something(s) that dont make her blue

Well, I hope your turkey day was as delicious as ours! Q helped out and learned alot about how to make this feast.

Pics below:

Bread that Q helped me make.

The Turkey and some fixings.

This is what it looked like outside when I got up at 6:30 to start the bread dough. A lovely delicate snow all day long, was amazing.

Like I said earlier, we started on our Thanksgiving prep today and we just finished our desserts!

Q made these pastry purses. Arnt they yummy!

Enjoy!

(Recipe, as per request. This is not meant to be a professional recipe and I made it up myself. As you can see, its not hard to do)

This is quite easy, the hard part is not eating them immediately.

My 9 year old made the ones you see above.

Ingredients:

- Store bought pastry dough (I have made this from scratch before and it IS good but I was not in the mood to make pastry dough for like three days straight).

- Apple Pie Filling in a can

- Egg wash (make 30 mins before baking (or overnight) – 1 egg, some salt, a bit of milk to thin.. beat the bejezuz out of it, let sit in fridge 30 mins)

Directions:

Preheat oven to 400F

Cut squares of pastry dough (dunno – 3 inches per side?), roll out a bit, cut little strips too for the purse. Keep these as cool as possible and re-fridge it all before baking.

Put a dollip of apple pie filling in center, bring opposite corners of square together and then pinch just so to form them into little purses, add the “string”.

Brush with egg wash, spring with granulated sugar.

Put on cooking sheet with parchment paper, cover with foil, bake until they look like the pic above. This varies per oven, make sure not to burn the little guys (check often). Dont take out too soon else you will have raw dough in the neck of the purse.

Let cool a bit or they will burn you when you bite into them. Keep them from humidity while storing.

First, I hope you all out there have a joyful Thanksgiving! It surely can be hard, what with financial pressures and job market instabilities. We had an oh-so lovely visit from Santa Greenspan and now we will have to work even harder ($200 a month harder) to stay where we were treading water just last month. Nice of him wasn’t it?

ANYWAYS, frugality is always something I admire and aspire to.

For this year’s Thanksgiving, Q and I will be working together to create the feast.

She will get a chance to make apple and pumpkin pastry purses (two different kinds, not together), a baked brie, snap beans and help me steam them, steam/prep other veggies, make a bechamel sauce, makes the cranberry sauce from cranberries – oranges – ginger, prep the turkey and learn about how best to do that, and cook said bird without drying it to jerky.

She has been preparing for this by browsing our cooking techniques book (with amazing pics of “how to”).

Encyclopedia of Cooking Skills and Techniques

She is also browsing our Culinary Institute of America’s text book “The Professional Chef“.

As well as our Professional Patry chef book:

These are both text books at the Culinary Institute of America and excellent resource books for much of what one would want to learn about cooking!

We will also do a photo-documentary of Q’s work, so Stay Tuned!

We start our week with a sax lesson. The cats become scarce, the baby dances to the sounds (looks like toddler modern dance in the living room), I sip my tea, and we encourage sibilance from a reluctant saxaphone.

Winter sun is so beautiful! We reconfigured our homeschooling space and now it catches so much sun, its wonderful!

We got out of the house this saturday and spent an afternoon in Old Sturbridge Village doing “old things” and generally enjoying being out of the house and in the fresh cool air.

I took a few pics:

Q carded wool

Here is an early carding machine:

Q tended shop:

Q and her little sister played shopping together:

Q got to practice writing with a quill pen:

Q’s little sister played in period costume too:

I was sorely tempted to get the Old Sturbridge Village Cookbook but held firm!

(sorry for not posting a few days, been balancing homeschooling with the job hunt – telecommuting stuff – so the blogging has had to go to a non-primary status)

Today Q, other than her Spanish, math, and English, did the Native American part of her “Colonial America” History Pocket.

I wanted to share the work she did here! (We listened to Carlos Nakai while doing this)

This project had her making an ear of corn that told of the Three Sisters, a homemade Native Languages – English language dictionary (with illustrations), a bookmark with some facts, and she learned a bit about peace treaties. She knows better than the average propaganda on this as she has read in Zinn’s “A people’s history” about the way whites treated native peoples in colonial and later times.

Exterior of pocket

Interior of book/pocket

The Three Sisters

Bookmark with some facts

Native Languages – English dictionary – exterior

Native Languages – English dictionary – interior – muskrat and opossum entries

Some information about a peace treaty

Q writes out the conditions

Recently, we have been learning a bit about the Romans by looking at this kewl fold out cut out diorama from DK books.

I took some close up macros from the book and thought I would share them here, lots of action shots!

Today, after practicing her cursive and some hiragana characters, Q and I opened up our second super-cheap science kit from Michaels Art Supply called “pH Fun!”, by The Wild Goose Company.

As you can see we have some bromphenol blue (pH indicator), a silk rose with another pH indicator in it’s petals, some pH strips and a booklet of experiments.

First, I took Q to a web page to learn some scientific background on acids and bases. This site is good for a graphical representation of the pH scale.

Then we visited this other amazing site that has a flash animation that illustrates a pH meter and we messed around with various solutions and measured their pH. At this point we took a side trip into a discussion of Scientific notation and a 30,000 foot view of molarity so that she could understand what is going on with the pH meter.

Regarding scientific notation, here are a few sites and I found the following blurb here:
Scientific Notation – A positive number is written in scientific notation if it is written in the form: a x 10 [superscript r] where 1 < a < 10 and r is an integer power of 10.

We also found another site that helped us explore pH titrations with an animated buret and solutions.

With the end of these discussions, we went on to the fun stuff!

The first task was to test things around the house. We assembled a variety of fluids including (clockwise starting at 1 pm): Wasabi, ponzu sauce (citrus soy sauce), onion slices, milk, lemon juice, orange juce, buffalo wings hot sauce.

You can see the pH strips. The results were as follows: wasabi – 4, ponzu – 3, onion slice juice – 5, milk – 7, lemon juice – 3, orange juice – 4, hot sauce – 3.

We also tested other materials and got the following results: Hydrogen Peroxide – 5, alcohol – 5, woolite detergent – 8, well water – 6, windex with ammonia-d – 10, acetic acid (vinegar) – 2.

The next experiment was to titrate the pH of a solution of water and bromphenol blue (a pH indicator). Approximately equal amounts of water were aliquoted out, same amounts of bromphenol blue were added to them and then the experiment was to add acetic acid (AA) and see what happens.

We made a digital movie of this part and it can be found here. (Please let me know how this site works for you re: getting the move to play for you! Lke it? Didnt work? Looks good? Looks horrible?)

Next, we titrated the pH back in the other direction with ammonia! See the digital video here.

We then experimented with the silk flower pH indicator experiment and the video is here.

Here are a few resources/tutorials on pH and chemistry!

Chemistry Hypermedia Project which features comprehensive on-line course in general chemistry.

The Element Song
This is a cute little ditty that is supposed to help students learn the names of the Chemiscal Elements. The lyrics are by Tom Lehrer
with lyrics or audio only file.

WebElements
The periodic table on the WWW. Vastly updated. Mark Winters highly recommends this site. I have been there and for knowledge of the elements, there is no equal. A real five star rating. It has the latest developments on current new elements being synthesized. A must visit!!

LearnChem This site is chock-full of tutorials, practice problems (with solutions), quizzes, exams, and more!