Fun Food - Thanksgiving Style

I love making fun food for the kiddos. I think that's probably pretty obvious if you spend even a few minutes looking around this blog. Sometimes though, I come across ideas that I love but they work better on a larger scale. However, having only two very small children with appetites that make tiny birds look like ravenous beasts, I usually do not bother some of the cute ideas I have bouncing around in my brain. Thanks to a new addiction obsession organizing tool, Pinterest, I have been able to fill my brain up with some neat ideas and thanks to signing up to do snack for our homeschool group meeting, I got to bring some of these fun foods to life. 

A cheddar cheese & black grape sunflower with a celery stem.

A veggie turkey made from cucumbers, green, red & yellow peppers and carrots. I used raisins for eyes, bits of pepper for beak & waddle and celery for the legs.. 

Indian corn marshmallow treats made from Kix cereal, raisins, dried cranberries and dried papaya. I used fruit roll-ups for the husks.

Everything was a big hit with the kids and we ended up only bringing home a couple pieces of veggies. Most of it was devoured rather quickly. I was actually expecting to be bringing home most of the veggies but I was surprised at how many times the kids kept coming back for more. Yay!

Alphabet Sensory Tub

I finally got our Alphabet Sensory Tub put together today! I was held back by not being able to find the alphabet pasta I really wanted. So, we are already on the letter C in our letter of the Week, but since I have planned to do a tub every four weeks that features the letters we will be covering those four weeks, we are still good. 

I love how bright and colorful it is!

I started by coloring lots of alphabet macaroni in the same fashion I colored pasta last year. The only difference is that I didn't soak it as long since they aren't very big and I had to keep mixing them up as they dried to prevent them from being a big pasta pancake. I still had to spend a little time breaking them apart after they were dry.  Once dry, I put them in lines in the tub.

Next, I sprinkled letter beads & charms over the pasta. The circular beads glow in the dark! Fun!

Then came all the goodies! We are focusing on the letters A, B, C & D. We have various wood & plastic magnetic letters, large foam letters, tiny foam sticker letters, wooden letter blocks, letter cookie cutters, letter beads and charms on chenille stems, a Bb book and finally items beginning with the letters. A: apple, acorn, alligator, and ant; B: bowl, butterfly, button & bell; C: caterpillar, cross, car and coin; and D: dolphin, dragonfly, dice and dinosaur.

I am also including a small pail & scoop on the side for the kids to play with in their tub.

 

I don't have any action shots yet since I got this done a little late in the day. They've seen it though and are anxiously awaiting their chance to have at it. I also laid down the law in regard to the tubs - they each get to play at one of the tubs and not together. After a certain amount of time (not sure how long yet) we will switch off. I'd like to say that my kiddos are perfect angels and play sweetly side by side, but I cannot tell a lie. When it comes to the "choice" items in the tubs - like plastic jewel acorns - it's just plain hard to share!

Autumn Sensory Tub

Happy Autumnal Equinox! Or in other words, Happy 1st Day of Fall! It came in with a blah here - cool, rainy & grey. At least a couple of the trees outside my back window have leaves that are starting to change to a lovely deep crimson hue which is quite nice to look at.

To brighten up our day, I put together our Autumn Sensory Tub and introduced the kids to it. It's jam packed full of fun fall finds for fledgling fingers.

I started with the rice that I colored yesterday (here) in four vertical lines. I love the autumn colors!

Then I added: silk fall leaves, leaf buttons, sparkly foam leaves, silk sunflowers, a pine cone, wood mushrooms, wood people, a wooden scoop, a grapevine ball, some sort of nuts, a wooden bowl, wooden bucket, plastic jewel acorns, foam and yarn apples, mini foam pumpkins and squash, yarn pom poms, an apple chalk board with chalk, and bits of green & brown pipe cleaner.

On the side I included an extra yarn apple, a mini basket and the Rubik's cube style fall puzzle cube for extra fun. Laural took to the puzzle cube right away and tried to figure it out. Micah went straight for the acorns as I suspected he would.

