Easy Recipe for Kids: 5 Cup Salad

When I was little, one of the first recipes I can remember my mom teaching me was 5 Cup Salad. It is so easy for kids to make that I even brought the ingredients to school and made the salad for my class as part of show and tell!

There are 5 simple ingredients and you need one cup of each:

Mini Marshmallows
Pineapple Chunks
Mandarin Oranges
Sour Cream
Coconut
(and we sprinkle a few maraschino cherries in it at the end just for a punch of color)

Nicholas was in charge of measuring all of the ingredients.

Rachel didn't get left out of this fun. She was in charge of pouring the cups into the big mixing bowl.

Of course, the stainer looked like so much fun that they both wanted to use it. It's fun to watch them get so excited over things that we use daily without a second thought.

Finally you mix all of the ingredients together and try to keep the drool out of the bowl.

Yum! We even added a few more cherries after I took this picture because we love maraschino cherries!

I really love this recipe. Not only is it sweet and refreshing but it always makes me think of my mom and my childhood. It was nice to be able to share it with my kids.

Pepsico Night at Six Flags

Yes, it's Six Flags time of year again!

Every year, Pepsico rents out Six Flags Over Texas for their private party to thank their employees. They are really a good company to work for and the CEO puts a priority on work-life balance and taking care of your family.

Of course, the kids love it since it's the only time we ever go to Six Flags.

The kids found souvenirs to beg for so conveniently located at the entrance to the park.

Rachel found these nifty glasses.

And Nicholas is sporting this classy mustache at the age of 7.

I was amazed that Rachel didn't cry when she saw the big giant Foghorn Leghorn rooster guy.  We've come here for years and when Nicholas was Rachel's age and older, he would cry and cling to us before getting anywhere near one of these big characters.  Rachel is so quiet and shy that I expected the same from her.  But with Daddy's coaxing, she actually shook Foghorn's hand!

Ah, the truck ride.  Another thing we have done for years and years.  It is always the first ride we come to and we usually ride it several times.  It's great for little kids...but also fun for big brothers and even a Daddy or two.

Throughout the park are Pepsico stations with tables and tables of Frito Lay products like Lays, Fritos, Doritors, Sun Chips, and Funyons as well as buckets and buckets of iced down Pepsi products like Pepsi, Sierra Mist, Gatorade, and Aquafina Water. You can just go up to these tables and help yourself to a snack and a drink.

Cheetos Puffs were the big hit of the night for us.  Anytime we headed to the snack station, one of us always seemed to grab more Cheetos Puffs.

The Little Diva especially likes Puffs.

I only wish they didn't turn everything they come in contact with this lovely shade of neon orange!

Rachel was excited about riding the Teacups.  She rode it last year with Nicholas and got a little scared when Nicholas got the car spinning really fast. 

This year, Nicholas was told that he couldn't spin the car because we weren't sure how Rachel would react.  The ride naturally spins the cars a little bit but poor Nicholas didn't understand this so he spent much of the ride trying to make it stop spinning.  But Rachel was actually wanting it to spin this time!

They rode this swing ride in the Looney Tunes (little kid) area.  Rachel looked down the whole time and I'm not sure that she enjoyed it.  Nicholas was just bored and couldn't wait to get the big rides.

We had fun on some rides but way too early in the night the rain clouds moved in.  It was just a drizzle then it got a little harder.  Some of the rides were able to continue for a while in the drizzle but there were episodes of lightning that would start and stop suddenly so the Park decided to turn the rides off for a while.

With most of the rides shut down, we let Nicholas play on the Midway games and both kids got to use our free Daffy Ducks to get a souvenir.

We were all disappointed about the rain and ended up leaving much earlier than usual. But at the same time, we are all getting over being sick and didn't need to spend the evening hanging out in wet clothes for rides that may or may not come back on. But we still had fun for a while. And of course, there's always next year.

Model of the Ear, Homeschool Style

Konos Unit: Attentiveness
Theme: General Attentiveness/Ears and Other Senses

We built a crawl through ear to help the kids really experience the ear and see all the working parts up close.

Stuart worked on cutting and taping to build the outer ear. Why is he laughing so much about a box?

Surprise! Oh, there were two little munchkins hiding in the box! They seem very excited about our crawl through ear.

With some kid wrangling, Stuart was finally able to finish his project. Here is our ear and ear canal. It's amazingly quite sturdy for being just two boxes taped together. I tell you, Stuart can build an ear!

I drew the ear on the front of the box and Nicholas labeled it with the correct term, "Pinna", which is the visible part of the ear that we all see.

Next Nicholas gathered various parts from around the playroom to use in assembling the middle and inner ear and labeled them.

We have a water frisbee for the Ear Drum, a baby toy hammer for the Hammer, a part of a Star Wars ship for the Anvil, a Nerf gun support stand for the Stirrup, and a styrofoam pool noodle for the Cochlea.

I opened up two more boxes to use for the walls of the inner ear. However, they are significantly more flimsy than Stuart's part of the ear.

I added a big sheet to cover the entire ear and it was time to explore!

Is that an eyeball in our Pinna?

Yes, that was Nicholas' eyeball!

