Paint Swatch Vowels and Crayon Resist Learning

For those of you that don't know, I had a baby in early July. During the last few months of pregnancy and first few months of new baby craziness I got out of the habit of doing lessons with my older son. We used to do handwriting practice for about 15 minutes everyday and sometimes we would also read books or practice sounding out words. He's only three, so I felt like that was about as much structured learning as I wanted to push in a day. Well after 5-6 months of not doing any kind of lesson, he doesn't know how to write most of his letters anymore. He even struggles with his own name. This bothers me - probably more than it should since, as I said before, he is ONLY three. However I decided now that the baby is less demanding and even sleeping through the night sometimes (thank you sleep training!), I would start working with him again. The problem is he really doesn't want to learn. He's a really good kid, so I know I could just force it and after a couple of weeks he'd stop complaining, but I want him to like learning so I decided to try some other approaches first. I got on Pinterest and started snooping around (and looking at all that stuff I pinned forever ago and promptly forgot about).

Paint Swatch Vowels

The first thing I decided to do was get some paint swatches to teach my son about the "magic e." It's a pretty simple concept. You get paint swatches with at least five colors per swatch. Mine had seven, so I just cut the last two off. Then you write four letter words that end in "e," making sure that if you take the "e" off, it's still a word (dim/dime, hat/hate, mop/mope). The fifth square stays blank and gets folded over to hide the final "e." As you can see, I made quite a few. Even so, when Ronan found them he was so excited that we went through all but 5 of them before he lost interest. That's another thing I've found. If I want Ronan to be interested in something, I don't show it to him. I just put it somewhere where he will find it on his own.

At first we just read the words. I think I did the first 3 to get him started and after that he sounded them all out on his own. He did really well and I was impressed. Unfortunately, he has not yet made the connection to words that aren't on paint chips. I'm sure that will come later, especially if I use the paint chips to remind him when he stumbles on a "magic e" word. When we were about halfway through, Ronan started asking me what some of the words meant. Luckily, I was prepared for this and had left out words like rap/rape. I included mat/mate, but used the definition for mate as a noun instead of a verb.

Next, I wanted to do an activity with numbers, and I found this post on Pinterest, which seemed perfect. Basically, she made a hundreds chart out of contact paper and then had her kids match numbers written on paper circles to the numbers written on the chart. Since she used contact paper, they could just stick the numbers on when they found them. I decided to use squares since it would be easier to cut a bunch of them. Honestly, we still haven't done this, but my son enjoyed watching me cut the squares so much and begged to play with them for so long, that I decided to do letters too. I made the consonants yellow, the vowels pink, and "y" orange. I made multiples of each letter so we could make lots of words without running out. Then Ronan helped me put them in a clear box with dividers for each letter. So far we have only used them for one activity, but it was definitely a hit.

Crayon Resist Learning

I have always thought that crayon resist activities were dumb. You write out the ABC's or your kid's spelling words in white crayon and then he paints over it with watercolors, making the letters show up. Oooohh. Aaaaahh. And then he's done. Why is going to want to look at this paper after he gets done painting it? What did he actually learn? Did he even read it? I'm not sure what made me even think of crayon resist when my son said he wanted to play with the letters I made and his phonics cards, but for some reason, I did. I had him guess how to spell the the names of the pictures on the cards using the letter squares. Then I gave him a sheet of "magic paper" so he could see how well he did without me saying "no, it's actually spelled..." or "e says eh. What letter says ih?" He spelled pig "pec" for goodness sake! Do you have any idea how frusterated I would have gotten trying to help him correct that?? This way I could just say "Ok, let's see if it's right." And then I could praise him for the letters he did get right and we could talk about why the words were spelled differently without me being the bad guy who has to keep telling him he's wrong. Plus, he'd argue with me ("but I want to spell it pec!") whereas he can't argue with magic paper.

It worked so well that after he went to bed I decided to make some more magic papers. I cut out pictures from the AAA Living magazine I got in the mail that day (I usually just throw it away), and pasted them on strips of paper next to the word written in white crayon. That way they are all ready for whenever he wants to do them and it should take him longer to figure out that I'm still the one writing the word. I'm posting the finished ones on the fridge to help him remember them. This way he gets a refresher on how to spell those words AND reminded of the activity so he'll ask to do it again. I've also been writing his guess on the paper with crayon, though I'm not actually sure why.

