Making Acorn Flour

A few days ago, D took the girls on a hike and they gathered acorns. He hasn't had a chance to prepare them yet, so the girls and I did it today. We shelled them, ground them into flour, rinsed it to get all of the tannic acid off, and now the flour is drying. We're going to use it in our pancakes tomorrow. We are all really glad we don't have to prepare them like the Native Americans used to. It's a lot easier with a food processor than it would be with a mortar and pestle! 

Picture from http://www.wikihow.com/Make-Acorn-Flour

 
This led to discussing a lot of different things while we shelled the acorns.  We talked about where our ancestors came from (England, France, Italy, Ireland and many other places), and I showed them on the globe.  We talked about how there were already people living here when our ancestors came.  While discussing how they wouldn't be able to just go to the store to buy food, but that grinding acorns like this would be a matter of either having food or not, we talked about other things they ate, like fish and deer.  E mentioned that sometimes hunting deer is illegal, which led to talking about government, and how there was no government then to say that hunting was illegal.  We talked about what the Native Americans wore, and looked up pictures of their clothes.  Then I told them that we see Native Americans every time we leave the house (there is a Rancheria in our town), and that they don't wear the traditional clothes very often anymore, but dress and look just like us.  

History, Logging, Box Factory

We went to the office for the local Rails to Trails program today to register the kids for the Fun Run they are having tomorrow. I had forgotten that they have a small, local history museum there. The kids had fun looking at everything. Pictures of our town 100 or more years ago and seeing how the people dressed, looking at the old lanterns (E was asking about the difference between lanterns and the torches in minecraft the other day, so now she knows what a lantern looks like), the wagon, the luggage, and the trunks and hope chests ("Mom, a treasure box!") There were also ancient things like typewriters and phones with cords. Lol

We saw pictures of the old saw mill and trains carrying lumber from the forest to the mill. On the way home, I took us the route that goes by the mill and we went slow and talked about why the mill closed and why it looks the way it does now. I also connected it to D's old job for them. Two summers ago, he worked as a fire watchman for a lumber company, and he lived in a trailer onsite. E still remembers visiting him there and seeing all the logging equipment and trucks loaded down with logs and we just happened to have been looking at old pictures of that yesterday, so that was a cool connection.

Then we went for a walk on the trail, and we saw horses, picked more pine needles for tea, and saw lots of pollen in the air. E saw some flowers and knew they were bluebells and I have no idea how she knew that. I hardly know the names of any flowers, and she said her grandma didn't tell her either. I wasn't sure what they were until we got home and I looked up bluebells and sure enough, that's what we saw!  *wrote on May 17

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So, you know how a few days ago, I posted about how the kids and I learned stuff about logging from that museum and drove by our town's old mill? Well, without knowing any of that, my mom emailed me a link to this documentary on a Steam Sawmill Box Factory just because she thought we might like it.  The girls and I had just revisited what creates steam a few days ago AND some of the boxes that they make are for Louis L'Amour book collections and D has a huge set.

This is what I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE about unschooling! The way everything connects to everything else is all around us! It's just a matter of being open to it.   *wrote on May 21

A few days ago, we got the movie Hercules at the library. I thought it was going to be like the Disney cartoon, which is mostly about Hercules' life on earth and his antics with a silly side kick. It turned out to be VERY much about him trying to become a god and the gods controlling things happening on earth and arguing about what to do with him. I made a few comments as we watched it, but I was also busy with other things. So tonight, E wanted to watch it again. I said yes, but that first we needed to talk about the beliefs portrayed in the movie.

I showed her Greece on the globe and told her that some people believed that there were many gods who acted the way the gods act in the movie, but that there is really only one God. While talking about that, I mentioned that Greece used to be a lot bigger than what we see on the globe. She asked questions about that and I told her about the Greeks and the Romans having large empires. I showed her how the country that we now call America used to belong to various other countries. The globe has a little picture of Columbus on it and she asked about that, so I told her about Columbus trying to find India and finding America instead.

