Autumn Bliss # 4 ~ Mmmm......

Autumn Bliss is....

Cooking fun foods for the kids on Halloween week.


Fun foods like Mummy Meatloaf! I loved seeing the kids smiles and laughs when they saw this dinner this past week.

Happy Halloween friends! I hope your holiday is full of all of the fun and sweets that your heart desires!

Autumn Bliss #3

Autumn Bliss is....

Eating apples with caramel dip.



Watching a favorite old Charlie Brown classic with the kids.



Receiving a Halloween table cloth in the mail that my sweet mil sewed for us.



Making Jack O'Lantern sandwiches as a surprise for the kids one day for lunch.





Watching the World Series with a house full of people that are rooting for the Rangers!



Autumn, the year's last, loveliest smile.
~William Cullen Bryant

How to Make An Apple Pie & See The World~ Part 2

As part of our rowing of How to Make an Apple Pie and See The World, we learned about each of the places that the girl in the story travels too.

Each day we read a book(s) or watched a video on the places that she traveled and then the kids marked those places on a world map in their lapbook and colored a flag for that country.




The flags the kid colored for each country. We put these together to make a flag book for their lapbooks.

For Sri Lanka we read,


This is a wonderful book on Sri Lanka that I picked up for a quarter at our library back in North Carolina. It has a lot of pictures alongside the words and it even shows how they remove the bark from the tree and process it to get cinnamon.

For Italy we read,




We love these books (their are multiple ones for different countries) and this one for Italy is our favorite because the story is so cute! The girl in the story is crazy is about pizzas and she overhears her uncle talking about the leaning tower of Pisa but she thinks he is talking about a leaning tower of pizzas! As her family ventures out for a trip to the leaning tower of Pisa, she expects to see a leaning tower of pizzas, and is much relieved to discover that the tower is not pizzas after all. In the back of each of these books is a paper doll of the main character.

For France we read,


I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE these books too! We have them for multiple locations. Author Miroslav Sasek has done a beautiful job of showing in these books the main places of interest in each city/country.



For England and Jamaica we watched videos of each location on Utube. On the day that we read about Sri Lanka the kids wanted to know more about how rice is grown because our book that we read went into details about how much rice Sri Lanka produces and it had pictures of rice fields. We therefore found some wonderful videos on Utube about how rice is grown that the kids really enjoyed watching too.

For America we read,



and,


By the same author as How to Make An Apple Pie and See the World, this is a MUST read! Love it! It takes on the same theme but as you can see by the title, the girl travels all over the United States to gather ingredients for a cherry pie. We had so much fun reading this one. Homeschool Share has a unit study for it that I printed out this summer and I look forward to doing it with the kids this year.


When the girl made it back to America, she specifically went to Vermont to get her apples for her pie so we read this book as well.

And just for fun, we read,


This is a fun read with a good ol' down home Apple Pie, American, feel. As the 27th president of the United States, William Howard Taft weighed more than 300 pounds and is sometimes remembered more for the size of his appetite than for his political ambitions. Told by a young boy, this good-natured spoof relates the events of a visit by Taft to small-town America at the turn of the century. The president is barely off the train before a delicious aroma propels him down Main Street in search of its source. Of course, the whole town, including the mayor and marching band, follows along in hot pursuit. In a tribute to cultural diversity, Taft stops at the town's local restaurants sampling culinary delights at "Tony's Italian Villa," "Big Ed's Barbecue," and "Mrs. Wong's Hunan Palace" but no meal satisfies him completely. Finally, Taft follows his nose to the child's house where mom's apple pie is cooling on the kitchen windowsill. After a hysterical encounter with the mother, her clothesline, and a rescued pie, Taft sits down to tea.


We learned about the different parts of an apple.


The kids recorded the different parts of the apple on this part of their lapbook.


We made these apple crafts out of spools.






We did a taste test with several different types of apples.


With each apple the kids recorded what they thought of it.


I cut up these cards and the kids had to put them in the correct order.


And last, but certainly not least, the kids made their very own Apple Pie! Here it is ready to go into the oven and I must say....it was delicious!

One day while looking at our large world map that hangs on our wall and reviewing the various places that the girl in the story travels to, Ally got quiet and then declared "Mom, I think the title of the book is wrong. She doesn't see ALL of the world, only part of it". Her observation made me giggle and made me proud too that she was observant enough to realize that.

"Good apple pies are a considerable part of our domestic happiness." -- Jane Austen

How to Make An Apple Pie & See The World ~ Part 1

Doesn't that sound fun!

It was!

As part of our Apple study this Fall we rowed the Fiar book How to Make An Apple Pie and See the World by Marjorie Priceman. This has always been a favorite book in our home with every single one of our children.


In the story a girl wants to bake an Apple Pie but when she gets to the market it is closed. So she starts a journey around the world to gather her ingredients for her Apple Pie! She travels first to Italy to gather some semolina wheat. Then onto France to locate a chicken for eggs. Then to Sri Lanka to get cinnamon from the bark of a Kurundu tree. Next stop, England, to get milk from a cow. Then Jamaica for sugar from the sugar cane field and last but certainly not least back to the United States to Vermont, to get apples.

