Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Christmas Cookies

When we were at Grandma's for Thanksgiving, I enjoyed reading their newspaper. Every Thanksgiving, they ask the local kindergarten classes for the instructions on how to cook a turkey. They publish the responses, and they can be really funny. So in that spirit, I asked Junior if he could tell me how to make Christmas cookies. He has an advantage here because he usually helps me make cookies:

Recipe for Christmas Cookies

Start with dough. You go with eggs. Then you go with chocolate chips. Use a cookie spoon. Now squeeze the cookie spoon and cookies will come out. Put the cookies on a cookie pan and put them in the oven at 30 degrees for 3 minutes.

Since we are not doing a scheduled "school day" right now, Peanut and Junior are going to be helping with this blog so that they can practice what they learned earlier this year.

Saturday, November 18, 2006

Peanut's Report - 2

A few weeks ago, Peanut had to give a report to her co-op class on an Oklahoma product or something invented in Oklahoma. She chose the shopping cart, which was invented in the 1930s in Oklahoma by Sylvan Goldman. It is an interesting story. Here is her report:

Sylvan Goldman was the owner of a chain of grocery stores in Oklahoma City, called Humpty Dumpty-Standard. In those days, when people shopped at the grocery store, they carried a basket in their hand to hold everything they wanted to buy. In 1936, Mr. Goldman got the idea to make a folding cart that would hold two baskets, so that it would be easier to buy more groceries. A maintenance man named Fred Young helped him design the cart. It took them a while to get it
right, but in a few months, they had shopping carts in all the stores.



At first, no one would use the carts. Men thought their arms were strong enough to carry around a little shopping basket. Women thought the cart looked too much like a baby buggy. A few days later, Mr. Goldman got the idea to hire men and women models to pretend to shop at the front of the store where people could see them when they came in. The lady at the front of the store would say, “Everybody is using these, why not you?” So their idea worked and now everyone uses shopping carts at the grocery store.



Mr. Goldman kept improving the cart, and he made them bigger so that people would buy even more. The shopping cart is the invention that has helped grocery stores the most.