The last activity we did was a fall craft. I had lots of scrap papers left over from making the letter and number squares plus I saved the pieces I cut off of the paint swatches. I cut all of those pieces again so that I had more irregular shapes instead of just a bunch of rectangles, and Ronan and I used them to make a mosaic tree on a piece of contact paper. I drew the rough outline so he knew where to put the leaves and I did the trunk pretty much by myself, but he put on at least half of the leaves. He started out placing them one at a time, but decided that was too slow so he ended up dumping them on and then rubbing them around until they stuck. Then I stuck another piece of contact paper on top so it wouldn't be sticky anymore. It would have made more sense to use clear contact paper and then just put paper on top of the finished project, but I started with white contact paper, so I didn't end up with that option.

Craft Stick Puzzles

I've been working with Ronan on counting to 20 (He only makes it to 13 most of the time), and on letter sounds. Today I decided to look on Pinterest for hands-on ideas. Amazingly, I found NOTHING, but somehow looking through other preschool ideas gave me an idea. Ronan loves puzzles, so I made a puzzle to help him with his numbers. I printed out some Cars coloring pages and colored them. Then I painted the back of the pictures with glue and stuck popsicle sticks to them. I cut the popsicle sticks apart with an exacto knife and labelled them with numbers 1 through 20. Then, I wrapped them with packing tape to make them more durable. Now, he can practice placing the numbers in order to form a picture, and when I do it with him, we can also say the numbers aloud. He can't complete the puzzle by himself yet, but I do think he'll get it soon.

If you decide to do this, I used the large popsicle sticks, and no, twenty sticks do not fit on one page. I used two coloring pages, used "Paint" to connect the ground between them, and then split it onto two pages (Well, actually the top and bottom of one page). The seam is on stick #11, but its not overly obvious.

It was easier than I expected and turned out exactly as I planned, so I decided to make a few more puzzles. I will probably make a few other number puzzles later, but today I decided to start on some basic spelling puzzles. They are much easier than the number puzzle, but I wanted it that way. I figure he will probably need to learn his numbers in order to be able to complete the picture, but on the word puzzles he will have to be able to complete the picture in order to reveal the word. These are the word puzzles I made. I plan on doing "cat", "dog", etc later, but for now I just used family pictures.

Cornbread from scratch

Cornbread is a staple in our house. We always have a couple boxes of Jiffy cornbread mix in the cupboard because my husband LOVES cornbread. I've always found it to be too dry and not worth eating, but hey, if he doesn't say anything about the massive amounts of chocolate I eat, I'll let him have the cornbread. So one day last week I went to make cornbread... and we didn't have any! I was confused. I looked through every cupboard. How could we be OUT of cornbread??? I'll make some from scratch, I thought. It couldn't be too hard, and I know I've got cornmeal around here somewhere because I bought it for one of those kids sensory exercises you find all over Pinterest. Nope. I had corn starch. Not really the same thing.

So the next time I went shopping I bought a big bag of corn meal plus two boxes of Jiffy just in case I was an idiot and couldn't make good cornbread from scratch. A few days later I made "Homesteader Cornbread" from Allrecipes.com, and now I'm seriously considering giving away the Jiffy. It was easy. It was cheap. It used only ingredients that I already had (plus the cornmeal). And I actually liked it. Not enough to choose it over sweet rolls or croissants, but enough to choose it over nothing, which is a huge step for me. Unlike cornbread from a box, you don't feel like all of the moisture has been sucked out of your mouth when you're eating it. My husband said that cornbread was the kind of cake he wanted for his next birthday (weirdo). So for anyone curious enough to try it, but too lazy to look it up themselves, here is the recipe:

1 1/2 C cornmeal
2 1/2 C milk
2 C all-purpose flour
1 Tbsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
2/3 C sugar
2 eggs
1/2 C vegetable oil (I used olive oil)

In a large bowl, mix together cornmeal and milk. Let stand 5 minutes. Add all other ingredients and stir until smooth. Pour batter into a greased and floured 9x13 pan. bake at 400 degrees for 30-35 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.

QUICK. EASY. CHEAP. DONE. How did Jiffy convince us all to keep buying those stupid little boxes?

