Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Make Your Own Onion Soup Mix

I am making Coca-cola pork roast in the crock pot tonight, and needed onion soup mix. I didn't have any of that, but thankfully this easy DIY recipe should do the trick.

Saturday, July 28, 2007

Free Printable Paper Dolls


I love paper dolls, and even though my daughter is not yet two years old, I've been printing, coloring and pasting these on cardboard for her...okay, for me. I'll post some finished ones later.

Here's a few dolls from the Dear America collection. Great for historical unit studies, or what-have-you, and best of all they are free.


A few Victorian dolls from Karen's Whimsey.

U.S. Historical Society Paper Dolls. Very neat includes Grace Kelly, Anna Pavlova, Audrey Hepburn, Florence Nightingale and more.

A very interesting journey through fashion history, Past Patterns offers authentic clothing patterns from the past, including those for wedding gowns. My favorite wedding gown is the 1939 one. Which is your favorite? They also offer a free paper doll with outfits from the Jacksonian era.

Over 20 different free printable paper dolls.

Berenstain Bears Dress-Up Dolls, fun for preschoolers.

This site has many links to vintage paper dolls.

More Vintage paper dolls here.

Historical paper dolls, includes saints.

Victorian jointed doll

Friday, July 27, 2007

How To Make Your Own Yeast


HOME-MADE YEAST


Wash four potatoes and then cut in slices, without peeling, and place in saucepan, and add three pints of water.
Cook until the potatoes are soft and then add
One-half cupful of hops. Cook slowly for one-half hour.
Rub the mixture through a fine sieve and then pour hot mixture on
One and one-half cupfuls of flour, One tablespoonful of salt,
One-quarter cupful of brown sugar.

Stir until well mixed, beating free from lumps. Cool to 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Now add One yeast cake dissolved in one cupful of water, 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Stir well to mix and then let ferment in a warm place for ten hours. Now pour into jar or crock and store in a cool place.

TO USE
Use one and one-half cups of this mixture in place of the yeast cake. Always stir well before using and take care that the mixture does not freeze. This potato ferment must be made fresh every eighteen days in winter and every twelve days in summer.

~ Mrs. Wilson's Cook Book Numerous New Recipes Based on Present Economic Conditions(1920) , download page.

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Free Worksheet Generators and More

There are a good number of free worksheet sites online organized by topic and grade level, and some have worksheet generators where you can make your own custom sheets.

Kidszone - free worksheets by topic and by grade. Here is an example of their printable tracing worksheets.

Abc Teach: over 12,000 worksheets organized by grade and subject. Free tracing pages, including beginning penmanship. Here are some cute preschool/kindergarten level letter and shape tracing sheets.

Printfree.com: school printables like a teaching clock, custom graph paper, lined paper, and more.

A nice cumulative list of sources for free printables. I've used a few of these, DLTK and Enchanted Learning were my favorite when ds was younger. I'll be using them again when dd gets a little older.

Charlotte Mason manuscript copy work pages.

Worksheet generators, custom worksheets:

Personal Education Press: cards & signs, game boards, study sheets, quizzes, and flash games.

Penmanship worksheet generator(K-First)

Handwriting Worksheet Generator

Handwriting for Kids, includes left handed sheets

Free penmanship paper generator. Customize line spaces, color, paper size and line weight, very neat!


Math Fact Cafe(grade K-5), very nice worksheet generator and some premade worksheets.

Make your own penmanship worksheets by downloading fonts with and without dotted lines from Blue Vinyl. I use the Learning Curve and Print Clearly fonts. You can use these fonts in a word processor which allows you to use downloaded fonts, like your notepad or Microsoft Works. Unfortunately, Google Documents and free Jarte allow only their fonts. I've had limited success copying and pasting into these programs...still fiddling with it. I don't have Microsoft Office, and I'm still trying to download free Open Office(large download for dial up!) to see if their program is more flexible.

Discovery School's Worksheet Generator: These are great if you want to make your own multiple choice, matching, scrambles or word blank quizzes or worksheets. These can be used for anything - after a field trip, book reviews, vocabulary building, etc. There are also sheets for math, and some premade sheets. You can view samples before generating sheets.