It was a winner for both kids, who are still seated behind me on the floor playing with it. I will be putting together a 2nd sensory tub - the alphabet theme I've been planning - this weekend in hopes of eliminating some of the arguments that seem to come along with two kids trying to share one tub.

Have a fabulous first day of fall!

Homeschool Group Meeting

Today was the first homeschool group meeting of the new school year! The kids got to play for a while and then we gathered for a lesson. Barb & Susie did a presentation on coral reefs. The kids started by putting together a notebooking page.

Laural still needs to finish some of the answers & she wants to make it look pretty with some coloring & stickers.

Next the kids did a group project - building a coral reef.

Can you guess what each item of the cake represents? Don't peek, but I'll put the answers below!

Finally, the kids got to make an edible model of a coral polyp.

I only got a couple pics and that was before everything was finished but here we have a banana as the body of the polyp and twizzlers as the tentacles. We added sugar sprinkles as algal growths and a round cracker underneath as the base. I think there were supposed to be oyster crackers as skeletons of dead polyps, but we ran out of time.

A big woohoo to Jeanette who provided snacks - tortillas & salsa, pb crackers & carrots. Yum

Everyone had a great time. The kids got to run around and burn off some energy and the moms got to hang out and chat which is always a good thing when you spend most of your days with only little people to talk with. Before we even got out of the parking lot, both kids were asking when we could do that again. I think they had a good time.

Ok, here are the answers to the coral reef cake question: 

Cake: limestone reef base

Pink Frosting: coralline algae that encrusts & holds the reef together

Green Coconut: sea grass bed in the back reef

Stick Pretzels: branching coral

Cauliflower: individual coral polyps

Bite Size Cookies: plate coral

Sprinkles: sand

Corn Chips: sea fans

Mini Marshmallows: barrel sponges

Chocolate Chips: sea urchins

Goldfish Crackers: schools of fish

Doesn't that sound like a yummy cake? Ok, leave off the cauliflower and we have a winner!

Homeschool Today

We didn't start school last week like we had planned. I made a last minute decision (mostly because I was behind on getting things ready) to wait until after labor day. Laural is going to be doing Heart of Dakota - Little Hearts for His Glory. We actually started this last year but then I got ill at the beginning of October, spent 3 months dealing with that and then another 2 to 3 months recovering. School was put on hold during that time and while I recovered, our school year did not. Even though we didn't follow the curriculum very well, we still managed to squeeze a lot of learning in. So this year, we are picking up where we left off with Heart of Dakota. Since she is already ahead in much of what is covered, we will sort of be rushing through just to make sure there are no gaps. Then we will move directly into Beyond Little Hearts for His Glory. 

Micah is doing Letter of the Week from Confessions of a Homeschooler. He gets very excited when I say that it's time for school! Today, when I announced it was time for school, he ran over & jumped into my arms and shouted "Yay! I love this!" I hope he continues this enthusiasm as he gets older.

Here is a little of what we did today.

Micah made an Alligator A for his ABC book and he also colored and traced the letter A and a.

Laural & I reviewed some of her reading and then she did some copy work & drew a picture to go with it.

Later, she did several pages in her miniLUK books.

We did lots of other things but I didn't think to grab the camera until near the end of our school time. Now, it's time for me to go get a little better organized for tomorrow!

What have we been up to?

We've had a few busy weeks in our home! We've had Laural's birthday party, Easter, and a whole bunch of other stuff that has been keeping us on the go but in between it all, we've managed to get some school time in. Because of my own insecurities, I decided to change the path we've been on with Laural's kindergarten and try something different. Up until recently, I've been doing my own home grown version of a curriculum, putting together things that I thought fit the requirements. But then, I began to worry. What if the way I'm doing things is making her fall way behind what other kids her age are doing? What if the way I'm teaching her to read and write are setting up bad habits that will be tough to break later? What if our math program isn't up to par? So, because of all my worries and wondering and not really having anything to compare our curriculum to, I caved and bought the Heart of Dakota Kindergarten curriculum. After looking through the book, I realized that I really had to reason to be concerned. We are pretty much way ahead of kindergarten reading, math and science. But that's ok. I thought about it and decided that we are going to continue with Heart of Dakota but on a little faster pace for the things that we are already ahead on - kind of like a review - and take a little extra time on the things that we haven't spent as much time on. I like that it's a little more organized than what we've been doing (I'm not much of an organizer) and it will give a good base for her for certain 1st grade components.

