Hippie kids snacktime

One of the Hippie Kids favorite snacks is homemade kale chips.  No, I know that kale doesn't sound that impressive as a snack, but when you know about all of the nutritional benefits of this wonderfully obscure green you will want to do what you can to have your kiddos eat it too!  Kale is a member of the cabbage family, and it
 is considered to be a highly nutritious vegetable with powerful antioxidant properties; kale is considered to be anti-inflammatory.  Kale is very high in beta carotene,vitamin K, vitamin C , lutein, zeaxanthin, and reasonably rich in calcium.  Considering that this is what it looks like, one can see how it would be difficult to get children (or husbands) to eat it:


However, if after taking the central stem out you happen to have some olive oil, sea salt, and nutritional yeast on hand, you can make a crunchy,slightly nutty, salty snack that is VERY addicting!

Once the central stem is removed, you just need to toss the kale leaves with the above ingredients until they are all coated with the oil (not dripping) and have a nice sprinkling of salt and nutritional yeast on them.  I pop mine in the dehydrator for about 45 minutes, but you can also put them under a broiler for a few minutes.  Just make sure that you check on them so that they don't burn...burnt kale smells "nasty" as the Seeker had no problem informing me before we had the dehydrator!

The finished result doesn't look much different than what you started with:

But is sure is much more enjoyable!!

Once I start eating these, my body actually craves them and it is hard for me to stop (it's also hard for the Hippie Kids to stop, they ask for them constantly when they're in the house)!  We also like to crunch them up over salads and pasta dishes to boost the nutritional value even more.

Be Well,

Review for Wordtoons

Being a homeschooling mom, I occasionally have the opportunity to receive freebies in exchange for a review. The most recent freebie that I was sent was Wordtoons. This particular product is the brain child of Wayne Logue. Wayne has been a cartoonist/illustrator for almost 2 decades and is now studying for his BA in Linguistics English Language Teaching and Education....ah, a teacher in training creating a tool to teach with, I LOVE it!!!

I was super excited to receive a sample of Wordtoons in my e-mail inbox because The Risk-Taker loves to draw. In fact, I find doodles of all different persuasions in the margins of his schoolwork when I am grading it. Drawing is his form of self-expression, and I was anxious to let him loose with this project.

The concept behind Wordtoons is simple.The program takes words and turns them into that particular object. For instance, DOG becomes:

Can you find the letters in the drawing? AMAZING!!!

There are many other words to explore and a few uppercase letters that turn into objects/animals as well. The review from The Risk-Taker was that: "This is the coolest schoolwork I've done all year!"   I now find doodles of "dog" and "boy" all over my whiteboards...I think these are the easiest and fastest for him to draw.

As an added perk, The Explorer (almost 5) is completely drawn in by the process (pun intended) and is learning more spelling due to this program. His thoughts on it were: "I LOVE this!".

I give Wordtoons two thumbs way up and went to the site to buy the full version. I am very anxious to see what Wayne has on the horizon for us!!