The rainforest is yummy.

I am in no way an unschooler.  Despite the fact that it’s not really the educational philosophy I agree with, it just would not work with my personality. I like plans and lists and schedules. I like curriculum. When I was in school myself I liked worksheets and tests (I was a good test taker so I liked them). I was kind of a teacher’s dream.

However, one of the advantages of homeschooling is the ability to throw all those plans and lists and schedules out the window sometimes. To ignore all the curriculum on the shelf and follow the rabbit trails where they lead. Today was one of those days.

We’ve been working our way through the One Small Square series of books for science the past month or so. I cannot recommend these books highly enough. They are little gems. John loves reading them and we both learn a lot. They have fun activities you can do throughout but even without doing the activities they are well worth the purchase price.

Today at lunch we read the one on the Tropical Rain Forest.

Afterwards, I asked John to tell me five things he had learned about the rainforest as a narration. His first thing was that chocolate comes from the rainforest. This wasn’t actually in the book, but he remembered it from some other time. The chocolate comment reminded me of this.

I had bought this little kit quite a long time ago to go with something we were doing last year but then didn’t get around to using it. I got it out and asked John if he wanted to do it. Not a big surprise, but the answer was YES!

So we got out the kit and made chocolate. I took some pictures but no matter how many times H. teaches me to use the camera for close-up photos all my food pictures come out looking awful. So basically I have a lot of photos of us with a bowl of brown gloppy stuff and then the brown gloppy stuff in the little paper candy liners. Somehow I don’t think they would add a lot to this post.

I will say it was surprisingly easy and made some quite tasty chocolate. We made some with peanut butter (John’s idea) and some with mini marshmallows (David’s idea). I thought the peanut butter ones were the best.  Almost good enough to make me into an unschooling convert.