So today, Laural and I continued with Heart of Dakota and I decided that it was time to start Micah on something a little more structured. So we started on Letter of the Week by Confessions of a Homeschooler. I love this curriculum! I started Laural (at age 2) on the Brightly Beaming Letter of the Week and while I really liked that one, I like this one even more. I might try to figure a way of combining the two. I wasn't sure how Micah would do with sit down learning, but he did an awesome job today! We started with a couple of the more hands on and fun things to do (I kind of ignored the suggested order of things so I could get a feel for how Micah would handle it). I think we will remain unstructured for a week or two to let him get accustomed to the idea of sitting and working on school work before I start structuring his school time. I started him with the A magnet sheet.

 I gave him pom pom magnets and the A/Apple sheet on a cookie sheet and he put the magnets on the tree and the A.

Next, we tried the poke page. Basically, I gave him a giant pushpin and put the paper on a piece of styrofoam and let him trace the letter Aa by poking homes in the paper!. I admit, I was a little nervous about letting my 3 year old handle a giant pushpin, but I explained to him that the end was sharp and not to touch it and he listened. What really amazed me was the awesome a job he did! He completely traced both A & a with only a few breaks to put a hole in other places on the page. I think I've been underestimating my boy!

We also glued apples to an apple tree, traced Aa with a pencil (he did a great job with this one too) and tried our hand at finishing patterns (not such a great job with this one). I also let Laural do the apple cut & paste and a cutting practice page since she doesn't handle the scissors so well yet. I'm really hoping the weather warms up soon so we can take some of our lessons outside! I miss the outdoors but with all the rain and wind, it's far from enjoyable outside yet. I also want to get some of my plants outside. My peas have gone crazy! I need to get them into one of the garden beds soon.

Steve starts vacation tomorrow and we've decided to just hang out around the house for the week and maybe get a yard sale organized for the end of the week - if the weather cooperates. I have so much stuff I need to get rid of - including piles of Beanie Babies! Yes, I fell into the craze long ago and we have loads of them sitting around in bags, needing a good home. Unfortunately, I don't think they retained any value so several have already become Laural's pets. LOL Oh well. I had fun chasing them all down years ago.

Homeschool = Learning Anywhere at Any Time

One of my favorite things about homeschooling my kids is that we can take just about any task around the house - or just about anywhere else - and turn it into a learning opportunity. Today, we learned a lot about plants and how they grow as we planted seeds in a starter tray. This simple thing that I needed to do to get ready for my garden turned into school time!

Planting cucumber seeds.

And red sunflower seeds.

We also planted peppers, beans, sugar peas and zucchini. All the rest of our seeds (corn, carrots, beets, lettuce and a few other things) will be sown outside when the weather is a little more agreeable.

While we were planting, we talked about what a seed needs to start growing into a plant. Then we talked about the life cycle of the plant (seed, sprout, adult plant, flowering, creating seeds, death), plant parts (root, stem, leaves, flower and fruit) and what plants need to continue to grow and produce fruit (sun, water, food). We also talked a little about how bees will visit the flowers to gather nectar and end up pollinating the plants. Next week, we will be starting a plants, fruits & veggies theme so this was a good kick-off for that. As we go through the various lessons, we will be able to keep track of our tray and watch our seedlings grow. We're hoping to get to Phipp's Conservatory as a field trip next week as well. I love their spring flower show!

