DIY Family Recipe Book: Whole Wheat Bread

One of my favorite aspects of unschooling is the time I spend with the girls cooking in the kitchen. We have many family favorite recipes and this year I want to put at least 52 recipes into a Mohler Family Cookbook. The girls are excited and are going to help with the process!

This week we are baking whole wheat bread. This bread is incredible and Olivia can now make it by herself as well!

I think the best lesson my girls learned through watching me bake bread is that failure is not an option. I guess you could say my bread baking skills were sub-par! Believe me no one in my house thinks my bread should be fed to our chickens. Actually I have listened to arguments over who will get the last slice!

This bread is made two or three times a week at our home. I hope you enjoy it as much as we do.

Ingredients:

Whole Wheat Bread Flour

Molasses

Sugar

Yeast

Salt

Vegetable Oil

Warm Water

Step one:

• Add 3 ½ teaspoons of yeast, 2 tablespoons of molasses, ¼ cup sugar, 2 cups whole wheat bread flour, 1/3 cup oil, and 1 & 1/3 cup warm water into a mixing bowl.
• Using the paddle attachment mix together for 5 minutes.

• This will create a sponge. The sponge will need to be covered with a moist towel and allowed to rise for 60 minutes.

Step two:

• Add 1 teaspoon of salt and 1 ½ - 2 cups of whole wheat flour to the sponge. Mix using the dough hook for 10 minutes.

Your dough should form into a ball. If you are impatient like me, do NOT cheat and try to mix for 5 minutes, or even 8 minutes. You will get the best results if you truly allow the mixer to knead the dough for 10 minutes.

• Pre-heat your oven to 350 degrees.

Step three:

• Roll dough into a log and place into a large greased loaf pan. Let rise for 30 minutes.

Step four:

• Place loaf pan in the oven for 33 minutes. That is the magic number for my oven. J

Let bread cool on a cooling rack, or slice right into the warm bread and slather on the butter! Whatever floats your boat.

I hope you enjoy this recipe. It is a definite family favorite in our home.

DIY: Happy Book Project

I spent some time with my girls talking to them about a new project I wanted to start this year. I really thought it would be a fun project for us to work on together, and could be a great part of our unschooling life. Two of my three girls decided that they wanted to do the project with me.

What is the project? Creating a 2015 Happiness Book out of an old used hard cover book. A bit of upcycling, creativity, time, and happiness are required to make a Happy Book, but doesn't that sound fun?!

Here is the premise of this project:

• Create a book full of happy thoughts, moments, images, and quotes.
• Create at least one page each week of the year.
• Upcycle an old book as part of the project.
• Use only what you have on hand.
• Goal is to focus on what makes you happy, even on difficult days.

The girls and I took a trip to our local used book store, and found our own hardback books to use for this project.

Next, we used an exacto knife and a piece of chipboard to cut away 4 – 6 pages of the book and then saving (not cutting away) two pages. 

We repeated this process throughout the entire book. When we finished we had books that looked like this.

We are cutting pages from our books, because we plan on adding bulky items to our happy pages. This will allow our books to bulge open a bit less. J

This week we created the title page and our first page of happiness for 2015!

The girls and I are excited to be doing this project together.

• We can keep each other accountable. Which will help me stick with my word of the year (BEGIN).
•  Creating with others is more fun than creating by yourself.
• It is simply FUN to spend time together on a creative project.

Maybe you want to create a Happy Book? I am extremely happy to have started mine. Hope you share your Happy Book pages here with me and my girls. 

2015 is the perfect year to focus on Happy!

A Novel Concept: Learning to Write

As a former public school English teacher, I can't believe I am going to say this, but here it goes. I do not believe kids need to be taught how to write. There I said it! Wow, it feels good to get that off my chest. I do believe that children will learn to write by being good readers. 

How do my kids learn how to write? Simple. When they feel like writing they write. Let me show you what I mean.

Ella is nine and when she writes it is normally a script for her My Little Ponies and Webkinz animals, because she likes to create movies with her animals.  Also, she will write letters to friends, because this is what she is interested in writing. When she writes she will share her writing with me and we discuss capitalization, grammar, and spelling. Super simple and it works because she is writing something that is important to her. 

Natalie is almost 12 and loves creative lettering. She has spent a lot of time working and developing her skill this year. Her writing this year consists of copying her favorite quotes into her notebook. Copy work is a great skill for learning how to write well. She has done more writing in past years, but this year she simply is focusing on copy work. She may write more later this year, or maybe not. The main reason this works is because she brings me her quote book and we talk about why punctuation is being used a certain way, and why specific words are capitalized and others are not. We will also talk about theme, mood, and descriptive words.

Olivia is 15 and has been a writer and story teller since she was 3 years old. At the age of three she would draw or paint pictures, describe the story and I would act as her scribe and get her stories onto paper. She still LOVES writing. Olivia wants to be an author. We worked together and found fantastic books, groups, conventions, and mentors to work with and ultimately create her own novel writing program.

Writing is a skill everyone needs, but how it is learned can be different for every individual. My three girls have all learned to write through their own methods and means. It didn’t require a classroom with boring material. It did require them to share their writing with me and for us to have a discussion about what and how they write. Writing really can be that simple. 

If you are interested in what books Olivia chose for her writing program I have them listed below. I have read about half of them, while she has read them all. These are wonderful books for any aspiring author.

