WFPB Granola

Hi, this is Anne! This is Whole Food Plant Based granola. It is very adaptable. You can make it crunchy or chewy. You can also put whatever you want in it. Up above there are a few ideas: Sunflower seeds, dried mango, chocolate chips, dried banana, and coconut flakes. At the end of the recipe I will show you how to dry your own fruit.

Granola

Ingredients

6 cups oats

1 cup honey

2 tsp cinnamon 

2 tsp vanilla

salt

Instructions 

In a large mixing bowl, mix oats, honey, cinnamon, vanilla, and salt. mix it up. then add in whatever you want!  If you like crunchy granola, preheat your oven to 350 ℉. Then, spread the granola out on a baking sheet and bake for 30 minutes, stirring every 10 minutes.  Allow to cool and add in the toppings. We like to make it plain the night before, then the next morning we have a granola bar and everyone adds in the toppings of their choice. We hope you enjoy it!

                 In the big bowl add in the oats, honey, cinnamon, vanilla, and salt. Mix it up!

How to Dry Your Own Fruit

Ingredients

Fruit or Berries of your choice

(Blueberries take at least 2 days to dry) 

You will need a Food Dryer

Instructions 

First, wash your fruit if you are drying a fruit/berry like apples, pears, or blueberries. Next, cut your fruit into thin pieces or it will take forever to dry. If you are drying a fruit like a mango, cut into smallish cubes. Now get out your Dryer, and lay out your fruit or Berrys on the mesh- like sheets. Next, set your Dryer to 350℉ (57℃) for 5-8 hours and check them when the dryer stops. You can peel one of if you aren't sure if they are done.

We hope you enjoy!

How to make Anne's Whole Food Plant Based Cookies!

Hi! this is Anne! I wanted to show you how to make my cookies. The good thing about them is they are whole food plant based and delicious! And they make a lot. I hope you enjoy them as much as we do! (look at the end for some pics of my brother John)

Anne's Special Ingredient Chocolate Chip Cookies!

        Ingredients
____________________

1 cup of brown sugar 

1 cup of white sugar                                                                           

1 1/2 cups of peanut butter                                               

2 flax eggs (2 Tbs ground flax + 6 Tbs water)                            

2 tsp vanilla extract                                                                
4 cups of flour                                                                              
1 tsp of baking soda                                                                
1 tsp of salt                                                                                  

1/3-1/2 cup of water

1-2 tsp of nutmeg (however much you prefer)

1/4 cup of chocolate chips

If you want, 1/2 to 1 cup of chopped walnuts

           How to make a flax egg
 _________________________

    To make a flax eggs, grind the  

flax and put it in a small bowl with 
  the water and mix. Add it to the 
electric mixer when it the recipe 
            says to add the eggs.

Instructions

__________________________

 Heat your oven to 350℉ 

With the whisk attachment on your electric mixer, mix together the brown and white sugar, with the peanut butter until combined.

Add the Flax eggs and vanilla extract and combine.

Switch out the whisk attachment, for the paddle attachment. Add the flour, salt, baking soda, and nutmeg, and blend. Then, add the water a little at a time, blending in-between. Add the chocolate chips and walnuts (if your using them) and combine.

Place the dough on the cookie sheets and press them down a bit. Place them in the oven and bake for 10-15 minutes.

Now, you can eat them!!

P.S this makes a lot, so you can put the extra in the fridge and pop some in the oven later! 









To make the cookies you will need: White and brown sugar, peanut butter, eggs, vanilla extract, flour, baking soda, salt, water, chocolate chips, chopped walnuts (optional),and my secret ingredient: Nutmeg! This is what makes it taste so good. You will also need a mixer with the paddle and whisk attachments.

sorry, I forgot the dry ingredients in this photo☹️

First, preheat your oven to 350℉, and get out your electric mixer. Any kind will do, this is just the one I have. Mix the brown and white sugar with the peanut butter on low (no.1 on mine) until combined. You may want to scrape down the sides.