After our hard "farm work" was done, we had to have a little snack. Since we had been talking about bees, we just had to have some local honey on some warm, buttered  homemade biscuits. Yum! Well, it was yum for me but for some reason, I haven't been able to get Laural to come around to liking the taste of honey. She ate half of her biscuit and didn't want any more.

Ear Update: It is looking quite a bit better today. The swelling has decreased and it is more of a normal color than it was. It helps that she was finally able to let me do a little better cleaning of it and get most of the dried blood cleaned from around the wound. She wanted me to take a picture of it so she could see it better - it's hard to see the inside curves of the outer ear in the mirror! So here it is.

She gets the stitches out on Tuesday. I just hope she doesn't freak out as much as she did when the ER doc was getting ready to stitch her up! She gets very anxious and upset if she thinks something is going to hurt. She gets near hysterical when we just need to take a band-aid off. Poor kid.

Valentines Sensory Tub

I was getting tired of looking at the feed corn based sensory tub (even though the kids loved playing with the corn) so I started gathering things for a new tub a few days ago. I decided to jump ahead to Valentine's Day already since we seem to be surrounded by a massive amount of Valentine's merchandise every time we set foot inside any store. 

The base is plain white rice. Also in the tub are pink heart picks (cut shorter or removed from the sticks with the sticks included in the tub), a small wooden bowl, wooden hearts, wooden scoop, red porcupine balls, various Valentine's Day erasers, red heart glitter, red rose scented soap roses, and a red plastic gem.

A note about the soap roses: I initially thought that these were paper that was scented like roses to be used as potpourri. A little while after I put the tub together, I read the box and saw that these were glycerin dipped paper soaps. You are supposed to remove a petal and use like you you would soap. I will strongly suggest not doing this! I tried it with one of the roses that I didn't put in the tub and the petal turned to a thick, sticky goo that wouldn't rinse off my hands. I rubbed and rubbed and rinsed and rinsed and still the pink goo wouldn't come off. After several minutes of scrubbing, I used a washcloth to scrub it off my hands and even then, it was difficult to get off.

I haven't been doing a stellar job at keeping up my 2 blogs! Homeschooling has been on the light side still - mostly because I am still recovering and gaining back my normal strength and energy from the lengthy illness I dealt with for all of November and December. I never imagined that I would still be dealing with recovery this long. But it is what it is and we are working around it and doing "good enough." I have a lot of housework to catch up on and I need to do a little re-training with the kids since they were used to things being quite lax while I was ill. There has been much resistance already. The cold and dreary weather aren't the greatest motivators either. These chilly days have me wanting to snuggle under some blankets with my kiddos and some hot tea or cocoa and watch some fun movies on netflix. I'll get there. I'm sure that by the end of spring, something will be accomplished. :)

School Stuff

We are easing back into school around here. Partly because it just still feels like it should be winter vacation and partly because I am still working up the energy to get everything done and caught up since I've been ill. This week, we've been doing a variety of new things along with the regular stuff.

 Laural has been using a Mini Luk book and controller that she got as a Christmas present.

And we played a Leap Frog spelling bee game. She did great with the spelling. She's really starting to sound things out and be able to figure out how to spell and read lots of words.

Micah has been practicing his drawing skills with his new Crayola Color Me A Song.

And both of them had some fun with their new Do-a-Dot markers. I was really surprised at how well Micah did with filling in the dots with the markers. The only problem was that once he was done with all the dots, he liked to drag the markers across the paper to make nice wide streaks. He also enjoyed holding the daubers down on the paper making a bit of a puddle of ink on the page. At least it's washable ink!

Bento Lunch & Hide-n-Seek Jar

I was in a mood today (industrious maybe? which is rare) and decided to make a quick bento lunch for Laural today. Micah was already in bed because some days he just gets too fussy and refuses to stay up for lunch which bugs me since the boy eats like a bird as it is! Anyhow, I decided to use Laural's princess sandwich box today.

