Fibonacci Sugar Cookies

I had some extra cookie dough to use up, and an excellent, math themed, picture book, biography to read with the children, that was just begging for a story time snack.



With the Fibonacci's sequence, and the golden rectangle in mind, I started dividing the dough into thirds (sort of estimating the proportions of the rectangles).


I placed two thirds of the dough into a bowl, and then divided the final third into thirds again. I placed two thirds of that dough into a second bowl, and divided the final third into thirds again, continuing that way, until I had the dough divided into six portions.


I cut the smallest piece into 12, 1x1 squares (using 1/2 cm as my unit of 1), and placed two squares side by side on the cookie sheet, for each of the six cookies a half batch of dough will make (click here for the recipe).


I mixed food coloring into the rest of the dough, a different color for each bowl, and a couple of teaspoons of baker's cocoa into the largest lump of dough...


...and then continued dividing them out into squares following the Fibonacci sequence. So, the second square was 2x2 (keeping in mind that my unit of 1 was 1/2 cm, making the sides of the square 1 cm).


Then, onto a 3x3 unit square...


...and so on, and so on, forming a golden rectangle. Or rather, trying to form a golden rectangle, because I was so busy worrying about cutting the dough into the right sized squares, while still keeping them all the same thickness, and making sure I had enough dough in each bowl for all six cookies, that I didn't even notice until after the cookies were baked, that I had reversed the position of the 1s and 2s.


Not to worry though, a quick slice with a butter knife while they were hot, a dab of frosting after they cooled, and everything was right again...


...and ready for the older children to pipe melted chocolate chip, across the corners of the squares...


...to form golden spirals, an image found throughout John O'Brien's illustrations.


It's great to be a homeschooler.

Sprouting Peanuts

Doing a little more after Christmas cupboard cleaning, I realized that besides all the candy,which is slowly dwindling, we also have quite a large bag of raw peanuts left over from peanut brittle making.

Generally I buy more than I think we're going to need, so that when we end up with one gooey batch, and one burned batch, we still have enough left for at least one good batch. This year, the weather before Christmas was cold and dry - perfect peanut brittle making weather, resulting in three good batches of brittle, and peanuts left over to spare.

That's okay though, because we've been meaning to try sprouting peanuts, ever since we took a look at the beginning of the plants inside the peanuts, last year.


We decided to go with the clear plastic cup method, so we will be able to watch our sprouting plants grow.

I gathered together the supplies:

* Clear plastic cups (ours are semi-clear)
* Raw (unroasted) peanuts (I also pulled out a bag of roasted peanuts, for comparison)
* Napkins
* Dark construction paper (cut to fit around the inside of the cup)
* And water.


I let the children shell a few of the roasted peanuts.


They had the same little plant part on the inside, but tasted much better than the raw peanuts.


To "plant" the peanuts, the children placed the construction paper strips around the inside of their cups...


...wadded up the napkins, to fill them...


...slipped peanuts, spaced apart, between the construction paper, and the inside of the cups...


...and poured in enough water to soak the napkins.


Then, we placed the cups into a dark cupboard, where they won't get knocked over, and left them for a day. When we checked them this morning, to see if we needed to add more water to the napkins, their peanuts had already started to sprout.


We took a quick look at one of the peanuts, before putting it back into the cup, and the cup back into the cupboard.

I'll try to remember to report on their progress for Science Sunday. Once the plants get to be about three inches tall, or so, we ought to be able to transplant them to a large, dirt filled pot, and after four months, we might even get to see peanuts ready to harvest - probably not enough for another batch of peanut brittle, but I'll let you know.

It's great to be a homeschooler.

Happy Birthday Isaac Newton!

It's Isaac Newton's birthday. At least, it's the anniversary of his birth - January 4, 1643, according the the Gregorian calendar.

If you're a purist, you might have already marked the anniversary of his birth, on December 25th. As according to the Julian calendar, in use in England, at the time of his birth, the scientific great was born on Christmas Day, 1642.

Either way, there's a "free feature", animated, video clip (meaning you can view it without a subscription) about his life, at BrainPop.com, today.

It's great to be a homeschooler.

Picture credit from Wikipedia : Godfrey Kneller's 1689 portrait of Isaac Newton
(age 46)

Lowercase Letter Cookie Activity

While helping the children with their Christmas thank you notes, I noticed C (age 5) had reverted to printing all her letters in capitals. In fact, she insisted on using nothing but capitals to spell out the thanks in her notes.

I haven't been too worried about it because of her age, but I have been trying to find ways to encourage her to print lower case letters more often. With that in mind, I set up a cookie baking activity for the two of us, this evening.


Before I called her in, I prepared a half batch of sugar cookie dough (click the link for the recipe), and got out paper and crayons, to go along with the sprinkles and cookie sheets.