While in Vermont she gathers 8 apples and gives one to the cow, one to the chicken, and eats one for herself which left 5 for the pie. We did some various math lessons using this scenario and some clip art.



One day we made some really fun apple pie crafts.


We took 2 paper plates and laced them together and stuffed them with red tissue paper to represent our apples. They looked yummy enough to eat!




The back of our pies.

While on the boat to Jamaica the girl gathers salt water from the ocean so that she has salt for her pie. This gave us an opportunity to discuss evaporation and the water cycle.


We filled a pan with water and salt and then set it out in the sun for a few days.


Our results once our water completely evaporated.

Our Drama for the book was to pantomine the end part of the book where the girl is baking her Apple Pie. The kids had to act out the following things; milling wheat into flour, grinding kurundu bark into cinnamon, evaporating seawater from the salt, boiling the sugar cane, persuading the chicken to lay an egg, milking the cow, churning the butter, slicing the apples, mixing the ingredients, and of course putting the pie into the oven. I managed to get a couple of pictures of the kids while they were doing their pantomines.


Here they are acting out "boiling". They are not boiling yet. They are waiting to get warm and then hot enough to boil.


Starting to move around some- getting warm.


Going nuts and bouncing everywhere- they're boiling!


Churning the butter.


Mixing the ingredients.


We talked about this saying and what it means.


We also guessed how many seeds are in an apple.


We recorded the kids guesses in their lapbooks. Our guesses ranged from 6 down to 2. The first apple we opened up only had one seed. The second apple had three seeds. The kids realized that every apple has a different amount of seeds in them.

For fun we made Rice Krispie Treat "apples" one day.



To be continued, tomorrow.

"Almost all wild apples are handsome. They cannot be too gnarly and crabbed and rusty to look at. The gnarliest will have some redeeming traits even to the eye." -- Henry David Thoreau, Wild Apples

Happy 42nd to the man I LOVE!

Yesterday was Bryans 42nd Birthday! I am so thankful for my husbands life. He's an amazing man of God full of love, incredible passion, and the greatest sense of humor I have ever encountered! I cherish each day that we spend together and I often wonder, where has the time gone? Wasn't it just yesterday that we were in highschool in the church youth group together?

Food has always been a big part of any of our celebrations here in the Unsell home. We celebrated yesterday with a day full of Bryans favorites. Orange rolls for breakfast and homemade Italian Meatball subs for dinner followed by a pineapple upside down cake that Emmy made for her daddy.



Emmy makes the best pineapple upside down cake!

Italian Meatball Subs (everyone around here loves these!)

INGREDIENTS:
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1/4 cup milk
1/2 cup dry bread crumbs
2 tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper
1/8 teaspoon garlic powder
1 pound ground beef
1/2 pound bulk Italian sausage

SAUCE:
1 can (15 ounces) tomato sauce
1 can (6 ounces) tomato paste
1 small onion, chopped
1/2 cup chopped green pepper
1/2 cup dry red wine or Progresso ® Beef Broth
1/3 cup water
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 teaspoon dried oregano
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon pepper
6 to 7 Italian rolls, split
Shredded Parmesan cheese, optional

DIRECTIONS:
In a large bowl, combine eggs and milk; add the bread crumbs, cheese, salt, pepper and garlic powder. Add beef and sausage; mix well. Shape into 1-in. balls. Broil 4 in. from the heat for 4 minutes; turn and broil 3 minutes longer.
Transfer to a 5-qt. slow cooker. Combine the tomato sauce and paste, onion, green pepper, wine or broth, water and seasonings; pour over meatballs. Cover and cook on low for 4-5 hours. Serve on rolls. Sprinkle with shredded cheese if desired. Yield: 6-7 servings.


We had a quiet, restful, and beautiful day celebrating Bryans life yesterday!

Psalm 103:13:
"As a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him..."

Galations 5:22-23

We have been talking about the Fruits of the Spirit that are mentioned in Galations in the Bible. We played a lapbook game that relates to the bible verse.





You roll the dice and move that many spaces and then draw a card and share your thoughts on responses to the question. Each of the cards have scenarios on them that bring up responses that would be part of the Fruits of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. I enjoyed hearing the different responses that the kids gave. The cards brought about some good discussions on how we react to many situations. The game also has blank cards where you can write your own scenarios and questions in.

If your interested, you can print the lapbook game by going HERE. Just scroll down on the page I have linked.

Autumn Bliss # 2

Autumn.........my favorite time of year.

"Winter is an etching, spring a watercolor, summer an oil painting
and autumn a mosaic of them all."
-Stanley Horowitz
Autumn Bliss is.....


New, soft, house shoe boots to keep my feet warm on chilly mornings and evenings.


The sound of walking on crisp fallen leaves.

"A few days ago I walked along the edge of the lake and was treated to the crunch and rustle of leaves with each step I made. The acoustics of this season are different and all sounds, no matter how hushed, are as crisp as autumn air."
-Eric Sloane