ofamily learning together

Baking Shortbread biscuits with the kids

Posted on November 14, 2014 by ofamily

Pink has been reading the Katie in Scotland book recently and wanted to make some shortbread biscuits like they eat in the book. Lucky for me my mom had a lovely recipe for shortbread biscuits so a rainy morning inside ment a perfect opportunity to give it a go.

The recipe is actually very simple (On our first attempt I actually halved the quantities as I was not sure if the kids would eat them but they loved them).

460g butter
130g icing sugar
120 corn starch (Maizena in South Africa)
340 g cake flour
1g salt

Cream the butter and the icing sugar together (My kids do all the mixing but I do have a quick check to make sure it is all mixed together properly)

Sift the dry ingredients (the original recipe says you do this 4 times but with the kids we only did this once)

Mix spoonfuls of the dry ingredients into the butter mixture slowly mixing (loved the teamwork here – blue added the dry mixture while big sister mixed it).

Bake in a greased pan at 180C for around 20 mins. Be careful not to overbake

Cut into fingers and when cooled sprinkle with some icing sugar (this is great for kids who are hesitant to get their hands messy – Baking has really helped Pink with this).

And enjoy (I thought they went perfectly with a nice cup of tea).

Posted in Baking with Kids, Homeschooling, sensory play | Tagged baking with children, home ed, homeschooling, Katie in Scotland, kids baking, sensory play, Shortbread biscuits | Leave a comment

Percy the Park Keeper

Posted on November 13, 2014 by ofamily

Blue finally discovered the Percy the Park Keeper books (written by Nick Butterworth). We have some of the books around the house as Pink loves any story that involves kind animals but until recently Blue was not that interested. Now every night for the last 3 weeks Blue has been chosing two Percy stories for his bed time. (The stories are lovely and the pictures are sweet). Our favourite is Percy’s Park – A Year in Percy’s Park
(affiliate link).

So no big surprise I thought it would be good to include some Percy activities into our home learning.

The kids love playing guess the animal game with us. One of the kids will describe an animal and then we need to guess what it is. There are a number of different woodland animals in the Percy stories so I thought we would try guess the animal but using cards that Pink had to read. Pink did really well and I only had to help with two of the tricky words.

And of course you can not guess the animal without going to find the matching toy animal (Blue loves joining in).

These are very simple cards but I am attaching the word document in case anyone else would like to use them.

Percy the Park Keeper Guess the animal

We also used the design a garden / design a park template from Twinkl. This was a huge success with both the kids getting involved. They discussed where the best place for a bench would be and if the flowers should be near the tree or the pond. We downloaded these templates as part of the Percy the Park Keeper Role Play Pack from Twinkl (FREE to download).

Pink also wrote some sentences about the characters in the book. I printed of the Park Word Mat (Twinkl FREE) for her to use but she actually ended up using one of her Percy books to find the words that she was battling to spell. I was really happy to see her paging through the book looking for words and phrases to write.

The lovely lined paper that we used is Pink’s favourite it is from activity village.

I found these lovely Percy the Park Keeper animals to do with the kids on Damson Lane. But the Christmas bug seems to have landed and our craft area is now a Christmas card making station. Anyway I am keeping them and I am sure at some stage we will get around to making them, they look lovely.

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Posted in Book Ideas | Tagged children's book, guess the animal, home ed, homeschooling, ks1 english, Percy the Park Keeper, Twinkl | 2 Comments

Home made scratch art

Posted on November 10, 2014 by ofamily

Over the weekend Pink asked to do some scratch art (she meant the ones that you can buy in the shop), we did not have any so we decided to make our own.

We started off by creating blocks of colour with our oil pastels. With younger kids I would suggest going over and making sure there is no white sticking through.

Then we painted over the page with our black paint. And we let it dry.

Once dried we started making our pictures. Blue used a small art stick that we had in our art trolley and Pink used a lolly stick. Blue had great fun making his picture – he informs me that it is the space scene from one of his books.

Pink actually surprised me and used it to practice her writing. She wrote quite a lot and then did a Christmas Tree.

I never thought of doing this as a writing exercise, we will definitely be doing it again when Blue starts learning to write his letter.

