ofamily learning together

Baking Crunchies

Posted on September 9, 2014 by ofamily

It is true when they say that your sense can trigger a memory. Today the kids and I baked some crunchies, as soon as I took a bite I was back in my mom’s kitchen in South Africa. I asked my mom and she is not sure where the recipe originally comes from, probably from one of the framers wives in the area that we lived.

Crunchies

Ingredients :

440g of softened butter
240g of sugar
400g flour
5ml baking powder
25ml coco powder
200g oats
200g coconut

Cream the butter and the sugar together until it is nice a soft (I highly recommend getting little helpers to assist with this).

Add the remaining ingredients and mix well.

Roll into soft balls, place them on a greased baking tray and flattened with a fork. We actually rolled our mixture into a sausage and Pink used a knife to cut it into rings

Bake at 180C for 15 – mins (makes around 60 crunchies – they keep well)

Once cooled you can add some chocolate icing. My mom always does this but to be honest we had some biscuits today without the icing and they where yummy. My photos of our baked goodies never do them justice, both kids loved them.

Posted in Baking with Kids, Homeschooling | Tagged baking bisuits, baking with children, crunchies, home ed, homeschooling | Leave a comment

The Crunching Munching Caterpillar

Posted on September 7, 2014 by ofamily

We recently picked up a number of wonderful books at our local Oxfam shop and two of Blue’s favourites are The Crunching Munching Caterpillar (Very Noisy Picture Books)
and The Very Lazy Ladybird (Very Noisy Picture Book) (Very Noisy Picture Books) (affiliate links). Both books have lovely bold pictures and there are sounds for each animal and/or action. My little boy just loves this as he gets to join in with the story.

One of my “new school year resolutions ” is to do more activities around the books that we are reading and loving. For us doing book activities is normally a good way of including both kids even though they are different ages. So this last week we have done some activities around The Crunching Munching Caterpillar. We started off making stick puppets. I have found that printing off black and white stick puppets and then getting the kids to make them (including colouring them in) is a great way of getting reluctant kids to actually colour in (I have a house of empty colouring book both my kids are not normally fans of colouring in pictures). I found our stick puppets in the HUGE resource pack on the Twinkl website (part of their platinum package)

Both kids loved these stick puppets especially the caterpillars. Blue really wanted a butterfly with flapping wings so I thought we would make our own. I started off by drawing an outline for the kids and they painted it using some sponges (I actually used baby bath sponges from Tesco which I cut into 4 pieces so the sponges would be nice and soft).

I had left some toilet rolls out for the kids to paint so we could use them for the butterflies body but my kids had other ideas and ended up using them to decorate the butterflies wings.

After the paint was dried we cut out the wings and glued them on top of the toilet rolls and added some antennas.

This actually works really nicely as the kids can hold onto the toilet rolls and the wings are free to flap.

So as part of Pinks “school work” we looked at the vocabulary sheet to go with the book and did the word search (both part of the resource pack that we downloaded from Twinkl)

I had downloaded the minibeast fine motor pack (Platinum package on Twinkl) so I could use some of the pages to distract my little one while Pink and I did our Maths but I actually ended up using some of the pages from this pack as part of our story pages. We used the animal / insect sort page for Blue

And Pink did some of the Caterpillar pattern sorting pages. I really like that fact that they included 3 different versions of the pattern pages so you can find one that suits your kids (Blue has asked to do this activity next week so I have printed off the easy version for him).

Both kids are really enjoying doing activities around their books, the only issue for me is trying to choose which book to do as there are so many great book resources and now I need to find a good space book for Blue – he has become space rocket obsessed this last week.

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Posted in Art and Craft Ideas, Book Ideas, Homeschooling, ks1 English | Tagged children's book, children's craft, home ed, homeschooling, The crunching munching caterpillar, Twinkl | Leave a comment

Apple Trees and picking apples

Posted on September 3, 2014 by ofamily

We have been speaking about going apple picking for a whole week so when I finally said that we would go today the kids where very excited. Pink and I made an apple word tree earlier in the week so she was dying to go and pick real apples.

I drew a tree for Pink and then she stuck the apples with the words that she knew onto the branches. The apples are from a free apple language pack done by Cassie on 3 Dinosaurs.

