The Fruit Leather Lay-Away Plan: 

a simple way to reduce waste, and ensure tasty, nutritious fruit leather 

When freezing berries throughout the summer months, I always have a few smallish, irregular or slightly soft berries that are better used in fruit leather. Also, from my berry plants I glean berries a little today and a little tomorrow, just enough to eat and to freeze a quart or two at a time. When I have odd lots of berries or seasonal fruit, I pack them in a freezer bag and label it "Berries for Leather".

As the season progresses, we go through harvests of strawberries, currants, gooseberries, raspberries, blackberries, peaches, and pears from our garden. I supplement with market bought fruit as needed for storage, and there are always soft (not rotten) fruits and small amounts of leftovers from the canning or freezing process. I throw them in the same baggie until it is full and I then start another one.

Finally in September when the apples are ready, I make applesauce with my imperfect apples. Then I thaw the contents of the "Berries for Leather" bag, puree' it and stir it into my applesauce. I usually have about 3 times as much applesauce as other mixed fruit. I use 12 cups of fruit puree' to fill 8 dehydrator trays. Your dehydrator will be different. I use the Nesco Professional Food and Jerky Dehydrator with 12" trays with the fruit leather liners installed. On each tray I use 1 1/2 cups of puree'. This makes a nice, just-right thickness, which has a great chewiness without being sticky or brittle.

BTW, the reason I have 8 trays is because after 16 years of faithful service, my old Nesco fan died. I bought a new dehydrator with identical trays, saved the old ones and stacked my dehydrator higher, allowing me to dry more at a time.

SQuIRRT

Summer Quality Intensive Reading Reward Technique :)

Keep your little squirrts reading this summer with this reward program:


I have no trouble getting our children to read during the summer. Each of our independent readers always has a book to read. They all read quickly and eagerly and when they are done, they look for another one. They go to bed with a book every night. After finishing a book, they often come to tell me about it and how much enjoyment they derived from the story. They read a variety of books. They read GOOD books. And, they use the books for inspiration to create original stories from their own heads. Reading is a joy at our house.

I am happy to say that our children are NOT natural-born-readers who come by this great habit by genetics alone. If they were, they would be such anomalies that scientists everywhere might request arrays of testing in cold, smelly labs to try to discover the “reading gene”. No. Our children are good readers because of habits formed through challenges and rewards provided by their parents. This is good news because that means YOU can do this with your OWN children.

Four summers ago I decided to incentivize our children's Summer reading with a points system (No, “incentivize” is not a real word; but, you get the idea; and, it sounds better than “bribe”). Creating a points system was easy enough. For each child I customized what they would each need to do to earn a point based on his/her own reading level. For example, at that time our oldest child could read well enough for me to require her to read 100 pages of a book to earn a point. Our second oldest was a reluctant reader, so I required of her only 30 pages for a point. Our youngest reader was in picture books so I awarded him 1 point for each book he read on his own.

So it looked like this:

Child #1: 1 point = 100 pages
Child #2: 1 point = 30 pages
Child #3: 1 point = 1 picture book

So far, so good. I had a measurable behavior clearly spelled out and customized for each child. Now, what could they cash-in their points for?

(This is the part I like best!)

Cool Back to School Supplies!

When you were a kid, didn't you always look at the rich girl in school with her sparkly rainbow folder or the boy with the Star Wars notebook, and then look down with derision at your peechee folder and 10 cent notebook? I did. So I thought our kids would work hard to earn the good stuff. I set it up like this:

5 points = 1 cool item
10 points = 2 cool items
15 points = 3 cool items
20 points = 4 cool items
20+ points = 4 cool items and a book or CD of their choice.

When I presented this plan to our kids, guess what? They LOVED it! All of them wanted to be the kid that had the nice school supplies! What's more is that I always wanted them to have the nice stuff, but I could never justify the expense. Now I had an excuse to splurge on them because they EARNED it!

At the end of the summer, most of our children had earned more than 20 points. We were very proud and excited. One child was overjoyed to get the BIG box of crayons with the built-in sharpener. Another child got mostly folders with cool pictures of bugs and aliens. I don't remember what our oldest picked out, but after she, a going-on 4th grader, read more than 2000 pages, I was glad to let her pick whatever she wanted.

Our plan has evolved over the last four summers. As each child grows, I increase the requirement to earn a point. Also, I began offering double points for choosing certain types of books. Last summer, I gave double points for the first of each genre they each read. i.e. the first biography, the first, historical fiction, the first non-fiction, etc. This year we will focus on the classics. I have a list of classic books appropriate to each reading level and will offer double points for reading them. You can find such a list here: http://www.amblesideonline.org/index2.shtml These are books that have stood the test of time, and are ennobling in nature for which I want my children to develop a taste.

I you have read to the bottom of this post, you must really want your children to read this summer. I encourage you to try this system. I can only say that it worked for our kids. You may have to adjust it using your parental instincts. Reading is a skill that is developed, not born. It will open for your children a world of fun and learning. Remember that the best way to learn to read is by example. So if you need an incentive to read, set one up for yourself along with your kids.