Now, add the eggs and vanilla extract and mix again. Now you will need to switch out the whisk attachment for the paddle attachment and add the half the flour then add the baking soda, salt and mix. It will look a little like graham cracker crumbs. To make the flax eggs, in a separate small bowl mix 2 Tbs ground flax with 6 Tbs water and add to the mixer. 

                                                                         

Now, add the water a little at a time, blending in-between for about ten seconds as it takes a while for it to blend together, or until it looks like this. Add in the chocolate chips, walnuts (if your using them), and nutmeg. I didn't use walnuts this time.

Take the bowl off the mixer, put the cookie dough on your tray and press it down a bit. The chocolate chips tend to end op on the bottom of the bowl, so you might want to get a spoon and put them on top of the dough.

Bake them for 10-15 minutes or until golden on the edge\bottom of the cookies. After 5 minutes place the cookies on a cooling rack until cool. If you want to eat them warm now is the best time.

The best part is, you have extra dough! You can put it in a Tupperware in the fridge and pop some in the oven when you need more cookies. The picture above is how many my first round made.

                                     

                                     And there you have your cookies!! I hope you enjoy them!

And now, the promised pictures of John:

Beginnings in Unschooling

We thought we'd give a quick update on how things went this last month.  We had decided to go the unschooling route prior to Thanksgiving, but we found that we needed some time to relax into it, to deschool if you will.  Of course the kids did a lot of playing (and still do) and we tried to mostly observe and think about what it would mean for our family to implement some of these new found ideas.

We try to follow the wisdom of Sandra Dodd, "read a little, try a little, wait a little, watch."  Or as we Mormons are fond of saying, "line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a little" (2 Nephi 28:30 and Isaiah 28:10).

So we decided to get a little more serious about education in our home after New Year's (but don't tell our kids...).  Looking back, we have noticed that Anne has started to explore ideas on her own and loves her independence.  These past few weeks she has taken to saying how grown up she is.

Anne is into sewing.  She began sewing at the beginning of the school year, but after seeing a Christmas bag at church that she wanted to make, she has been hooked.  She already knew the basics of knot tying and stitching and she made several small projects, all on her own with no help or push from us.  She repaired anything she could find (patched her jeans, restitched my travel pillow that had a small hole, Lucy's ripped blanket, ...).  Then she started trying to make things that she saw in picture books she was reading, like a wallet.  We had ordered an introductory hand sewing book at Christmas that was on backorder.  It came a few weeks ago and has fueled her enthusiasm.  We now have several small pillows and some stuffed toys.  (Randy was even encouraged to get in on the sewing and made a sweet stuffed monster.)

Now, it was tempting to jump in and want to help her improve on her designs.  I mean, nothing was hemmed.  But we praised her up and down and we are waiting for her to see how she can improve.  And don't get us wrong, her projects have been good enough for her younger siblings to enjoy playing and sleeping with.

Since our primary goals for education are that they learn how to learn and love learning, we are encouraged by her behavior with sewing.  She is self motivated and largely figuring things out on her own, and she loves it! Right now we are not concerned with the subject of study as much as the enthusiasm for study, whatever it may be.

Of course there is a lot more than sewing going on with our family, but we'll leave those for another post.

Best meme suggestion gets a pretend prize!

Coming Out

That's right.  We've said it.  We are coming out of school and into a new way of thinking.  Our new obsession is how to best approach the education of our children.  We have been thinking about this off and on for years, but since we started preparations for homeschooling we have put a lot of serious thought into the subject.  We have made the decision to go the "unschooling" route.