Writing Irresistible Kidlit: The Ultimate Guide for Writing Young Adult and Middle Grade Readers

Olivia really enjoyed this book and felt it helped her focus on the genres and audience she is interested in writing for. 

Stein on Writing: A Master Editor of Some of the Most Successful Writers of Our Century Shares His Craft Techniques and Strategies

Cool information from a master editor. Good information to know for any future author.

Plot & Structure: (Techniques And Exercises For Crafting A Plot That Grips Readers From Start To Finish) (Write Great Fiction)

This was Olivia’s FAVORITE book of the year! She wants more from the Write Great Fiction Series.

Rivet Your Readers with Deep Point of View

She found good information from this book.

The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer's Guide To Character Expression

She uses this reference book often!

Outlining Your Novel: Map Your Way to Success

This book was really helpful and gave good ideas for different ways to outline a novel.

Enjoy learning to write in  very natural way!

Making the Perfect Pie Crust

This year we spent Christmas at the happiest place on earth! The girls have named this the BEST Christmas ever and I would agree. Yet, because of the traveling we missed doing some of our favorite holiday baking. Everyone at my house is thrilled that we are celebrating 2015 with homemade pie!

Perfect pie crust is a must and I am incredibly grateful that my grandmother taught me how to make an awesome crust! I no longer make it in a glass bowl with a wooden spoon, but after a few tweaks and a Kitchen Aid I can truly whip together pie crust in no time at all.

Ingredients:

·         2 cups all-purpose flour

·         ½ teaspoon salt

·         ¾ cup of butter flavored shortening

·         6 – 8 tablespoons of ice cold water

The KEY to making great pie crust is the ice cold water, so take a few seconds and put some ice in a bowl and add water to it before you start mixing anything else together. Trust me on this.

Combine flour, salt, and shortening into a mixing bowl and mix well with a paddle attachment on your Kitchen Aid mixer. It should be a crumbly consistency.

Place the dough hook onto your mixer. Turn the mixer on and begin adding 6 – 8 tablespoons of ice cold water. Allow the pie crust to mix until the dough forms into a ball in the mixer. The dough should NOT be crumbly, if it is add another tablespoon of water.

This recipe makes enough pie dough for two pie crusts.

Roll your dough out onto a lightly floured pastry cloth. Lay the rolled crust into the pie pan folding under any excess crust.

Your pie crust is now ready for your favorite pie filling. My family LOVES pumpkin pie, so our New Year’s Day will be celebrated with a slice of our favorite pie! Hope you love making pie crust as much as I do. Such a yummy way to kick off 2015. 

My 2015 Word of the Year

I have got to be honest. I have not been good with follow through. Actually I kind of suck at it. Not all of the time. When it comes to taking care of my kids – I have great follow through! They need a dance costume I can whip one together. What I tend to struggle with is follow through on anything that has to do with my own personal well-being. 

As I sit here thinking on my last statement the only words coming to my mind is that truly sucks!

This year I am joining with the thousands who choose a single word to focus on throughout the year. I am going to follow through on this one simple task. I need to stop choosing the path that sucks for me personally and follow through on something I want to do for myself.

So, there you have it blogosphere! I am putting it out there and am choosing not to suck at following through. Instead I am going to choose to BEGIN. Yes, begin is my 2015 word and mantra!

I am going to BEGIN taking care of myself. I will BEGIN to follow through on my personal passions. I will BEGIN to take chances that will make me happy. I will BEGIN to rest when needed. Most importantly I will BEGIN to feel complete.

2015 is going to be a wonderful year to simply BEGIN!

My 8 Year Old Chooses to Learn

My youngest who detests anything that has to do with physically writing asked to learn cursive this week. Out of the blue she requests not only to learn cursive, but she wants a cursive book.

I immediately ordered a book and it is set to arrive this next week. I am not certain why she suddenly has this interest, but she does. I simply roll with it and encourage her.

She spends most of her day playing, reading and watching videos about animals, adding videos to her Youtube channel, doing a bit of math, and this week we will add in some cursive. Love how this little one chooses to learn.

Those Who Judge Our Choice to Home School

It is the time of year when I get asked one question over and over again. Where do your children go to school?

I quite simply answer, "They don't." Most often people ask if I home school and then spend the next fifteen minutes explaining to me how they would love to be able to home school, but they could NEVER do it.  

Today was a new day, yet the questions about how we school were the same, but my response was answered with raised eyebrows, many questions, and a look of disapproval. When a child sitting near by started to share how much they wish they could home school, the mother who raised her eyebrows stated, "Think of all that you like about school." 

Needless to say the child shrugged, and no longer participated in the conversation. 

I get that not everyone can wrap their head around the idea of home schooling, let alone the idea of unschooling. I simply ask that if you can't wrap your head around a concept please refrain from casting judgement and squelching others curiosity. 

I understand why some believe that they could never teach their own children, and can not imagine taking them out of school. I completely disagree, but I can understand how someone can believe this. I simply ask those who have difficulty understanding why I would home school, or unschool my children to put down their judgmental glances and comments. 

I ask these people to take some time to read and learn about the topic of home schooling or unschooling. Don't squash inquisitive children, because they are curious about a topic you are fearful of. Most importantly, don't judge with words or body language. I am not judging you for keeping your children in public school.