Our assignment today was to make bread from scratch! Here the boys are taking turns grinding wheat berries into fresh flour. We are using the Country Living Grain Mill and it serves our family well! We are using a whole wheat bread recipe from the Urban Homemaker. If you are interested in reading about why we mill our own flour, check out this article. To make our bread today, we needed 7 cups of flour, which means we had to grind about . . . I just thought of a good math problem for Jordan. If each cup of berries makes about 1 1/2 cup of flour, what is the ratio of whole berries to flour produced? And how many cups of berries did we have to grind to get 7 cups of flour? This will be a good review for him, so I'll let him read this tomorrow and tell me the answer. :-)
Luke has really been wanting to learn how to make bread, so this assignment was perfect timing! He and the boys followed the recipe and I gave them a few tips along the way.
I think they did a great job! If only you could smell it!
While waiting for their bread to rise, the boys worked on their memory verse. Here is what we do: we write the verse on the white board and then I erase one word. The boys take turns reading the verse and if they say it, they get to erase another word. We do this until all the words are gone and they can say the verse from memory! And it is fun! They also write the verse in their journal and listen to it on CD. I try to give them many different ways to learn, as they are all different learners!
An assignment, that we will do next summer, is to make a map of our neighborhood and note possible food sources. We did this this past summer at our old house and were able to identify many wild edible plants. We collected samples and dried them to make a "guide to wild edibles in our neighborhood." In our lesson this week, we discussed the use of the cattail as a food source. In early summer, young flower heads can be boiled and eaten like corn on the cob. In mid fall to mid spring, the starchy rhizomes can be used like potatoes or dried and ground like flour. In the Spring, the sprouts can be eaten raw or boiled. We live near a marshy area and there is an abundant supply of cattails! It will be fun to see what we discover in our new neck of the woods!
Please send your "cattail as food" information to any African or missionary contacts that you have, along with the admonition that cattails collect pollutants, so only what's grown in clean water is usable that way. There are hundreds of megatons of cattail going to waste in Africa, causing innumerable problems. What isn't fit for human consumption can be made into fuel. Help me turn a never-ending nuisance into an everlasting resource.
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