All in a Day's Work...

So some friends have asked me what my little love, Lucy, does while I teach my older son. Most of the time she is right there a part of the action, getting her little hinny in on everything her brother is doing. But we also have time where I just have her work on her "school work" and him work on his. I'm going to try to periodically post stuff geared for 3 and under as well as CC stuff to give us all more ideas of what is doable and worth our time (or not).

But before I get to that- we ran out of detergent last night-s o I had to get bus and make that before school today.

So here is my make shift recipe of homemade detergent I love love love making! 

It's ingredients are 

1-2 bars of Dial Soap (unscented),

 2 bars of Feels- Naptha (available at Wal Mart), 

1 box of 20 Mule Team Borax, 

1 Box of Super Washing Baking Soda, 

1 Bag of Regular Baking soda (not pictured), and 

1 Regular sized container of Oxi Clean. 

I bought my Oxi Clean at Sam's so this is a much bigger box than what you would see at Walmart. 

I open everything up, and chop up the soap bars on a cutting board. Then I get my grading blade for my processor and feed it through. If you don't have one, you can do by hand with a cheese grader.

It looks like grated cheese. But not as yummy.

Add the Borax and mix again for a few minutes until well blended.

Dump everything else in a very large bucket. Mine is a 6 gallon sized bucket I found in the storage aisle at Walmart. Make sure you throughly mix. I love this part since I'm so tactile. Really get in there and make sure it's well mixed.

When you are done you will have about 3 gallons of detergent for about $20. And since it's all homemade, I love knowing what exactly is in it. :)
I use about a regular scoop size for each load and since it's a not the lathering type you can use it in HE washers. I would start off with maybe 2 TB for a med HE load and work up if need to.
Ok, now onto the rest of our day.

Ok, onto school. Here's Tony doing his Reading program. So far so good. 

Here's Lucy doing her pouring activities. She pours beans, rice, salt- anything I have available into another bowl. This is great for all sorts of reasons, motor skills, eye- hand coordination, cooking and life skills, etc. After she was done I asked her to put them in the correct jars, but I guess there were too many beans for her, since she left them in the bowl as is. Tomorrow we are going to do some patterns with them and I will use them to make some large letters for her to glue the beans on.

Another thing I use for Lucy is the magnet letters from our leap frog kit. Here she is matching up the lower case letters (from All about Reading) with the upper case (from Leap Frog). 

Onto my favorite SOTW Co Op group. We worked on making citadels this week and built our own using styrofoam bricks. So great! The kids really enjoyed it.

 This guy is a little brother from one of the CC kids. But don't you just love how the younger siblings get to participate as well? I'm so thankful for multiage teaching. None of the "little" kids acted little, they all did what the big kids were asked to do. 

When they were finished we added the roof and moved them aside to dry. Then we worked on some Chinese painting and ended the Co Op with playing at a great park.

Ok, Tomorrow I will be posting us doing a Roman Tax Party! I want the kids to understand taxes and why the people got angry over getting taxed. Hopefully my idea will work. :)

Blessings to you all tonight!

-Crecia