Olivia says, "Cheese"

Now that Olivia is nearing the end of our school district's Pre-K program it was time to sit down and talk about what she wanted to learn for the next year. Here in New York State we don't need to declare our homeschooling intentions or curriculum until she turns 6 but that's no reason to hold back learning if she wants to learn something. We wanted to make sure she was getting a rounded experience all year long and still remain child-led.

Throughout the year Olivia has been using the kitchen and food for what she deems "science" and so we talked about how to turn that into some Olivia-appropriate learning for the coming year. In our discussions Olivia said she wanted to make cheese and the quest to build a curriculum began.

We've got a lot of experience in our family with food science with nearly a decade of homebrewing beer (not an Olivia project), a food science company in the family, and few years of finding/creating our own recipes for delicious and healthy food.

After searching the Internet for a while, I happened across a cheese making curriculum from a University of Cincinnati professor, Dr. David Fankhauser. While this is written for older people than our Olivia, the steps are clearly laid out, illustrated, and concisely worded. Also, I truly appreciate how Dr. Fankhauser scaffolded the whole cheese making process from making a simple yogurt to a 1 lb. wheel of bleu cheese (although we might substitute cheddar).

Now, this was written at a level Dad can understand and the intended audience wasn't a 4-year old (albeit bright) curious girl. This is where the family aspect of homeschooling comes into play. How do we take this adult-oriented complex process and make lessons out of it for our child? That's the beauty of Dr. Fankhauser's curriculum; it is written in a way that you can not only easily extract lessons for kids but also repeat and build the learning up to the mastery level of making cheese at home.

Our plan is to build in steps to each scaffolded project. At first, Olivia will learn some basic steps for each project. For example, in making yogurt (project #1), Olivia will learn these steps:

1. Clean the jars to get rid of germs.
2. Heat up the milk.
3. Cool down the milk.
4. Mix the slurry (a fun word).
5. Mix the slurry into the milk.
6. Pour the milk into jars.
7. Put the jars into a cooler (or hot box as she calls it since we heat it up with warm water).

Step 6. Pour the milk into jars.

We will stay at this level and with yogurt until she gets good at it. We're in no hurry and embedded with each attempt with each project is some basic science, math, and composition (via a video story about the project that Olivia will record). All Olivia-appropriate.

Olivia is excited to make yogurt, cheese, and have fun in the kitchen with Dad. We've got to work on some perceptions that are completely natural for a kid; like the yogurt we are making isn't the strawberry-banana stuff in the colorful containers and the cheese we make isn't deli cheese in individual plastic wrappers. So, add to culture to math, science, and composition.

Mom's excited to have help with making things Olivia-appropriate, helping with the composition, and enjoying the fruits of the labor.

Dad's excited to be learning along side Olivia the craft of making cheese, building and implementing the curriculum (along with Mom and Olivia), and watching Oliva go from cheesy apprentice to cheesy master. We'll post about the first night making yogurt once we get Olivia's video dairy about it...right now the yogurt is incubating in the "hot box" for a few hours.