I mentioned in my strawberry post that strawberries are one of my favourite fruits, but one I like even better is raspberries! I would quite happily eat all our raspberries fresh and forget about finding recipes to use them in! But I did my best to curb my desire to eat them all fresh and found some other things to do with them with the kids.
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Around our place we are starting to see signs that we only have a couple more weeks of summer and then we will be jumping into the autumn harvest. The next few weeks will start getting really busy with bringing in our garden produce too. When that is done we will be able to get into the new school year. That means more math and reading and more structured learning again. But for now, we are still having a lot of fun learning through our summer unschooling and teachable moments!
Last year Princess grew lettuce for the first time and she loved it! She is in charge of growing our lettuce this year too :) When I thought about blogging about lettuce I realized that the usual salads and sandwiches that we use our lettuce for are rather boring for a blog post. So, I headed to Pinterest to find some interesting ways we could use lettuce.
A couple of people have commented on how great my garden looks, which I certainly appreciate. I love my garden and am rather proud of how much we are able to accomplish in the garden :) But, just in case anyone thinks I am writing all these posts about gardening because I am actually a really good gardener, let me show you that I do not actually have the proverbial green thumb...
Lemon Balm is one of the plants we learned about when we read through the Herb Fairies books. I got excited about it and bought a plant, and then found out from friends who have tried it that it is only an annual where we live and it won't come back the next spring. I was disappointed, especially since I did not actually use my lemon balm the summer I planted it. I wanted it to put down good roots so I left it alone. Boy, was I in for a happy surprise this spring when I saw that my lemon balm not only came back, but it had spread it's seeds and I had lemon balm coming up all over my flower garden! I must have somehow found a good spot where it was happy :) This summer I am finally going to try some of those lemon balm recipes from the Herb Fairies!
I can tell we are having a good break from school because I am starting to get "the itch" to get back into our normal homeschooling routine :) (Does anyone else feel like that after a break?) I have been looking at curriculums and thinking about how we are going to do things this next year. But, in the meantime, we are still enjoying our summer unschooling break and the busyness of summer gardening.
Rhubarb is a fun spring food, but one of my all time favourite foods is fresh strawberries, straight from the garden! There is nothing else like popping a fresh strawberry into your mouth after you have picked it with your own hands! Unfortunately, after years of fighting with the stinging nettle that insists on growing in my strawberry patch, I finally moved a few plants to a new location and worked under my original strawberry patch. I use to get an ice cream pail full of strawberries every three or four days from my patch. Now my patch is much smaller and we are getting only enough to eat a few fresh ones every other day or so. I wanted to make strawberry jam and I needed more than a handful of strawberries. So I decided a field trip to a u-pick was in order :)
I have discovered a new favourite blog :) Fran's World of Discovery is a blog after my own heart! Here is what Fran says about her educational philosophy: In my world, education is interesting, the choices are endless and everyone learns at their own pace, in a way that works for them While searching for strawberry recipes I read Fran's post about strawberries and saw that she has written an ebook called Strawberry Craze. When I contacted her about it she generously sent me a copy of her ebook to review. To be honest, when I first saw this ebook I thought it was something different. I was expecting it to be more of a child-friendly strawberry recipe book. Now that I have read it I know that while there are easy strawberry recipes in it, this book is so much more than just a recipe book! It is full of fun, hands-on educational activities to learn all you can learn about strawberries!
We did something really fun last year with our gardening. We learned about the weeds we find in our yard and what we can do with them.
I posted before that we don't do much formal school work over the summer, but we don't take a break from learning either. We are summer unschoolers :) Here are a few of the things the children have been doing this summer, besides helping in the garden.
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