What is unschooling, you may be asking?  This from Wikipedia:  

Unschooling is an educational method and philosophy that rejects compulsory school as a primary means for learning. Unschoolerslearn through their natural life experiences including play, game play, householdresponsibilities, personal interests and curiosity, internships and work experience, travel, books, elective classes, family, mentors, and social interaction. Unschooling encourages exploration of activities initiated by the children themselves, believing that the more personal learning is, the more meaningful, well-understood and therefore useful it is to the child. While courses may occasionally be taken, unschooling questions the usefulness of standard curricula, conventional grading methods, and other features of traditional schooling in maximizing the education of each unique child.

This post is not about bagging on the traditional school model.  It is about providing you with enough background information to understand where we are coming from so we can have an intelligent conversation about it if you are interested. And we hope you are.

When we started looking into different homeschooling philosophies this last summer we decided to think about what was most important to us.  Before studying the many philosophies out there, we came to the conclusion that the most important thing we wanted our kids to learn from school was how to learn.  We also wanted them to love learning.  If they have that we are confident they will succeed.

This has been a long journey.  Before I (Randy) gave "unschooling" any serious study I thought this approach was for lazy parents who were being irresponsible.  And with my superficial understanding of the philosophy, of course I would come to that conclusion.  However, I have had an about face.  

I am a very curious individual and I love learning.  Interestingly, I don't think I would have recognized this characteristic in myself until after leaving High School.  I am one who gets obsessed about something and wants to eat and drink it for a while.  There has been (and still exists in most cases) backcountry sledding, cello, statistics, reliability, math, physics, biology, shoe design, wood working, cooking, T'ai Chi, full body alignment, etc.  I have discovered that there simply isn't time to do everything and one has to learn how to prioritize their interests to accomplish the means that they are most interested in.  When someone forces me to learn something it turns sour quickly.  I have come to the realization that almost everything  I have learned that is worthwhile has happened outside of classes.  Don't get me wrong, classes have their place.  I am proud of the M.S. in statistics I earned at Iowa State University and it was probably the only setting where I could have learned what I did.  But the process would not have been worthwhile if I had not been personally invested.  I knew that it was up to me to succeed and I learned a lot because I was willing to do what it took to succeed.  For example, when I found I wasn't up to speed on matrices and linear algebra, I watched lectures from MIT on youtube (which are great, if you're really interested) and talked with other students about it. 

(Megan now)  From the beginning it was a matter of prayer.  I was trying to decide what curriculum to choose for my daughters.  When I first began, it was an overwhelming task.  I mean, that is a huge decision!!  I was confident that we would be guided to something good for our family.  But I kept thinking, "What I choose for them is probably going to impact their whole lives! Yikes!" (Too much like Satan's plan.)

It may have started about that same time that I came to the conclusion that every person has a unique education--even the kids that go to the same schools and have the same classes.  Not a great revelation, I admit, but I had never thought about it in this light. There were holes in my education that weren't there for others.  Yet on the other hand, I had learned some things that other people hadn't.  It was a great realization that there is no ONE curriculum that fits all.  And that was a relief--and a worry.  Am I going to have to taylor this to each child??  This was going to be tricky.  

I felt good about the curriculum we started with but I knew that I would learn a lot this first year and possibly need to make some changes as we went along.  So here's the first change.  Unschooling. Interestingly, I have noticed that the process I went through to educate myself about unschooling is the way this philosophy proposes we allow our children to learn.  When they are the ones that want to know, they will learn it. And they will own it. Which gives me confidence in our next step.  Much less tricky than trying to do it for them, but still a lot of responsibility on me to expose them to all kinds of things and help them learn to learn.

(Together again) Once we were excited enough about what we were learning and wanted to act on it, we started talking about it with others.  We quickly found that it's not easy to talk about this subject since our new ideas are the opposite of what our culture currently accepts as education.  So we have decided to share with you some of the best of what we have read and watched.  If you are interested or worried about our children, we would love to talk to you about it... after you've done your homework.

Some assumptions up front (the mathematician can't help it).  We believe these apply to children just as much as they do to you and me.