Oh, the kids are having so much fun with our ear. And amazingly, this has really helped Nicholas to learn the parts of the ear without even trying to memorize anything. What a fun way to learn!

Attentiveness

Konos Unit: Attentiveness
Theme: General Attentiveness/Ears and Other Senses

Our next character trait that we will be learning about is Attentiveness. Boy, this is an area that my squirmy 2 year old and bouncy 7 year old could both improve in!

We started with a story from the Bible about Samuel and Eli. Nicholas just got a new Bible and he loves to read it as part of school.

Samuel keeps being woken up from sleep by hearing someone call his name. He keeps going to Eli and asking what he wants but Eli keeps telling him that he didn't call him. Finally Eli tells Samuel that it was the Lord calling Samuel and that the next time he hears the call, he should answer the Lord and listen to what He says. We dramatized the story and Nicholas just loved it when I played Samuel and acted totally startled by the calling.

We talked about the ear and sound. Nicholas used a dictionary and the website Dictionary.com to look up definitions to make his vocabulary cards of words related to attention, hearing, and sound.

We moved on to some materials from the library. The Magic School Bus has a great series of books that teach to children in a fun way as their magic bus shrinks down and gets inside of the craziest things. Of course, when I discovered that they have a book called, "The Magic School Bus Explores the Senses", I knew I had to get it. I also found a good book on the mechanics of the ear called, "What Happens When You Listen?".as well as a DVD called, "Physical Science for Children: All About Sound".

Nicholas The Ghost and Rachel enjoyed watching the cool demonstrations about sound on the DVD.

Nicholas immediately went to build a Lego demonstration of sound waves that ripple outward in all directions.

Here's a visual of sound coming out of his mouth....except that it would actually be much bigger if the size was determined by true volume of the sound emitted from his mouth.

I also read some younger children books about the senses to Rachel. This worked perfectly because I just learned that they are talking about the five senses at her preschool. It seems to be "the thing to do" and the beginning of the school year because that's when we covered it in our Bob Jones curriculum last year as well.

To feel sound, Nicholas felt the speaker on the TV.

But he also felt sound vibrations on his own throat.

We attempted to make our own otoscope to help us see into each other's ears. We used a small flashlight, black construction paper, scissors, and tape.

Nicholas started with making a round disc out of the black paper.

Then he cut a slit in the side of the paper and test fitted it around the lit flashlight to form a black cone. He cut of a small piece of the center (tip) of the black cone to allow the light to shine out in a directed beam.

It looks pretty cool now that it's done.

Here's the lit tip of the flashlight.

The eardrum is a light-gray color or a shiny pearly-white. Either we have unstraight ear canals or the homemade otoscope just didn't direct the light well enough because neither of us could find an ear drum when we looked in each other's ears. Of course, it was fun to just play with the otoscope too!

Stay tuned....next we are building a model of an ear!

Big IQ Kids Review

I haven't used any type of educational computer work with Nicholas' homeschool curriculum so far. However, we recently had the opportunity to try out BigIQKids and we are both pretty excited about it.

BigIQKids is an award-winning program for grades K-8 that is affordable and easy to use. It is an online site that offers FREE lessons in spelling, vocabulary, math, and U.S. geography lessons. Premium accounts are also available for math and geography. There is an easy chart available to help you see the difference in free vs. premium access.

I am most excited about the ability to customize lesson plans to control the difficulty and length of Nicholas' lessons. It's not just a cookie-cutter, one size fits all kind of program.

Each lesson has it's own little tutor that goes over the directions for the lesson and helps the student navigate the program.

Nicholas sits down at the table and uses my laptop for about 10-15 minutes of BigIQKids lessons each day. Some of the work is new to him like the U.S. geography program. It teaches state location, spelling, capitals, and abbreviations. Other lessons like math will be used more as a review.

As Nicholas completes a lesson, he gets rewarded with a game coin. He can then go to the game page where there are over 75 games to choose from, each costing 1-2 coins to play. There are lots of fun games like Krazy Kart, Cupcake Frenzy, Pirates Game, and Dress Up, just to name a few. Nicholas said, "The games are fun. It makes me WANT to work on school work!".

When Nicholas completes a lesson, BigIQKids sends me an email to let me know how he did. I can go online and check out his Progess Report which gives detailed information like how he scored on a particular lesson and other specifics such as average time to complete math problems for a particular lesson.

Since the lessons are customizable, it can grow with Nicholas and his skill level. There are even lessons that we can use years from now on Vocabulary Prep for the SAT which includes a spelling bee, synonyms, antonyms, and sentence completion exercises.

I can also see a benefit in having BigIQKids for Nicholas to work on so that I can grab a few minutes of one-on-one school time with my younger child.

But best of all, BigIQKids is offering a once a year bundle package right now where you can get access to all of the premium benefits offered for just $89.99/year.

For more information, please visit the BigIQKids website. You can also follow BigIQKids on Twitter.

Savor The Days was granted premium account access in order to write this review. There was no compensation for my time and the comments made here are entirely my own (and Nicholas'). Please check out what others on the TOS Homeschool Crew have to say about this great program.