More training

Yesterday I woke up with flu/cold like symptoms. I pressed on. This morning I woke up feeling even worse. With plans of going to Denver for another Ameritowne training looming I again pressed on. I was mostly in a daze and on auto-pilot for most of the day. We got to the training late , of course. The boys learned their jobs and were then directed towards their group. All the children were divided among volunteer mom's and dad's each with a different area to teach. The idea is that the kids all have jobs that run a different part of town. There are many here are a few Towne Hall, T.V. station, snack shop, Bank, Medical Center and newspaper among a few others. At the bare minimum 60 kids participate in this event. There are generally two trainings and then the actual towne. So I suppose you want to know now what the boys will be . OH ok then. drumroll please.

Austin is in sales at the snack shop
Colin is an accountant at the college
Conner is a Community Relations Director at the towne hall

Austin's job entails offering refreshments to hungry and thirsty citizens.Quality control is important because customers expect to get what they ordered. Proper hygiene is of utmost importance. Colin keep writing checks for business expenses, keeping a register sheet and making deposits as well as recording them. Conner's job responsibility is to collect all donations for the six Young Ameritowne Non-profits. You will record all donations and announce amounts at close of business day. Also responsible for Quality Service Survey and report of.

Conner's title just cracks me up. All the kids were like your a what? It was so over their heads. Colin had a great time in training. All I kept hearing was and then I had to subtract all this money and did you know I had to pay the photographer $25 for the yearbook? He was incredibly animated, turns out he likes his job so far. Conner still is unsure of what his job entails but we know it will be customer service. Austin was also in Customer service. So I helped the parents out while we taught the kids about good customer service and advertising. I didn't really help all that much , seems my symptoms were getting the better of me.

Conner and Austin in their group for customer service training

Colin is in another room with his group, this one all accountants for different area's of Ameritowne

This is the advertising signs the kids came up with.

The kids had a good time and learned some skills for their jobs and Ameritowne. Next week we will go to Ameritowne. I can't wait to tell you all about it. Bear with me as this is our first Ameritowne.

All the way home my poor aching (the flu like body ache, kwim?) body sniffed and sneezed and coughed wishing for a nice warm bath or bed. Two and a half hours later I pulled into our house thanking God for getting us there and me to a nice bed. So I did the bad mommy move and made dinner leftovers or whatever they could figure out on their own.

This one is just for fun, while getting their lunch we came upon a Nestle Toll House Cafe. Can you believe it? I had no idea they had these shops.

Ameritowne- Hands on lessons for "free enterprise"

Friday sent us to Denver for the first of two training sessions for Ameritowne. Now if you haven't heard of Ameritowne it is a phenomenal "hands on " lesson in free enterprise. We did International towne last year and the kids had a blast so now we will venture in Ameritowne.

You can get more info about these events and if there are some in your area here. We got up and left the house about 7 am. We were unable to get the materials before the training session so when we got there we had to fill out job applications and fill out our checks and registers. We turned those in and then came the speeches for mayor and judge from the running mates. It was so neat these kids had truly worked on these speeches and it showed. There were about 5 kids up for each position in suits to boot. It was fun. The running kids all sat down and groups formed around them at which point we got paper and colored markers to make posters for our running mate. WE lucked out that the guy we were going to vote for, for mayor, sat with us so making the posters was fun. One of the parents gave a finance presentation and we had a general election. We gave our ballots and left. I did want to get home around a decent hour. Next week we are to come back and the boys will find out what their job is and get training among other things. I am so excited about it all and the kids seem to be as well. I got this huge binder that is a complete lesson plan for this.

The boys making campaign posters for our Candidate "David"

Austin came up with "David is Haven" Poster. Oh and if you look close at Colin you can see his cheek has a scrape. This is from him falling on the ice the day before while ice skating with friends.

The boys make friends

Its funny because just the other day I was reading a blog and ti was talking about getting homeschool burnout. And it hit me I was in a rut and had burnt out and needed something to spark my interest and the boys too. I think going to Ameritowne is doing just that. I am going to do the lessons to get the boys ready and hopefully I will have enough time. I can't wait to share some of it with you guys.

Oh and share if you want what inspires you to keep going when your homeschool meter has run out.

Yellow and more

My boys tested two weeks ago to get their Yellow belts in Karate. Monday they found out they all passed the test and now have earned their yellow belts. You should have seen their faces it was great but of course one glimpse of my camera gets the ole' eye roll so unfortunately I did not capture the moment. I did manage to get a couple shots of them trading in their white belts for their new belts.

They have been going for almost a year now and have worked hard at learning. I actually count this for some schooling as it serves for P.E. and Foreign Language (Japanese). Occasionally Sensai throws in some history about Karate as well.

Sensai Gary passes out the belts while Sensai Matt hands out the written portion of the test along with their certificate showing their rank.
Austin was actually happy about this. True to his age he is starting to fight us on going to Karate.

