Our Family Feast

Dear Parents,

This week we boiled, skinned, and mixed sweet potatoes. Everyone took turns using the hand mixer. We added a tiny bit of milk, cinnamon, brown sugar, and butter. We read Feast For Tenand noticed that the illustrations looked like us cooking in the kitchen

The next day we boiled cranberries to make sauce. We felt the cranberries before adding heat and then watched as they split open and turned mushy. 

We had eight different kinds of apples for snacks. We compared the apples, noticing that they were different sizes, shapes, and colors. We cut the apples into bits and tasted them using our sense of taste. We recalled our five senses and realized that we were using all five. We looked in the center of each apple to see if they all had stars inside, they did. 

We mixed dry and wet ingredients to make our corn muffins. We tried to time it so they would be hot for the butter we made last Friday. 

On Wednesday, during our family feast, we filled our family tree with pine cones, and our bellies with food. 

Thank you all for sharing your offspring with us! 

Have a delicious thanksgiving,

Therese 

We Are Family Tree

Dear Parents,

We started our week working on the fruit of our tree. We used cut paper plates for our pine cones. The children said pine cones are brown, so we painted them brown. We examined a real pine cone and looked with our sense of sight at the pattern. We felt it with our sense of touch. 

We talked about patterns. The children shouted out color patterns, “Green, white, green, white!” We clapped a pattern with our hands, we talked about the four seasons being a pattern and adding up to one year, and patterns that we follow in school: put our coats away, line up for the bathroom, wash our hands, etc. We looked at the pine cones and found their patterns.

During circle we looked at all of our family photos and noticed that families had taken pictures by trees, by the ocean, one in Times Square, two by a hotel, and one had a castle in the background. We noted that one of our families had grown by one since the picture was taken. Everyone was excited when we looked at their photo.

After hanging the branches of our tree one person shouted, “That’s so cool!”

Yoga with Tanya has been focused, with children excitedly showing us poses upon their return. After yoga, we went outside to take a class picture under our tree. We have been watching and waiting for the leaves to turn from green to yellow for our fall picture. They turned.

On Friday, we made butter from heavy cream. We predicted how long it would take to shake the cream into butter. The guesses were: one shake, five shakes, ten, eleven, twelve shakes, and one minute. We put on some disco and danced while taking turns shaking up, down, and all around. It took about sixteen minutes and five disco songs. Y'all can taste the butter at our feast!

Reminder: our family feast begins at 11am on Wednesday. We will hang our fruits on the tree first, and eat, drink and be merry second. 

Have a buttery weekend,

Therese