The Lentil Challenge

As I walked through Costco the other week, I spied a 10 pound bag of lentils. We didn't have bulk dried items like that in Costco on the East Coast. I thought about it and decided I am going to buy 10 pounds of lentils for less than $6.00 and we will enjoy lentils. Do you realize that is 60 cents a pound? That is cheap protein.

Now before you feel sorry for my kids for having to eat 10 pounds of lentils, let me tell you about my son's reactions when as I walked through the aisle with my shopping card to put a bag of lentils in the cart. His reaction was something like, "lentils, yeah!" with a very excited tone. My kids love lentils.

One of the easy things about lentils is they don't need to soak and are generally ready to eat in 45 minutes. For a long time lentils have been my go to item if I didn't have meat thawed.

So the challenge that I have given myself is to use all 10 pounds in the next 8-10 weeks. (We are praying that we will have our visa by the end of the year and be moving and I won't take this with me.)

I have a few lentil recipes that we like and I also spent some time online looking for lentil recipes. I pinned a number on Pinterest.  For my first meal I was brave and tried a new recipe. I made this recipe, Lentil And Spinach Dhansak (I copied the recipe here for reference.) We ate it so fast I didn't take a photo.

Ingredients

• 25ml Flora Cuisine
• 1 red onion, finely chopped
• 2.5cm (1 inch) piece root ginger, grated or finely chopped
• 2 teaspoons curry paste, or to taste
• 1 Knorr Vegetable Stock Cube dissolved in 600ml (1 pint) boiling water
• 85g (3 oz) red lentils
• 2 carrots, chopped
• 1 sweet potato, cut into cubes
• 350g (12 oz) basmati rice
• 225g bag spinach leaves
• Finely grated rind and juice of ½ lime or lemon
• Lime or lemon zest, to garnish
• 150g carton low fat natural yogurt to accompany                   

Preparation

1. Melt the Flora in a saucepan, add the onion and ginger and cook for about 5 minutes, stirring occasionally, until soft.
2. Add the curry paste and cook, stirring, for 1 minute.  Gradually add the vegetable stock and bring to the boil.
3. Stir in the lentils, carrots and sweet potato and simmer gently for about 15 minutes until tender.
4. Meanwhile, cook the rice according to packet directions.
5. Stir the spinach leaves into the cooked vegetables until they have just wilted and then add the lime or lemon rind or juice.
6. Serve the vegetables with the rice, garnished with lime or lemon zest.

In my typical style I changed the recipe a bit. I didn't know what Flora Cuisine was so I just used butter. I didn't use red onion just a regular brown onion. I used brown lentils instead of red and decided that was not enough lentils so I increased it to 1 cup and added more water. Maybe it is because I used brown lentils instead of red but it did take longer than 15 minutes to cook.

The recipe was a hit. My son had thirds. Everyone was a bit disappointed that there were not enough leftovers to have for lunch the next day.

So share with me your favorite lentil recipe. I have enough lentils and we will probably be looking for some variety. A number of the recipes I have are Indian type dishes. Give me your favorite.
Beth

Math Fun - Hopping by 5's

I wanted to review and work on counting by 5's. I had copied the 100 number chart the other day and we colored and the 10's. Today I wanted to work on the 5's. I was talking about hopping and went to grab an animal thinking maybe there would be a rabbit in the animal box that could hop along. Instead I found a frog that was just right for our 100 number chart.

First we colored the multiples of 5 in green because the frog needed some lily pads to hop along as we went through the number chart.

Then using the frog we counted our way to 100 by 5's.

It was a fun activity. I love it when I come up with something fun that didn't take much planning. I am not always the best at planning things ahead which is funny because for the most part I would consider myself a planner.

J thought it looked fun and said, "remember when you used to do fun things with me in math." Yes, now he is studying fractions. Maybe we need a pizza and we can do some fraction work.

Beth

Fall Soccer

The leaves are beginning to change color, the days are getting shorter, the apples and pumpkins are in season -- it is fall and that also means time for soccer. J has played the last four years on the east coast and we were able to find a team for him to play with here in the Northwest.

