But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law.
Matthew 5:22-23
Spring means strawberries here in Michigan… and it’s a good thing too since we read the Giant Jam Sandwich! Strawberries were dirt cheap this week, so I picked up a TON of strawberries at the store to make homemade strawberry jelly. The kids had a blast helping me cut the berries and squeeze the juice of out them. I tend to not be a fan of chunky jam (it’s a texture thing!), so we opted to make jelly instead.
I have never made strawberry jelly, but I have canned grape jelly in the past. It never ceases to amaze me how much sugar is called for in the recipe! We always half the sugar in the recipe (and it’s a good thing we do because I didn’t realize we were almost out of sugar! Poor planning on my part!). I love the low/no sugar Sure-Jel… I’ve never had a problem with jellies not setting up because of a lack of sugar when I use this for canning.
If you have never read The Giant Jam Sandwich, I’d recommend it for a good laugh. My kids thoroughly enjoyed it!
We also read Sheep in a Jeep this week. It’s a very simple book and quick to read, but my kids thought it was hilarious seeing these silly sheep try to drive a Jeep. We talked about being responsible and paying attention to what is around you… otherwise you might get stuck in the mud! haha
To work on our math skills this week, we got all of my sons cars/trucks out and put them in piles of five. We then skip counted by 5’s until we had counted all of his cars. We then sorted all the cars by color to see which ones we had the most of… red won!
I recently found a book called Jesse Builds a Road at a used book story, and while it isn’t a “planned” book from The Peaceful Preschool curriculum, it’s one I’m glad we added! It’s a cute book about a boy who uses his imagination and trucks to build a road in his back yard, so I invited my son so go build his own road. Anything that involves using his trucks, he’s a gamer for! He dug and paved and removed a ton of dirt. My garden had a handy road weaving through it by the time he was done!
With the beautiful weather, we spent a lot of time outside this week. Target always has the best dollar bin finds! I recently found these archeological digging blocks, so we got out our hammers and chisels and dug for J-ewels. We may or may not have eventually taken a hammer to them to get the block broken open. HAHA! But it was a fun half hour!
We also used our imaginations and chalk paint that Nana got for the kiddos in their Easter baskets. My slightly OCD mind has a hard time mixing colors, but I love how kids don’t have any boundaries or preconceived ideas of what colors should do! They end up making the most brilliant artwork. I recently stumbled across this quote, “Who told you that one paints with colors? One makes use of colors, but one paints with emotions.” (Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin) This is what children do! They use emotion to make glorious “messes.”
I am very thankful for our beautiful back yard! We have nature at our fingertips and it’s something I don’t take for granted. I’m also very thankful for the lack of mosquitoes! YAY for mosquito control! We’ve been splashing in streams. Picking up snakes. Looking at fungus. And getting downright dirty. This is what science should look like. Hands on and pure joy.
Of course we ended our Letter J unit with another handprint artwork! J is for Jellyfish! These squiggly handprints might be my favorite handprint art yet.