- We are naturally curious
- No one likes to be bored
- Real learning cannot be forced or coerced 
- We choose to do hard things that interest us

A Mathematician’s Lament, essay by Paul Lockhart http://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf

How this type of philosophy fared in Matamoros, Mexico http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/free-thinkers/all/

Sudbury Valley School (est. 1968) stuff.  To me (Randy), the Sudbury Valley School model is the most ideal schooling system I can imagine right now.
- http://www.sudval.com/05_articles.html (Most articles from “Articles on the Following Subjects” were helpful)
- Videos linked here were interesting http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awOAmTaZ4XI&list=PL5ACC72C2C7100240 
- Daniel Greenberg on Sudbury Valley School http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Um2c9o25nfM (it’s all good, but my favorite part is at about 28:00 - 32:00)
- Free at Last by Daniel Greenberg (book)

This study has been intertwined with an enlightening, fun, and fruitful gospel study on how our Father in Heaven teaches us.  How does he do it!? We encourage you to keep this and other gospel principles in mind as you read through these articles.  That's what we've been doing.  Trying to sift through the information to distinguish truth from error.  We began with the need to know something.

Are you still here?  This feels right for our family and we are going to go down this path.  We still don't know how it's going to work out exactly for us but we're excited to get started.  Heaven help us!

We are HERE! We are Here. We are Here!

Well, it is our first year of homeschool and we are enjoying it, so far!

We have a funny, enthusiastic kindergartener.

She wants to be a mathematician when she grows up.

Just like Dad.

And we also have a 2nd grader who knows how things work at school.

She's learning a lot of history and is pretty patient with me as I figure out how I want things to work.

Aren't they cute?

We have been pleasantly surprised with how well our garden did this year.  We actually harvested some of our red and orange peppers this year!!  We have also had more cherry tomatoes than even Lucy and Brig can eat. Lucy loves picking them whenever she has a chance.  We had enough tomatoes for 2 batches of salsa, jalapeños, sweet peas, zucchini and yellow squash, and as you can see, cantaloup.  Our most recent surprise was a delicious watermelon that we picked yesterday.  

It is funny how much satisfaction can come from growing things you can use.

The ducks like the handouts.

We have enjoyed learning about the lily pads at Longwood Gardens.

Life with kids.

We have been busy these past few months.  Time goes too fast.  I can't believe my boy is 8 months old already!   He is so wonderful for me at church, it has been said in reference to Brig by several couples in our ward--expecting, and not yet expecting babies, "I want one of those."  He is a gem, what can I say.

We got a swing set!!  And within the week Anne finally figured out how to pump all by herself, and Ruby made some major improvement!  (hooray for me!)

The girls will preform his every command.  Or at least they compete to be his favorite jester.  Anything to make this guy laugh!

We went to Philadelphia to meet Uncle Cory and Aunt Jill.  It was so fun to see them!  It has been too long.  

Had to get a picture at the Rocky statue, even if it isn't very good.

And here's an Easter picture that snuck in there.

We had an awesome activity at church!!

At home, Lucy kept asking me why the doorbell was broken.  It wasn't until I was going through pictures later that I realized what she was talking about.

Campfires are the best!  It took Lucy a while to cook her hot dog, holding it way up there.

Did you know you can reach farther in the splits?  Well, at least Brigham can.

We had a passover dinner with some friends leading up to Easter.  It was fun to think more about the symbolism as we remembered the sacrifice of our Savior.

We are excited for the fruits of our garden!

One happy baby.

Hayride at Milburn Orchards.

To celebrate finishing The Book of Mormon as a family, we had a party.  Here are our bows and arrows that were not broken. 

 But some of them lost their spring.

Anne was chosen as a "Young Ambassador" again this year.  We are so proud of her hard work in school and her good citizenship.  

Would you believe those girls are in the same grade?

Anne had a great growth spurt this year too!

I guess she takes after me more than I thought.