Weekly Wrap-up: Fungi and Volunteering

This week we went back to a normal schedule for school and followed up on the yeast topic we stumbled upon last week during our unschooling, and I pulled together some resources for learning about Fungi.

• Planet Wild Fungi video
• Assorted books from the library (none that are noteworthy so I won't note them here. I just pulled whatever I could find off the shelf)
• Experiment with yeast in warm water (and one with cold), with added sugar, salt, or flour. 

The sugar and warm water worked best, and even the sugar and cold water worked fine, just took a lot longer to produce as much carbon dioxide. The sugar and salt and warm water produced some, but not as much, and the flour and warm water produced a little bit, but not much.  The one with no sugar at all, didn't do anything, as expected.

• Experiment with growing mold on bread (swiped in sink, swiped in sink and put in fridge, and not-swiped in sink):

 The kids were surprised that the mold didn't grow on the bread in the refrigerator. At first,we were going to monitor this for 10 days, but it got so gross, we decided to cut it short and end after Day 4.                                                                                                      

The other thing that filled up our time this week was starting up some routes for picking up  leftover food from local restaurants and delivering as part of some volunteer work for Rescuing Leftover Cuisine. I recently began volunteering with them to start up some new routes here, so it's been a busy week of coordinating pickup/drop-off times, communicating with potential volunteers, meeting volunteers, and actually driving around.  It was eye-opening for Monkey to see the amount of food that would have been thrown away as we packed it into our car and delivered it to the food pantry. 

I've always wanted to find a way for my kids to volunteer and serve the community, but it's often hard to find something that will allow kids to help (usually for safety reasons) and that fits our personalities.  We tried volunteering at a nursing home last year, but all of us being introverted, quiet types, it really didn't work out as an on-going activity, as we just couldn't converse naturally.  We've done a few one-day volunteer events in the past, but I'm hoping that this work with RLC will be a great way for the kids to see that we really can make a difference and to give them a heart for serving others.