home study+home studio+retro food
Our home studio is excited to announce our high school senior won a music scholarship to his favorite university. Once we reminded him to check his email, he discovered he had won the scholarship. Ha ha!
My son’s success was part hard work and part luck. Below I will outline his journey and give seven tips for applying for a music scholarship.
[Read more…]This retro punch recipe from the 1970s is perfect for any holiday or special event. As you can guess from the title of this post, the secret ingredient is Five Alive Citrus juice. I looked all over the place for Five Alive Citrus juice and finally found it in Canada via Amazon.com.
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This citrus punch is amazingly refreshing. We call it “First Communion Punch” in our family since we always served it at first communion celebrations. It is also the perfect punch for wedding showers, graduation parties, Thanksgiving Day, or holiday parties. The light, effervescent quality of this punch just lifts you up.
[Read more…]Editing is a skill you should master before you graduate. Just because you are graduating doesn’t mean you are done writing and editing papers. Not by a long shot.
Everyone loves cheesy potatoes, right? I make cheesy potatoes every Easter. My recipe has a slight twist. I use O’Brien style hashbrowns.
O’Brien potatoes are just a version of diced potatoes roasted with diced green and red bell peppers and onions. The hasbrown version is just hashbrowns with the peppers and onion.
[Read more…]Are you looking for ways to help your middle school or high school student with their writing assignments? Here are 5 simple writing assignment help tips that may be just what high schoolers and parents need.
Writing is a process that leads to a final product. Most students want to skip the process part and go right to the final product. I worked in a college writing lab and spent 15 years grading papers for high school writing workshop classes, so I’ve seen it all.
[Read more…]Serve up these deviled crab cakes for Mardi Gras and let the good times roll! My family makes these deviled crab cakes on Christmas Eve as part of our main course. These delicacies are good for New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Day, or Mardi Gras, too.
My family has been making these deviled crab cakes since at least the 1960s. I am not sure how far back this retro recipe goes. Maybe the 1950s?
[Read more…]Remember the old rhyme “i before e, except after c, or when followed by g as in neighbor or weigh?” Vowel combinations can be tricky not only in spelling but in reading, too. The tips below will help you teach your child to read vowel combinations at home.
When you think about it, the main difficulty with how to read words is in the vowels. Vowels and all of their sounds can make life difficult. Interesting, but difficult.
[Read more…]Old fashioned gingerbread cut out cookies, to me, are Christmas. I make these first every holiday season.
The holidays can start once I’ve baked my gingerbread cookies. This recipe makes a ton of cookies, so I have to be sure to set aside a big chunk of time for baking them.
These are such delicious cookies. The molasses and spices in these thin, crisp cookies are perfect.
This year we even ate gingerbread cookies for breakfast. Amazingly, they kept us satisfied the whole morning.
[Read more…]My goal here is to provide parents with tips on how to teach their child to recognize and read long vowel sound words. In this step your child will learn to recognize when to say a vowel the long way.
Your child should be reading 3 letter short vowel words and 4-5 letter blends and digraph words with short vowels. See my posts on these here and here. They have been listening to the sounds in these words and have been writing down the sounds as letters.
It is important to keep practicing all of these types of words as you move forward.
[Read more…]Letter sound combinations called blends and digraphs are fun to teach. In Step 8 of 10 Most important simple steps to teach your child to read I will provide some simple tips for how to teach these short vowel letter sound combinations.
Like math, reading builds on skills that increase in complexity. You as the parent can “gamify” these words as much as you want so the complexity does not set up a road block. At the end of this post I list several games that have worked well for my students.
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