Posted in Art and Craft Ideas, Homeschooling | Tagged children's craft, christmas tree, home ed, homeschooling, kids art, kids craft, scratch art, writing | Leave a comment

The Scarecrow’s wedding and scarecrow cookies

Posted on November 7, 2014 by ofamily

We bought a new addition to our mini Julia Donaldson library last week – The Scarecrow’s Wedding (affiliate link). We all love it. Pink thinks that Harry and Betty (the 2 main characters) are lovely and gentle so I could not resist the temptation to make some scarecrow biscuits with the kids.

We used our favourite cookie dough from Annabel Karmel – I have a lovely cookbook called Easy Peasy Cooking with Kids by Annabel Karmel where we got our recipe from. But I found it on the internet here cookie dough (step 1 we increased our quantities so that we had more cookies). You could honestly use any basic cookie dough all you need is a simple cookie for the kids to decorate. I was actually thinking this would work really nicely with what us South Africans call Marie biscuits or in the UK a round tea biscuit.

After we got our mixture out of the fridge, Pink rolled into a long sausage and cut the strips and placed them on the baking tray for me. (My role is operating the oven).

We let the cookies cool and then the kids got busy making their scarecrows. We started with white icing as a base for the face which also helped to keep the eyes and nose etc in place. The kids used smarties for the eyes,

mini marshmallows for the nose, some wafer biscuit for the hat, some chocolate sprinkles for the hair and they used some red icing for the mouth.

Both kids enjoyed making and eating the Scarecrow cookies.

You might also like this post – The Scarecrow’s Wedding Craft and Writing

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Posted in Baking with Kids, Book Ideas, Homeschooling | Tagged baking with children, home ed, homeschooling, julia donaldson, Scarecrow cookies, sensory activities, The Scarecrow's Wedding | 1 Comment

Banana Muffins

Posted on November 4, 2014 by ofamily

Before I had my kids I was very good about following a low GI (Glycaemic Index) diet but then motherhood and all that came with it hit and my good habbits melted away. I am trying to get back into the low GI diet so I dusted off my two trusty cookbooks – Eating for Sutained Energy 2 and Snack and Treats for Sustained Emergy 1. The kids and I have been having some fun trying some of the recipes.

The kids favourite Low GI recipe to make and eat are these yummy banana muffins from the Eating with Sustained Energy 2 cookbook by Gabi Steenkamp and Liesbet Delport. The recipe in the book is actually for banana bread but the kids enjoy making it as banana muffins. One of the authors (Gabi Steenkamp) of this lovely cookbook has given me permission to share this very tasty and healthy recipe.

Ingredients :

2 bananas
30 ml (2Tbs) lemon juice
1 small apple, grated
100 ml skimmed milk
250 ml (1 cup) high fibre cereal
10 ml canola or macadamia oil (we have used sunflower oil before)
125ml (1/2 cup) of soft brown sugar
1 egg
250ml (1 cup) cake flour
10ml (2 tsp) baking powder
2ml (1/2 tsp) salt
5ml (1tsp) vanilla essence

Steps (all mixing steps are done by my kids)

Peel the bananas and mash the flesh with the lemon juice (This is my sons favourite part of making this recipe).
Mix in the grated apple and set aside
Heat the milk and pour over the high fibre cereal. Stir and leave to soften. (Both my kids are fussy about the texture and this step is important as the cereal needs to soften).
Cream the oil, sugar and egg until smooth but no longer then 1 min
Sift the flour, baking powder and salt in a separate mixing bowl.
Combine all together and mix with a wooden spoon
Add the vanilla and stir
Spoon into a greased loaf pan (about 30 cm long) and bake for an hour at 180C

My kids like scooping the mixture into greased muffins trays. Depends upon the size of the muffin tray that you use but we get about 10/11 muffins out. We bake at 180C for around 25 to 30 mins

We have made these muffins so often that I now know the recipe off by heart and I have actually ordered the Sustained Energy for Kids cookbook by Gabi Steenkamp, Jeske Wellmann and Tanzia Merlin. I am looking forward to trying some new recipes out of this cookbook with the kids.

For more information about the authors, their cookbooks and the GI diet please click on their names and the links will direct you to their personal websites.