Portfolios ~ "BOATLIFT, An Untold Tale of 9/11 Resilience" video

BOATLIFT: A Must-Watch Video

What's Cookin'?


Food Show Recipes:


Dc will be using the following recipes for their contests this year.

Dd-9 is making Banana Nut Muffins.  We soak ours but will actually follow a recipe for a change for the contest :).  Of course this will take some testing so we're making them in a few minutes.  I found this recipe online.  For the contest we're making the following adjustments but for real life I would soak them overnight with adjustments: whole yogurt instead of low-fat; rapadura/sucanat for the sugar; and vegetable oil instead of canola oil (much of canola is genetically modified)(we'll probably use sunflower oil).
http://eatingcleanrecipes.com/2010/02/whole-wheat-banana-nut-muffins/

Dd-14 is making zucchini bread.  I'll try to type that up soon.

Dd-15 is making pancake crackers (scroll down to What's Cookin'? here) and homemade peanut butter (I posted here about peanuts).

What's Schoolin'?

What do I do with all of their work??  Well, this has worked well for us for several years... but you'd have to understand my NOT left-brain type (and compensations for my Lyme brain).  It would probably drive many of you crazy!

Throughout the year we simply toss "keepers" in one of these wonderful Sterilite plastic drawers that I kept in the closet of the old house.  It includes Math pages, tests, art work, etc, etc, etc.  Then during the summer (okay, it was every TWO summers for a while!) we go through it and they/I choose the real keepers of the year, take a photos with all of the rest spread out on the floor, and put the real keepers in a binder.  I punch holes in the art work or papers when appropriate and put others in those plastic page protectors when appropriate.  I can also put any cards, letters, smaller items and even notes to me in those page protectors.

This has worked so well that I plan to continue using it.  When we switched to lapbooking the "keepers" went down considerably because the unit pages are in the completed lapbooks that we keep on a shelf in the schoolroom.  When we switched to spiral notebooks for the different subject areas the "keepers" went down even more because random assignments or shelf work follow-up work is done in spirals.  Each spiral may span several years and when one if full we chunk it in... the drawers until summertime :).  At that time I simply store the full spriral with their other portfolio binders.


I hope posting this "system" will help others struggling with keeping/organizing their children's work.

Enjoy!