I just recently came across the National History Day organization that is trying to help students and instructors to move beyond the dates and facts of historical events. The idea is to encourage students to discover the real history of everyday events. History is full of stories, songs, documents, recipes, movies, pictures, artifacts, furniture, landmarks, ghost stories, myths, and the list goes on. Here is a little excerpt from the NHD website explaining why they think everyday is National History Day."

When is National History Day? Every day is National History Day. Because history is made every day. We are teaching students that history is not just about the names and dates of people and events from 200 years ago but about the stories that happen every day in communities around the world. National History Day’s year-round programs culminate in a national contest every June.

My daughter will be looking at a song "Songbird" that was created by a series of poems written by kids in a concentration camp in Czchekoslovakia. She will be detailing her finding here at college-cram.com for all to enjoy. Let's all take some time and blog about current events or collect stories from parents or historical figures, and make our own history on College-Cram.com 

All right I had some time on my hands this weekend, so the girls and I started a cooking project. I love to cook and I especially enjoy getting my daughters involved. We have been vegetarians for over two years now and love eating vegetables and also trying out new recipes.

I had been eyeing in one of my vegan cook books the process for making wheat gluton to make setain and then flavor it like sausage. It seemed harmless so we tried. First off, it was a whole lot of fun and we were happy with what we made. We got our recipe from one of my favorite vegan cookbooks "La Dolce Vegan!: Vegan Livin' Made Easy" by Sarah Kramer.

The recipe for the wheat gluton called for 2 cups of wheat flour and 2 cups of all purpose flour with 1 3/4 cups of water. You mix it and then knead it for a minute. Then let it rest for 30 min. Once you have taken a little nap, you start washing the dough in a pan of water squeezing the dough until the water turns milky white. You dump out the water saving the dough and repeat the washing until the water is not milky white, then do it twice more. You now have wheat gluton that can be used to make faux meat. The girls thought it looked like old chewing gum when we were finished washing it.

We then followed Sarah's recipe for making a sausage broth.  It was wonderful! We all got a good lesson in creativity and also in the chemistry of cooking. Oh, we took our faux sasuage and then made a wonderful vegan lasagna with it. We will be eating it later this week.

We have been watching and learning as users continue to access and participate at College-Cram.com. We are experiencing some rapid growth since we converted the site from a content repository to a social learning environment. With these changes our search traffic is continuing to climb up each week, with more users finding and learning what they need to be successful in school.

In the last weeks we have tweaked College-Cram to include:

• An improved layout to high-lite the user toolbar for easier access to the full capability of College-Cram.com
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• Added "Chew on These 'Chick-lets' - Create, Connect, and Learn" to the header to further demonstrate how College-Cram.com can become an integral part of your learning experience in school.
  

These are some powerful tools available for students to allow learning but also the connecting and creating of learning resources for one another. If you are new or old take a few minutes to check out these new improvements