I started out printing each lower case letter for C to copy on the paper, and then rolling some of the dough into a rope, and forming it into the letters on the cookie sheet. For each lowercase letter she was willing to copy...


...she got to add sprinkles to its cookie dough counterpart.


D took over printing letters for C to copy, while I rolled the dough...


...and in no time at all, she had happily printed, and sprinkled, all 26 lowercase letters.


While the cookies baked, we read Audrey Wood's alphabet rescue, a letter adventure that starts out with a lowercase alphabet...


...and ends, conveniently enough, with a thank you note, written with the help of those lowercase letters.


It's great to be a homeschooler.

Linked with Watcha Making Wednesdays at The Ramblings and Adventures of a SAHM.

Tangrams and Cinquains for Children

Our jump back into "school" for the new year is off to an odd, but I'd have to say typical, almost unschooled beginning. I read The Warlord's Puzzle to the children at breakfast.


It's the first of a math themed series, set in ancient China, by Virginia Walton Pilegard.







Each of the engaging stories has a short Chinese history lesson at the back, as well as a suggestion for an easy to make, math themed, craftivity, and there are additional study guides for many of the books on the publisher's website.

As you might imagine there is a pattern for a tangram puzzle at the back of the book we read today. Since the story is about a contest to try to put a broken tile back together into its original square shape, I thought it might be fun to cut a puzzle out for each of the children to monkey with at lunch, to see who could be the first to form the square.


The children are familiar with tangrams, but usually we use them to make various shapes, and pictures. It's not too often, that we remake the original square. A (age 10) solved the problem by flipping to the back of the book, and looking at the pattern there.

I told her that was cheating, and then happily played the audio version of Barbara Park's Junie B., First Grader: Cheater Pants...


...which I had downloaded from our library's online catalogue last night, after reading the suggestion from publisher's study guide for The Warlord's Puzzle to introduce children to cinquains (5 line poems, pronounced sing-cane, as a combination of the French words cinq, for five, and quatrain, for four lined poem, made popular by American poet Adelaide Crapsey in early 1900s as a nod to the haiku), which somehow reminded the author of the love of nature shown by Chinese poets in their writing.

It just so happens that Junie B., First Grader: Cheater Pants, in addition to addressing and defining the problem of cheating, also has a very clearly spelled out lesson on cinquains for children.

1st line: One word (title)
2nd line: Two words that describe the title
3rd line: Three action words about the title
4th line: Four words that express a thought or feeling about the title
5th line: One word that means the same thing as the title.

Which, is how we ended up spending our morning, and part of the afternoon working Chinese puzzles while creating silly little American, French named, Japanese inspired poems.

It's great to be a homeschooler.

Chocolate Unit Links and Books

We weren't really planning on a chocolate themed study last week, but along the way of exploding chocolate Santas in the microwave, seizing and "saving" melted chocolate, testing the "melt in your mouth, not in your hands" quality of M&Ms, blooming chocolate, and watching it melt (my personal favorite), we learned enough about the geography, history, mathematics, and science of chocolate, mainly from the video links below, to easily create an entire unit study.

Video Links (move your mouse over the titles to find the links):

The Magic School Bus in the Rain Forest

"Chocolate" on BrainPop.com (this is a subscription service, so an account is required to view the video clip.

The Food Network's Good Eats episodes "The Art of Darkness I, II and III" with Alton Brown.

The Science Channel's How It's Made: Cocoa Beans.

Hershey's "Making our Chocolate" (sort of has a 1950s Disney feel to it).

After all we learned from these clips, I decided to stick with chocolate themed fiction for fun, as a compliment to our experiments, instead of checking out any of the non-fiction, from bean to bar type books for the children.

The younger children, and I enjoyed Margret & H.A. Rey's Curious George Goes to a Chocolate Shop. The librarian who checked it out for us, glanced down at the cover, and without even cracking a grin said, "I bet he's going to into trouble, but it will work out in the end." That pretty well sums up all the Curious George books, doesn't it? This particular title reminded me of the I Love Lucy chocolate factory episode, which naturally, we had to watch, too.


Our favorite book of the week was Patrick Skene Catling's take on the Midas touch - The Chocolate Touch. It's a Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle meets Bread and Jam for Frances cautionary tale about the dangers of being greedy when it comes to chocolate...


...as is Robert Kimmel Smith's Chocolate Fever, though told with a slightly less magic flair.


Chocolate by Hershey, A Story about Milton S. Hershey by Betty Burford was the one non-fiction, simple chapter book I did pick up, for additional reading after watching the biography of the inspiring entrepreneur on Biography.com.


I also brought in a few of Jerry Pallota's chocolate themed math books. They are fairly simple, but always a big hit with the younger children.


It's great to be a homeschooler.

Linked with What My Child is Reading at Mouse Grows Mouse Learns.