Easy Churros at Home

 

Treat Time!

Trying out the four day week was interesting, yet didn’t work out well for all my children. The younger ones, K-2, had no problem getting the same amount of work done in four days as they did normally in five. However, my 6th grader had trouble getting all the assignments completed. Being challenged with a lack of focus, in addition to the shorter schedule, caused us to revert back to a five day week. But that’s okay, I think I will try segmenting each day instead of the week to try and fit in home school, house cleaning, sewing, cooking, and everything else that needs to be done.

So in honor of needing a break from it all, here is a quick treat to make!
Homemade Churros – the easy way.

You’ll need:

Tortillas

Butter or margarine to spread on the tortillas

Cinnamon and sugar mixture to sprinkle on the buttered tortillas

Here’s what you do:

Put the tortillas on a cookie sheet in one layer.  Spread with butter making sure to get all of it covered.  Sprinkle with the cinnamon mixture.  Roll up the tortillas one at a time and fasten with toothpick if necessary.  Bake in 350′ oven until heated through or edges start to crisp.  Take out, let cool, but not too much – you’ll want to eat these warm!

The Four-Day Week

It is always an issue to complete lessons, grading and record keeping for my home school while keeping the house from becoming a toxic hazard zone.  To find that balance, I have started a four day school week.  The remaining day, Friday in my case, is for house work.  This is the second week of my four day week schedule, and I have to say that it is hard to remind myself that I should put off certain cleaning chores until Friday.  But I do have exceptions: laundry, dishes, and general upkeep.  The big tasks like bathroom cleaning are supposed to be reserved for Friday.  Once a week seems to be fine for most cleaning jobs, as long as you are not too messy inbetween.  But if you happen to miss a cleaning job and it has to wait another week…that is a different story.  This is where my careful planning crumbles like a dry biscuit.  The way to avoid this is to be thoroough, but that is not always easy.  Walks, games, visitors, sewing, there are so many wonderful things that take me away from my ridgid schedule.  And I am glad  they do, for it would be pretty dull around here if we didn’t let these interruptions lighten our load and remind us that the truly important things in this life are fleeting except one; God will be watching as I don’t get the tub sparkling clean and take a walk with my children to tell them about His glory.

Tricks that don’t work on this home school mom

Children have a natural talent to circumvent anything they perceive as drudgery. If you are like me, you feel accountable for the quality of education you supply to your children. Unfortunately, what we perceive as opportunity and responsibility, children sometimes see as (they say in the vernacular) a drag.   As a home schooling parent, I can not let this happen with home school activities (or any other part of the household, for that matter!) since chaos shortly follows and then no one benefits. Here is a list of common stall tactics my students use:

• Constant interruptions (changing the subject, too many questions, asking for drinks, etc.)
• Negotiating to do the least favorite job last (then they do everything else so slowly that they never get around to the last job)
• Playing possum (pretending to not feel well)
• Conveniently misplacing things needed to do the job
• Amnesia (conveniently forgetting to do it)
• Shabby work (partially done, sloppy, or not even the correct assignment)
• Plain Stubbornness (just refusing to work)
• Tit for Tat (wanting something extra for cooperating to do the undesirable job or offering to do extra chores to get out of the undesirable job  – this can be tempting, but in the end, everyone will lose)

Sometimes children will do these things without really thinking about them.  Other times, they have well laid plans.  Either way, making sure you do not reward these behaviors is very important to ceasing the perpetuation of the objectionable behavior.  Usually, the entire point is to put off a task, so here are a few ways I deal with it:

• Make the task due immediately (I call this ’stopping the world’ – absolutely nothing else happens until the task is done, with the exception of breathing)
• Make it the least-liked assignments the first items on the to do list (I like to teach ‘just get it over with.’  Google the term “If+you+have+to+eat+frogs”)
• Require the task to be done more frequently (if you try to get out of writing science definitions at my school, you will end up writing definitions in every subject)
• Assign multiple copies of the same task to be done, without access to the prior completed ones (repetition  = boredom)
• In some cases, I have been known to ‘alter’ an assignment when there has been demonstrable cause to do so.  Being reasonable shows your students how to adjust to changing circumstances.

As usual, the best way to equip yourself for dealing with children is to know each of them well.   Children give us the chance to be like angels.