Besides this being a chance to talk about different religions and it leading to other ideas and facts, the movie was also a great representation of Greek thought and reminded me just how different it is from Hebraic thought. Many of the modern church's ideas about God, how he treats us, and how we should relate to each other, come from Greek thought, because the church tried to eliminate anything that looked Jewish. They forbade the Messianic Jews and Torah Observant non-Jews to celebrate the feasts and festivals, killed Jews who refused to eat pork and changed the observance of the sabbath to Sunday. Then they mixed Christianity with pagan practices like Christmas and Easter. To top it off, the American government system is based somewhat on the Roman Republic. So the typical American Christian is brought up, in church and in culture, with a Greek-type mindset, thought patterns, beliefs and priorities.

SO MANY thing are affected by this! For example, many of the beliefs that the church holds about women and children are derived from the teachings of Augustine, who had help interpreting the Bible from Plato (a misogynist and not even a Christian). This is where some churches get such beliefs as babies being born evil little sinners, women being made in the image of man (not God), etc. In ancient Judaism, children were not accountable for their own sins until the age of 20 and women were equals to men.

One thing that was brought up several times in the movie was "head over heart" and "never let your heart rule, always be ruled by your head." This is so VERY Greek! From this thought the church derived stereotypes about men being ruled by their heads and women being ruled by their hearts, thus the belief that men are more fit to lead because women are too "emotional." Ancient Judaism teaches that the heart rules the body, not the head, but they do not extrapolate this to mean that the woman should rule over the man, but rather that they should work together in Echad, because in Hebraic thought, all things are circular. This circular thought means that all things are connected, intertwined, come from one another and answers lead into questions. This is in direct contrast to Greek thought, which is linear and must have hierarchy and definite answers. This is where the church gets the linear hierarchy of God, Jesus, man, woman, child, dog. Ancient Judaism focuses Echad, which is plural unity. When combined with the teachings of Jesus and Paul, we get a beautiful picture of the unity of God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit and the unity of husband and wife.

Greek thought also affects beliefs about hell. If you just read the words of the Bible, it doesn't say much about the afterlife. Most of the places that have the English word "hell" have the Hebrew or Greek word for grave and if you read the context, it is often obviously talking about physical death. The concept of hell and the devil comes from Greek beliefs about Hades and the gods of the underworld. Modern Christian thought about the afterlife much more closely resembles Greek mythology than Ancient Judaism.


The difference in Greek and Hebraic thought makes such a difference when reading the Bible! I strongly recommend learning about Hebraic thought and reading the Bible through that lens. After all, this is the thought pattern of the authors of the Bible, the thought pattern that God spoke to them through, the thought pattern that Jesus and Paul and the other NT authors had when they referred back to "the Scriptures" and the only scriptures they had to refer to was the Old Testament!

Ok, I quit!

No, I'm not quitting saying yes! I'm just quitting blogging about it. Well, not permanently, I'm quite sure it will come up often. But I am not going to continue to try to blog about it every day for this 30 day challenge. I have too many other things to do..... like spend time with my kids. lol

I will just jot down a few things that have happened the last few days, not necessarily yes related, though kind of.

E got stung 8 times by wasps, L got stung once and I got stung 3 times. The ironic thing is that we had just watched A Bee Movie the night before and talked all about honey bees and them protecting their hives. So, then E wanted to know what the difference is between honey bees and wasps. The best we could come up with is that honey bees are useful and we like honey and we understand why they sometimes sting to protect their hives. Wasps on the other hand are useless and evil and attack unprovoked. Ok, I know that's not entirely true (except it really was unprovoked, but I'm sure not from their perspective), but that's the best I could come up with in my post-sting, still itchy state.

We were watching Sponge Bob last night and I just love how such a silly, sometimes outright ridiculous show can spark neat conversations. Sponge Bob and Patrick were protesting the building of a highway that was going to destroy Jellyfish Fields. That led to conversations about the environment and how decisions are made to do necessary things like build highways, but that there is a cost to nature in the trees that are destroyed, the landscape and sometimes the homes of wildlife. She was really sad that all the grass was killed by the highway, but then at the end they tore the highway out and the grass came back and the jellyfish got their home back. During one part, they were dressed up like hippies and she asked why they were dressed like that. I told her about the war protests during that era and the ones that still go on today. Yep, conversations about environmentalism, ethics, construction, history, war and civics, with a 4 year old, sparked by Sponge Bob. So cool!