She had a sliced red pepper, cheese stick cut in two, chicken nuggets, apple wedges and different colors of lettuce as baran. She was rather excited to be using her princess lunch box. I also have a small drink jug that matches but I didn't get a pic of that today.

One of our activities today was to use our Halloween hide-n-seek jar. I got the idea from Chasing Cheerios. I have seen similar things in the store for a hefty price and loved the idea but never even considered making something like it ourselves. So, inspired by Chasing Cheerios, I gathered stuff from around our house and I bought a few things too.

I arranged everything on a tray and took a picture which I printed out and laminated. The kids toss a button or small stone on the picture and whatever it lands on, they have to look for in the jar.

I used a Prego Spaghetti sauce jar and filled it with the Halloween theme goodies and black beans. I also threw a couple things in the jar that weren't on the photo as a surprise. Laural enjoyed it more than Micah but I think he was more hungry than anything else at the time I showed it to him. We will try it again tomorrow.

Micah is currently fascinated with pumpkins - how can he not be as they are everywhere this time of year - so the first thing he noticed was the pumpkin in the jar and had to point it out over and over. Then he pointed to the pumpkins I have in the middle of our table as a centerpiece and the big one sitting by the fridge that will be carved sometime tomorrow and made sure that I knew that those were pumpkins too. The boy loves his pumpkins!



Slime Time!

I decided to make some good old fashioned slime to play with today. Ah, it takes me back to the days of my youth when kids would bring in a small tub of the stuff and distract class with it, driving the teacher to confiscate the goo until the end of the year. In our house though, slime is part of school, not something for the teacher to get upset over. It's actually pretty awesome to see what happens when 2 liquids are introduced to each other - a nice and simple science lesson for a 5 year old. It's super easy to make too.

Laural was afraid to touch it at first but then she had a ball with it - especially after she realized she could make "rude sounds" with it. We liked to set it up in various shapes and then watch it melt down and ooze back to a shapeless blob.

Slime is awesome!

One of the last things we did with it before putting it away was roll it into a long snake and then I draped it over my hands and we watched as the ends stretched lower and lower. Each time the ends reached the table, I'f lift the slime higher until we must have had at least a 6 foot long slime snake. At that point it broke and landed on the table in a messy pile. I can't decide whether it looked like a long worm or a pile of intestines. Either way, it looked kinda creepy - perfect for Halloween!

To make slime you need:

1 tsp borax

1 1/2 cups water

4oz of white glue

food coloring

Dissolve the borax into 1 cup of water, set aside. Pour glue into a bowl. Add 1/2 cup water and mix well. Add desired food coloring and mix. Pour the borax water in and watch it become slime. Mix it up with your hands. At first it will be really slimy and gross. Then as you mix it up you will have 2 seperate things - slime and liquid. Remove the slime and discard the liquid. Knead the slime a little and it will become one nice, smooth wad of slime. Then, have some fun!

Halloween Sensory Tub

I decided to retire the fall/apple theme tub and put a Halloween sensory tub together today. Both kiddos were hovering as I added the elements. Both kiddos were dying to get their hands into the tub! I think it was nearly torture for them to have to wait until I took the picture.

Our tub contains: 4 pounds of black beans, various plastic spiders, bugs, & lizards, a wood scoop, 3 wood bowls, a jack-o-lantern container, green & purple pasta and a green plastic spoon. I removed the large pumpkin and replaced it with a cute pumpkin basket (yard sale find) just after I took the picture.

To say that the kids really enjoyed this tub would be a serious understatement. I think this one will remain popular as long as it is in use. I think there might even be a revolt if I try to replace it after Halloween is over. I think I will have to make the new one under cover of night. I think I'd better include something similar to beans in it as well.

Sensory Tub, Play Dough & A Giveaway!

I recently fell in love with sensory tubs while perusing a blog called Counting Coconuts, "a place where you'll find lots of learning activities and ideas for toddlers and preschoolers inspired mostly by the Montessori method." This has quickly become one of my new favorite blogs! After spending quite a bit of time there, I decided that we would incorporate the sensory tubs and also play dough play into our learning routine. So, yesterday and today, I've been doing a little shopping and today, we created our first sensory tub!