Today the weather was perfect meaning warm and not too cold, not raining or not even drying from rain so I took my camera to the game with the goal of getting some photos.

J's favorite position to play is defense. It was fun watching him play and realizing how he is focusing and thinking about where the ball is going.

His team won today 2-0. It is a team that has been playing together for a few years. 

I am glad that he has had the opportunity to play here. They have practice twice a week and a game every Saturday. It gives him some good exercise and I consider it his PE. 

Today's game was at 5:00 so it was a bit cool by the time the game was over.

I guess his arms are out to balance himself. Maybe it is also a bit of having done ballet this morning with his sister. He said she would only do it if he did it with her.

Miss K found some friends and was playing both soccer and football. She was happy even though there was no playground. She remembers going to the playground when we were on the east coast and wanted to do that tonight but this is just a huge field with lots of soccer fields.

Here I am.

Beth

Math Funny

A few days ago I wrote a nice long post praising Miss K for all her math progress. Today I gave her the assigned page which is to copy the date, write in what today is, do a patterning sequence and then do eight math problems. It is simple and the same thing that she did all by herself just a day or two earlier. Well, I looked at her page and this is what I saw.

A big "X" on the addition problems. She said she didn't want to do them, they were too hard. Her brother tried to tell her that wasn't going to work and then her mother told her that wasn't going to work.

She is a fast learner. We had been working on Explode the Code and there was a page with three sentences with the words mixed up and she was to unscramble the words and make a sentence. It is a concept that she does not understand. She will just copy the words so she writes, "runs Jim mud in the". So I decided it was too much and so I put a big "X" on that page. I guess that will be the last time that I allow something like that.

I will say that after being sent to the principal's office she did get her math done. She sat in there and did it. She can do it. Yes, it is hard but we work hard to make it easy.

She keeps us laughing and enjoying life.

Beth

The week we moved, again

On Monday we moved, again. Hopefully this is where we will stay until we move to England. We are back in the mission house and it is the closest thing that the kids have to home at this time. I think it is providing a bit of stability for them.

Yesterday, I got the last of the boxes that we had stored at friends' house and so now we have all the books we need for school except for the DVD that went missing.

We do school at the kitchen table. In our previous house we had a room off the kitchen that was the school area and I do miss that. We could leave our books piled there and we had all our books there. You work with what you have and here we have a kitchen table. I just realized that there is a table in the dining room. Now I will ponder if I want to move there.

We are moving through Mystery of History Volume II and enjoying it. This week we read about the Apostles Creed, Diocletian, and Constantine. We do history together. I don't do anything special for Miss K. J does a bit more reading related to the history we are studying.

One of my goals for J for this year is that he will more independent in his planning and work. I have given him a guideline that tells him how many lessons/assignments he should do per week. It has been slow and I think I need to continue but not expect that he will get to that goal in a week or two.

Here he is at his desk working on math. He looks very studious in this photo.

Miss K continues to only want to do a tiny bit of school. Keeping her on task and working is a challenge. She will do a bit and then ask for a break which doesn't work because I have a challenge coming back and so does she.

J and I were talking and he was remember the lapbooks and other fun things that we did the first years in school. He was also remembering the DNA which someone posted to Pinterest and so the one day that I do school with my kids in their pj's and now the whole world can see it. So I have been thinking about what fun activities I can add into our day. Maybe I should look through my Pinterest boards and see what I have pinned.

J has a soccer game this weekend and the kids have AWANA. My goal is to finish unpacking and get a creative activity for next week.

That is about all that happened this week here.

Beth

Math-U-See Alpha Update

We have been using Math-U-See with Miss K for about a year. I was watching her do her math today and thinking just how much she is learning and I think Math-U-See gets quite a bit of the credit for that.