The kids managed to talk me into trying a science experiment involving a microwave and grapes. Yup I am a mom of BOYS. Lol. Apparently if you cut a grape in half and put it in the microwave they spark at each other. We found that they only did this once or twice so if you missed it you need new grapes. A whole grape will "scream" during microwaving. This one is sort of creepy if you want to make it creepy but really all that is happening is the air is making that noise due to the heat the grape is experiencing. This is very similar to a marshmallow experiment they did last week. That was quite fun . They put marshmallows in the microwave and the marshmallow expands. We added food coloring and it doesn't expand where the food coloring was. It was neat to see what we could do with the marshmallow.

The boys look on as their grapes spark at each other. This is followed up by a series of "cool", "awesome" and "now let's ......, no no lets do this.....". It was fun to watch their creativity go wild as they went through the scientific method trying all sorts of things, having a good time and learning.

Marshmallows Before

Marshmallows After


Marshmallows with food coloring, notice that all the parts with food coloring is sort of dented inwards and the parts without food coloring still grew.

Movie's

The boys have been busy making stop motion pictures or is it films?? Anyway it's actually Colin who has been busy doing this. It took us some time to figure out what to do once we had the pictures all done. Once we figured out how to manipulate the pictures on Windows Movie Maker we got it done. Then Colin was off, of course he had made three short films at this point. I am proud to report he uploaded them to Youtube. Here is a direct link to them.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYImdBZbFHo

Please let me know if you don't get to his Movie as I will need to adjust the link.

In other news we have been busy getting ready for Winterfest. This is a weekend youth retreat to Estes Park through our church. The boys well Austin and Colin are very excited. They have to be at the church at 9 am and then they take the bus up there. It will take them about 5 hours. I got the boys some things to keep them busy and a bunch of snacks. Of course being a scrapbooking mom I gave them both disposable camera's, No way was I handing any of my camera's over to be lost. I told the boys that The Stanley Hotel is in Estes Park, you remember the movie "the Shining" it's that hotel. I wonder if they will even see it, LOL.

I'll write more later but right now I got to go finish making those pancake's. Have a good day.

Here and there

We have been dabbling in a few areas of late. The boys found a recipe for Rock Candy and wanted to make it. I said fine. Do you know how much sugar is in those things?? Ick Anyway they boiled some water and sugar among other things and put them in mason jars. Again when I think about the size of a mason jar and the amount of sugar I want to gag. Two of the candies did not turn out. But Conner lucked out although it took a whole lot longer than stated.

I was also concerned with how long it sat out on the counter. I mean if you leave juice or ice tea out on the counter it goes bad by the next day so I thought this can't be good to eat. What do you think? The recipe said it should be fine though. I also included a link to the recipe for those adventurous spirits. The site you will come to is absolutely fabulous and since I have a chef in the house I go to it often to see if I can make a lesson out of something we cook. What a great resource.
http://www.exploratorium.edu/cooking/candy/recipe-rockcandy.html
So here is our rock candy.



For our Indian history lesson we made Navajo fry bread. Honestly once I figured it out it was no hard at all. I can't believe they charge so much for what essentially is pancake batter. Ok the kind of batter we make in Germany not the fluffy stuff Americans make. I mean its eggs, milk and flour and they want to charge what for that? I think though now that we made it we won't be purchasing that anymore. We thoroughly enjoyed making and eating it. We even thought that if we piped it we could make funnel cake. That is another time though.

Here is our Navajo fry bread. MMMMMM

My boys enjoying the fruits of their labors, or rather mine since this did include frying. I don't like for them to mess with frying. You can sprinkle cinnamon sugar, powdered sugar or whatever you like. The Navajos used this like a taco and put any and all of their meal into it. In this way they didn't need utensils. My question is how did they fry it? I mean where did they get the oil and does a fire get hot enough or too hot for oil? I didn't see this in the lesson and have yet to find the answer.

Ok I'm not sure if you can tell but the egg on the left is way smaller then the egg on the right. We got these from a friend and I took the opportunity to show my kids why the egg carton is labeled medium or large or extra large eggs. It is one of those simple things that I even overlooked but once you saw an egg of a different size you could really appreciate when a recipe calls for a certain egg size. It truly would make a difference, I think.

This one is just to show you the craziness that my poor family has to put up with from me. I was at a friends house and on her counter there sat a stainless steel cookie jar. It was a small/medium size and had a glass lid. I saw that it was for composting. Now here is why this is interesting. I have had a composting bowl out on my counter for a year and it's , needless to say, very unsightly. I love being green and strive to make our household that way. So I said to myself why didn't I think of this? I mean really, I could still have my compost stuff handy till it is ready to be taken out to the bin but it would have to look ugly. We were at the store and I had told hubs about it and he found this trash can. Its fantastic because it has a plastic insert that comes out so when it's full the kids can pull the insert out to empty into our bin outside. Yes this is the craziness of me. LOL.

Vanessa