I decided to go with a fall/apple theme.

Items in the tub:

small silk leaves

foam pumpkin

foam squash

2 medium and 2 small foam apples

3 yarn apples

a small basket

2 small wood bowls

3 silk sunflowers

2 wooden mushrooms

9 plastic "crystal" acorns

an apple shaped mini chalk board

a rubber cricket

little pieces of brown & green chenille stems

Everything was purchased at either Walmart, Dollar Tree or Pat Catan's except for the yarn apples which I made myself.

Micah immediately went for the acorns. He loves stuff like that.

Laural enjoyed playing with the silk leaves, sprinkling them down like leaves falling from the trees.

Next up was play dough. I made a double batch. Now, I have made play dough before, in lots of colors, but I have never before thought of or heard of scenting the play dough. I really liked the idea though. I also really liked the apple pie scented play dough idea at Counting Coconuts. I divided my dough into 2 balls. The first ball I left natural color for the pie crust and scented it with cinnamon, vanilla extract, a little almond extract and butter flavor (like you would use to make butter cream frosting for wedding cakes). It smelled divine all mixed up. My mouth was actually watering. For the 2nd ball, I mixed in a lot of red gel food color, cinnamon and a little bit of tropical punch candy flavoring to give it a fruity smell. Again, it smelled good enough to eat. When Steve got home from work in the morning, I took the lid off the container and asked him to smell it. I asked what he thought it smelled like and he said apple pie! Bingo!

I gave each kid a ball of each dough, an apple or star cookie cutter, a small shallow bowl to use like a pie tin, a plastic knife and the rolling pin. I don't have a little one, so they had to use my big one.

They had a blast playing with it. I told Laural how to make a pie and she made me a very nice pie.

Micah isn't quite to the point of making things like that but he had quite the time using the rolling pin, cookie cutter and knife in the dough.

Most of the time though, he just wanted to smell it.

Now for the really good part - a giveaway! My first giveaway, actually. I had such a fun time planning for and shopping for things in the sensory tub that I want to share the fun! So, here is what I will be giving away to one lucky winner - some fall/apple theme sensory tub fillers!

2 small wood bowls, 2 wood mushrooms, a wood jug, an apple shaped mini chalk board, 4 medium apples, 1 small apple, 2 yarn apples (hand made by me), 3 silk sunflowers, a fall themed cube (like a rubik's cube - see pic below), 9 or 10 "jewel" acorns and a rubber spider.

(I may throw a couple other things in there too that I've picked up since posting this.)

The "rubik's" type cube. I thought it was a cute and clever idea so I grabbed one for my kiddos and a spare for giving away.

The very cute yarn apples that I made. I found this at Make and Takes through Counting Coconuts.

For a chance to win, just leave a comment letting me know that you do and what your experience is with sensory tubs - whether you've tried them before, would like to try them or if you think you'd use the stuff for some other use. Easy peasy!

For bonus entries: share on facebook, tweet and/or blog about the giveaway and leave a separate comment with a link for each thing you do for a total of 4 possible entries per person. Please make sure I have an email address to get in contact with you should you be picked!

Deadline for entries will be October 2nd at 11:59 PM EST.

I'll use random.org to pick a winner sometime in the 24 hours after the close of contest.

Winner should respond within 3 days of being notified or I will pick another winner.

This is a giveaway sponsored by me! Nobody gave me anything or paid me to give anything away. These are things I bought myself - either an extra with the intention of giving it away or part of the contents of a multi pack that I am sharing just because I want to. :)

Well, there were some pretty good odds for the two who commented to win! Random.org says:

Congrats to Frugalhomeschooler! I'll be sending you an email soon!
Thanks to both of you for entering.



Thanks for stopping by! Have a blessed day!

I linked up at Along For the Ride for Crafty Day.
(because I loved those little apples so much!)

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