Here is just a bit of background information. We began math with Saxon Math K and that worked great as there is no writing. Miss K loved the meeting book. She knows the calendar and will tell you what day and what month it is. I love Saxon especially up to Saxon 3 but as I moved further in Saxon with JP I realized that Saxon was not going to work long term so I began to look at options.

Knowing that hands on things would work best for Miss K. Math-U-See states that they teach for concept, emphasizing memorizing the facts. I knew that Miss K can memorize and I do think that she needs to memorize the facts. Someday we might get to the point that we need to use a calculator but at this point she is able to learn her facts. Math-U-See also teaches to mastery and I felt that was something that she needed. I felt that I needed to make a switch earlier rather than later so last year I made the switch. I am still using Saxon 1 along with Math-U-See except for right now as Saxon is in storage and someday we will be reunited with all our things.

We began with Alpha. Miss K loves watching the DVD. I have found that I really do need to sit with her and watch the DVD so I now what is being taught and some of the terms that are used.

We are moving slow as I want to make sure that she has the concepts down. She has learned the blocks and knows what color each of the numbers are. Of course, she loves 8 which is "chocoeight".

Since we took the summer off, we have been reviewing and going back through some of the facts making sure she has her facts down.

At this time she know her + zero facts and her +1 facts. We are working on +2 and along with that odd and even numbers. She needs more review than the workbook gives so I just write some of the problems on a page for her. This morning she was pulling the blocks out of the bag and lining the numbers up and figuring the problems herself. She got all eight problems correct using the blocks.

We are slowly working our way through Alpha but we are taking it slow to make sure that she understands and knows her facts. I have been impressed with Math-U-See and do think this will be a good fit for her for math.

I do at times wonder about other things. There are two other curriculums out there for special needs. One is TouchMath and another is Numicon. I have looked at these online but the price of TouchMath stopped me from considering that further. I have been interested in Numicon which comes for the UK but at times it has been hard to find here in the US. At this time Math-U-See is working so we will continue with this.

One other resource is the book Teaching Math to People with Down Syndrome and Other Hands-On Learners. It has been quite awhile since I looked through that book. I seem to recall that was a bit beyond where Miss K is at this time. It sits on my shelf as a reference though right now it is in a box.

One of the challenges that I have is reviewing what she knows on a regular basis so she doesn't forget that. Some of the things that she knows at this time include the following:
Telling time on the hour
Counting by 10's
Plus zero facts
Plus one facts

We are working on but have not mastered including the following:
Telling time on the half hour
Counting by 5's
Counting by 2's
Plus two facts

There are a few troublesome areas including the following:
Counting to 100 (yes, I am just going to ignore the fact that she can't do that and wait until it happens)
Getting the teen and -ty numbers confused (17 and 70 or 18 and 80 which I can't decide if that is a math problem or a speech problem)

So that is where we are at this time with math.
Beth

When I grow up,

"When I grow up, I want to be a teacher like you." Miss K told me that this morning.  That made me happy to hear.

Normally she says she wants to be a cocoa pilot which is a co-pilot because she knows her brother wants to be a pilot so she figures she can fly with him if she is the co-pilot. I think a cocoa pilot sounds sweet.

Sometimes she says she wants to work in a pet store when she grows up.

It does change from time to time, just like most children.

I do wonder at times what she will be when she grows up. She has normal child dreams of what she wants to be when she grows up. Some days in the back of my mind when she tells me these things I wonder, "will she be able to?" Then I remind myself I can't limit her. I need to help her become all she can be using all the gifts and abilities that God has given her. I need to teach her, train her, love her, push her to excel.

I remember when she was born there was some grief and some questions wondering what God had planned. One thing that kept through the years is that Down Syndrome was not a surprise to God. He knew all along and it is part of his plan.

So just as when she was born it was not a surprise to God, her life is part of his plan and so we will wait and see what God has planned for her. I need to keep my eyes fixed on God. It is hard at times not to worry about what will happen, where will we be living, what will she do, will she always live with us, and so many other thoughts of the future. There are so many questions.

I do wonder what she will be when she grows up. We will just enjoy this today and trust God for the future.


Beth