Grape Juice

My mom makes grape juice every year in the fall.  Her grape juice is the best I've ever tasted.  She grows her own grapes, picks them, steams them, and bottles them.  And then we all drink the delicious juice for the rest of the year.  The grape juice is so wonderful you can drink it straight from the bottles.  No sugar or water is needed at all.  Pure grape juice! The absolute best!!

The grape vine covered patio

Joe picked us a few buckets full of grapes.  

And we then spent many hours removing all of the stems and putting the grapes into the steamer.

After the juices was steamed out of those grapes we put it into bottles and sealed them up.

And finally we enjoyed some of the juice!

We bottled about 36 quarts this year.  Lots of sticky messes but a lot of great juice to come this year!!

Cookies and Fall!

Cooler weather makes me feel like baking and since my mom asked me to make my peanut butter cookies for her, I just couldn't say no.  I found a recipe on Allrecipes but I changed it up a bit about a year ago and I think its delicious.  When I first made them I did not know they were gluten free or what gluten even was.  When my mom found out that she was gluten intolerant, as was my brother and sister, I realized that I had the best cookie recipe ever for them.  They are super easy and the ingredients are ones that are usually on hand.  These are my absolute favorite peanut butter cookies!

Peanut Butter Cookies

1 c. peanut butter
1/2 c. brown sugar
1/2 c. white sugar
1 egg
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. vanilla

Preheat oven to 350.  Mix all ingredients.  Form into balls and press with forks in the traditional criss cross pattern.  Bake for 8-10 minutes. Enjoy!

On a side note, the mountains are simply stunning this fall.  I don't remember them ever being as beautiful as this year.  This is what I get to see each day.  And they become more and more colorful each day.

 

 From the back yard.

 

My favorite view.

The vibrant bush in my parents front yard.

My Feeble Attempts

I am attempting to teach the alphabet to a group of learning disabled first graders.  The key word is attempting.  After a rough first few weeks of just trying to get them to memorize the letter symbols and their accompanying sounds with little to no luck,  I decided to try something I had read about in my research of Waldorf Education.  I am very intrigued with Waldorf Education and I really like the philosophies.  This is a great website with a lot of information.

Anyway, back to what I've been working on.  I decided that just a mark on a piece of paper to mean a letter is not getting through to these kids.  They needed to see the shape of the letter in a picture with an accompanying story with the sounds the letters make to go with it to keep their attention and to somehow make the letters mean more to them than just a few scribbles on a page.  I also decided to teach the lowercase first because lowercase letters are more often seen than uppercase.  I have attempted to draw and color, with pastels, four pictures with four dinky little stories and so far the kids that I've been working with have enjoyed the pictures and have been asking to hear the new stories and to hear ones I've told before again. The stories are lame and the pictures are extremely simple but I'm pretty happy about the kid's progress so far. They are beginning to  remember the letter names and sounds when I test them.  The true test will be when I finish all of the pictures and stories and test all of the alphabet together. 

Pardon the picture quality.  I forgot to bring my camera to take photos of them at work so I had to make due with my phone's camera. 

Ann the Angel

Bob the Butterfly

Cedric the Cat

and Don the Deer

I have tried to incorporate multiple letter sounds into the names of the drawings just for that little extra emphasis.  So I will be working on the letter e tonight.  I'm thinking about doing an elephant somehow.  I don't know.  If anyone has ANY ideas for letter pictures please let me know! I'm running low in the idea department, at least with some of the tougher letters.