We went to a farm (Garsons) in the area that has vegetable and fruit picking fields. It is a great outdoor activity to do with the kids and it really brings home the whole idea of where we get our food from.

My little boy was totally intrigued by the fact that there where apples on the ground

and was thrilled when he found some apples with worms.

Finally we managed to get him to actually pick some apples off the tree. We where also in luck as the strawberry fields where still full so after finishing with the apples and some plums we got some yummy strawberries

After a lovely morning picking fruit I thought the kids would be tired (I know I was) but once we got home both kids wanted to do some more apple activities. Pink wanted to use the trees that we had made over the weekend. The trees we made where very simple – we just cut out a tree trunk and branches in brown paper and a big green roundish shape and stuck them together. I think if you are using something like this for a Maths activity it is better to keep it simple as you do not want it to be too distracting.

We took out our number tub and both kids sat down with a tree and started looking for apples.

Blue is still learning his number so he choose a number, put the number on the tree trunk and then he had to add the correct number of apples to his tree (beads from the tub). Blue liked having multicoloured apples.

With Pink we used the tree to practice some number bonds. She would choose a number place it on the tree trunk and add the correct number of apples to the tree. Then we would look at different ways for the apples to be grouped so we could make up the total.

Pink really like this and I think part of the success for her was the fact that we where using trees which she helped me make. However if you are looking for some templates to print off I found these these FREE number trees on Twinkl which would work.

Numbers 0-50 on trees

Come and visit this weeks Home Ed link up so see some other great Home Ed posts

Posted in Homeschooling, Kids Outings in London, ks1 English, ks1 maths | Tagged apple tree, children's craft, home ed, homeschooling, ks1 english, ks1 maths, sight words, Twinkl | Leave a comment

Starting year 2 and making Collages

Posted on September 1, 2014 by ofamily

The kids and I had a blast this weekend experimenting with our food dye and bits and pieces out of the kitchen cupboards. We started off dyeing some rice, mainly as we have done this a number of times before so we knew what to do. Blue was in charge of this and no big surprise he choose to dye the rice – Blue. We then dyed some chick peas purple using water colours. This was the first time I have used water colours to dye sensory tub fillers and it turned out really nicely plus there was no vinegar smell. We also did some chick peas with food colouring and we dyed some corn. I was attempting to dye the corn red so we could use it in a planned autumn art project but they turned out pink instead.

Luckly for me my little girl thought they looked like pink jewels and promptly informed me that she was taking ownership of the pink corn. I have been so inspired by the results of what we did this weekend that I have ordered some more goodies with the weekly groceries shop so we can try more of the great ideas on this lovely blog post – How to Dye sensory Tub materials.

And so far none of the items have been used in sensory tubs they have been used in art, imaginary play and more art. Both the kids are going through a sticking craze at the moment, they are making pictures and signs with all kinds of strange and wonderful items. So after chatting to Pink about how to answer those questions that we keep getting asked – “where do you go to school, what year are you in “. We both decided to make some signs. Pink loved this idea, she smiled and chatted the whole way through. I think in a strange way it helped to build some confidence in answering ” those questions” as she kept telling me, while she worked, what she will say next time she gets a question.

And the end results

Posted in Art and Craft Ideas, Homeschooling, sensory play | Tagged back to school, children's craft, home ed, homeschooling, sensory bins | Leave a comment

Elmer and ballerina collages

Posted on August 29, 2014 by ofamily

I have been spending quite a lot of time on the Twinkl webiste looking for maths and english pages and just generally searching the website. On one of these searches I came across these great looking Elmer colouring pages (Platinum package) only I thought they would be great for some collage fun.

I set the table with a bunch of different materials and let the kids decide what they wanted to use.

I was actually surprised to see that Pink totally ignored the sequences and sparkly bits and went straight for the pasta and shredded paper.

Both kids then moved onto using the magic maize but Blue did not last long with this as he finds it gets very sticky and he ended up getting a bit frustrated. Pink did 2 pictures with the magic maize

The pink really enjoyed doing these so I made some simple ballerina templates for her and she created a few ballerina pictures. Unfortunately the templates are saved on my computer which is now in computer heaven. Pink wants to do more ballerina pictures so I will redo the templates and make a few new ones for her next week and upload them.