home study+home studio+retro food
Wild Rice Minnesota Style is the perfect side dish for your Thanksgiving table. This recipe is easy to make and adds just a few ingredients to the wild rice. It’s what we Minnesotans eat with our turkey, gravy, stuffing, and cranberries.
This is Step 7 in my series 10 Most important simple steps to teach your child to read. In this step, I will give you some tips on how to teach your child to read and retain sight words. These words are often called sight words or high frequency words. I call them story words. They are the words that a child needs to know to help them read stories.
Even the shortest and simplest stories are full of words like and, said, the, an, to, is, it. But these can be difficult words for beginning readers. These words do not always follow the letter sound rules.
This is our family’s birthday cake chocolate frosting recipe. Frost your favorite chocolate layer cake or spread it on graham crackers for an afterschool snack or study break. You will crave this fudgy chocolate frosting. When it hardens, it tastes like fudge.
I always requested a double layer German chocolate cake with this delicious fudgy chocolate frosting for my birthday cake. Paired perfectly with my mom’s bacon-topped meatloaf recipe or my grandma’s recipe for spaghetti and meatballs, it was my favorite birthday dinner.
[Read more…]In Step 6 of our series of posts on how to teach your child to read, parents will learn how to teach their child to sound out and read simple 3 letter words. This step will empower parents: they will see and hear their child read words.
First, make a list of simple 3 letter words that have a vowel in the middle and use the most common sound of each letter. Use simple words like cat, pet, lip, top, cup. It is fun to make lists of words to use. Parents can enlist their children to help think up simple, 3 letter words.
Look around the house for inspiration.
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Vanilla is my favorite baking ingredient. For some reason I feel decadent using extra-strength vanilla. Usually when I am baking I end up spilling in a little extra vanilla because it overflows the measuring spoon. Now I just write that right in to the recipe: “1 teaspon vanilla plus spill in a little more.”
[Read more…]Acme Brownies are great for kids to bake and eat as an after school snack. These are a real back to school brownie treat. My sister used to bake these brownies for a deli in town called Acme Deli. We looked it up in the dictionary, and the word “acme” means “the point at which something is the best.” These simply are the best homemade, from-scratch brownies. The proof is in the brownie!
The basis for this recipe is from our favorite retro kids’ cookbook, Betty Crocker’s Cookbook for Boys and Girls published in 1975 by General Mills. This cookbook is so retro 1970s. The kids pictured in the cookbook have classic clothes and hair, and the recipes in the book are quirky. Check it out here.
[Read more…]I never could have imagined the joy of a home music studio. In 2020 we built a home music studio in our basement. Timing gave us the ability to turn our basement TV room, rec room, and extra bedroom into a home studio.
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This studio has become a gathering place for my teenage sons and their friends and for my husband and his musician friends. It kept everyone occupied during the pandemic and civil unrest in our city. Now it provides a designated space to go to and do creative work. And it allows me some peace upstairs!
[Read more…]Awareness of details in the world and people around them is an important skill for children learning to read. Find out how to help increase your child’s awareness of details by trying these simple tips.
I am going to go off the path a bit here and talk about the importance of awareness. By awareness I mean attention to detail. This can be anything from using clues to help figure things out, the desire to figure things out, and the ability to figure things out. Awareness in reading involves things like noticing a certain line in a letter, being careful of which way to write a letter, or reading a word out loud and correcting it so that it matches an actual word in the English language. I notice the gap in awareness levels in my youngest students when they are in my classroom. I believe that awareness of details is very closely tied to reading.
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This retro recipe for Cowboy Food is the perfect dish to make your first night of a camping trip. It takes me back to early August days camping high in the Rocky Mountains of Montana. Cowboy Food is camping food.
We ate Cowboy Food for dinner at least a couple times per camping trip. We cooked it in a pot on our camp stove perched at the end of a long picnic table. This recipe for Cowboy Food is more in the Midwest tradition because it is sweet and tangy and not spicy like a Tex-Mex version might be. Even if you’re not going camping, this recipe for Cowboy Food is sure to warm you up on a cold fall or winter evening.
[Read more…]This is Step 4 in our series of posts about how to teach your child to read. This step is perhaps the most important step. In this step parents will learn how to build the bridge between the sounds in words and the letters that represent those sounds.
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In steps 1 and 2 of this series you introduced your child to sounds in words and to letters and the sounds they make. In Step 3, you used small objects like pennies to represent the sounds in words. And now you will use letters to represent their sounds in words. You and your child will land right on the doorstep of reading!
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