Sight Word Memory Match
My daughter’s kindergarten teacher sent us home from Curriculum Night with a list of sight words for the kids to memorize, with the suggestion to “make flash cards or something”. Sight word flash cards sounds extra boring to me, so I decided to make a memory match game instead.
Approaching Fall
Even as we enjoy the warm sunny weather, its impossible to ignore the feel of fall in the air.
Drawing on Driftwood
We took advantage of the beautiful late summer day today and headed to the beach for what will probably be one of our last beach outings of the season. While the kids played in the sand I picked up a small smooth piece of driftwood and sketched the landscape in front of me.
I should have put something in the photo for scale: The wood is about two inches long.
More Travel Journals for Kids
I got these sweet blank journals at an event this summer and set them aside to use for the kids’ travel journals this fall. I’m starting to add some activity pages and the nameplate pages.
Travel Maps for Travel Journals
I’ve come up for air for a minute from the hectic pace of back-to-school to work on the kids’ travel journals for our upcoming trip. Today I drew the route maps for our flights out and back; not the actual map but an approximation of the time in the air, so they can color blocks of time and see ‘if we’re there yet’. I just realized in the middle of the trip we also have a 3+ hour car ride (each way) so I’ll have to plan some activities for that as well!
More Blackberry Jam
I made the second batch of blackberry jam today. I did a few things differently – I used a bit less sugar and added two diced apples to try and give the jam more body. I haven’t opened a jar of this batch yet so I don’t know if the experiment worked.
I think that there is at least another batch of jam worth of berries on the bushes, so I’ll probably try to pick more sometime this week – that cake was so good that I might have to make another one of those as well.
Blackberry Jam
Today the eight cups of wild blackberries in my fridge became 6 pints of blackberry jam (although it might be a wee bit closer to blackberry sauce than jam; no matter).
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| First the well-washed berries went into the bowl (actually they were already washed and in the bowl from yesterday). |
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| Next they were mashed up with a potato masher – next time I’ll leave more whole berries. |
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| Lots of sugar went into the pot on top of the berries. Lemon juice went in as well, un-photographed. |
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| After about 30 minutes of cooking time, the jam went into clean hot jars and was processed in a hot water bath for 25 minutes. |
Gardening Cleanup (To Fill up the Bin on Trash Day)
I had a big empty yard waste bin that needed to go to the curb filled for tomorrow morning, so I decided to go a little bit crazy on the butterfly bush in the corner of the yard. Here’s the before picture:
After much cutting and sawing and pruning and snapping branches, I had a full-to-the-brim bin and a butterfly bush that looked. . .
pretty much the same, truthfully. It looks like I’ve got quite a few more bins-worth of work to do to get this bush tamed.
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