Tour of Frito Lay Headquarters

We're a member of a Plano homeschool group and they planned a most awesome tour for our group...

A tour of Frito Lay headquarters!

Yes, Stuart works for Frito Lay/Pepsico but he doesn't work in the headquarters building so we never would have seen all of this if it wasn't the for our homeschool group.

We started our tour learning about Sustainability and Recycling. I love that SunChips has experimented with compostable bags and that Frito Lay does so much to ensure that they minimize waste and recycle as much as possible.

The campus is really nice with a lake on the property as well as a credit union, salon, and fitness center too!

Although there were a lot of people from PEACH attending the tour, we were divided up into 6 groups that rotated between tour guides so the actual group we were in was rather small.

We learned about the Research and Development process.

We saw the test kitchen where the chefs create new products and flavors. We saw the packaging department where they test new packaging. We even saw this machine that tests how hard someone has to pull to open sealed bag of chips.

We watched some Cheetos product being made in the R&D manufacturing room and felt how warm and soft it was when it first came out.

We saw the grocery store setting where Frito Lay tests their products in an environment similar to a store to see how light and heat are affecting the various products. Some poor person gets paid to sample the products every day to make sure that each batch is staying fresh for the estimated time that they would stay on a shelf. How do you get a job like that?

We learned how Lay's potato chips are made. Just potatoes, salt, and oil go into these salty wonders. But Frito Lay doesn't use just any potatoes. They have done research to find the perfect species of potato for making their chips. It was so interesting to learn all about the process.

We decorated our own chip bag.

Chose the salty snacks to fill the bag.

Helped turn on the heat seal machine.

Our chip bags were sealed for us.

Ta-da! Rachel's very own chip creation!

Her bag lasted approximately 0.23 seconds before she opened it up and ate all of the contents right there!

Thank you PEACH and Frito Lay for an exceptional tour that was both educational and fun for all ages!

Letter A

Rachel has learned the sounds of all the letters and can identify many of them but still needs help with quite a few of them. So I'm going to do a little bit of work with her on letters. She'll do some coloring, searching for the letter, making letter sounds, do-a-dot pages, crafts, storytime etc. Everything will be related to that letter.

Rachel usually likes coloring but she doesn't fill in an entire open space with one single color. Instead she likes to use splotches of multiple different colors to fill the space (which kind of drives me crazy!).

I got the boxed set of Alpha Tales by Scholastic. The set comes with a teacher's guide plus a book for each letter of the alphabet.



Here's we reviewed the mini-book for the letter A. I had her point out to me the upper case A's and the lower case a's which I marked for her.

Then she colored some on the pages but then she wanted to move on to something else.

So I pulled out the Discovery Box I made for her which includes all sorts of little things that start with the letter A such as alligator puppet, Angelina Ballerina, apples, astronaut, angel, army man, avocado, ambulance, airplane, and aluminum foil. She placed all the things out on the table so she could look at them all.

I had bought Angelina for her a while back but I forgot to give it to her at Christmas so she was a new surprise in the box.

Rachel had fun wrapping up several of the A objects in the aluminum foil!

I also had two series of preschool printouts with a theme of apples and alligators. Here she is tracing numbers on one of the alligator pages. I had to "encourage" her to try writing with her right hand. She still switches hands a lot and I'm trying to see if we can start pushing her to write with only one hand. We don't have any left-handers in our families but Nicholas is ambidextrous. We're still not sure which hand is dominant for Rachel.

I worry when I see Rachel's head so close to her paper. I recall a teacher in high school commenting to me about my head being too close to my paper and I think I did it because of vision problems. Hopefully she isn't already having problems but I did get my first pair of glasses in first grade!

Rachel seemed to have fun working with the letter A. I don't have a particular plan as to when we will finish all of the letters. Rachel's a quick learner and she loves to sit with me to do "school" but she is in a Montessori preschool class two days a week so I don't want to make her do much more school work than that at this age.

Seven Lies About Homeschooling Debunked

I just wanted to share this cute YouTube video about some of the silly ideas that people have about homeschooling.

A Present From Rachel

Rachel played in her room for a little while this morning after she woke up. When she came out she found me and said, "I brought you a present!"

Two little pieces from her Calico Critter house. I love getting presents like this. It meant a lot to her and that's what melted my heart.

Sketching

I was working on the flower bed in the front yard this afternoon while Rachel took a nap. Nicholas went back inside and came out with drawing supplies.

He plopped down in the grass and just started sketching things around him.

We do random art projects at home but he also takes a homeschool fine art class at Art House where he learns about famous artists and real art techniques.

It was such a beautiful day. Cool and sunny, my hands were in the dirt, and Nicholas was creating art outdoors, even if it was just a sketch of our mini-van. I loved it!