Alex's 3rd birthday cake - Lightning McQueen

I decided to make a birthday cake for my neighbor's son, Alex. He's really into cars right now, so I decided to make him a Lightning McQueen cake. I also wanted to try a technique I found on Pinterest that allows you to make coloring pages into buttercream images. You can find the link to the post I followed here.

First you need to find a picture that you want to copy and print it out in the correct size. If it has any text on it, you will want to flip the image before you print it. I realized that my image was going to be a mirror image but didn'tcare which direction the car faced. I didn't think about the fact that the numbers on the side of the car and the word "Rusteze" on the hood would be backwords until I put it on the cake. Go me.

You are going to place your printed image on a flat surface such as a piece of glass or the underside of a cake pan and tape a piece of wax paper over it. Then make your frosting. I suggest using a fairly thick buttercream for the outlines and then thinning it a bit for the fill. I used a fairly thick buttercream for the whole thing and it didn't end up being completely flat. Do your outlines first. If you have a very detailed picture like I did and you want to use a thin outline tip, that's fine, but use a thicker line for the outside line. I used a thin line all over and you could see under it on the final cake. Then fill in everything else, starting with the smallest, most intricate area first. When you are doing the larger areas later, you will want to frost right over the small lines and intricate areas with your main color of frosting. When you finish, you will want your entire picture to be about 3/16" thick.

Then put it in the freezer for about 15 minutes Longer is fine- you just want to make sure you give it enough time to freeze. When you remove it from the freezer, untape it and flip it onto your cake quickly, then (also quickly) peel off the wax paper. Your image will stick to the wax paper when it is frozen, so you don't have to worry about doing the actual flipping quickly, you just need to peel the wax paper off while it's still frozen. I imagine if you move too slowly you can probably put the entire cake in the freezer with the image and wax paper attached for 15-20 minutes, and then take it out and peel it then. My image did not turn out as good as I was hoping but it's still much better than I could have done freehand. I will try it again some other time using the tips I've posted here and see if I have a better experience. Please let me know if you try it and how it works for you!

Raising tadpoles - part 1

Like most kids, my son has a fascination with animals. The problem is that while we used to have a ton of pets, we got rid of most of them before he turned a year old because with a baby in the house, we just didn't have time for snakes, lizards, rabbits, etc. We still have a dog and two cats, but he wants a turtle. Or a horse. Or the bird at the pet shop. Or the squirrel climbing a tree. Mainly he wants a turtle, and oddly enough I've seen two turtles crossing the road in the past week that I could have taken home with me instead of just moving them away from traffic. The problem is that I don't want a turtle or any other animal that I have to feed and house and possibly even buy.

A few weeks ago our tomato plants got attacked by tobacco worms, which are fairly attractive, very destructive caterpillars that turn into plain-looking brown moths. They reeked havoc on my plants but also provided me with a unique opportunity- a  completely free pet. I saved one of them from being a skid mark on the bottom of my shoe and put it in a plastic jar. My husband found a stick and some moss and drilled holes in the lid, and we dropped in a few of the already half-eaten green tomatoes. For almost a week, Ronan was ecstatic. he talked about his caterpillar (which he called a crap-pillar), all the time. He walked around with his jar showing it to anyone that would look. Then the darn thing cocooned and it was back to "Mommy! Mommy! Turtle. Hold it?" Even when there were no turtles anywhere nearby. (My son just turned 2 last month, so his vocabulary and sentence structure are understandably limited) I still hadn't figured out what I was going to do about Ronan's recent pet fascination when the answer forced itself on me.

Now for anyone that doesn't know me, I am a tree-hugger. Not literally, but I am more of an animal/nature lover than anyone else I know. I still go outside sometimes after it rains to save the worms from drying up and dying on the sidewalk. So when I went to clean my son's swimming pool and found hundreds of tiny tadpoles, there was no choice to make other than what I was going to put them in and where they were going to go. I think I ended up with about 300 miniature tadpoles, each approximately the size of a flea. Trust me, it was fun trying to separate them from the -even more plentiful- mosquito larvae. I put 200 of them in a ten gallon aquarium and the rest in a large fishbowl. I went to two of the local boat ramps but couldn't find any suitable pond plants, so I ended up adding some sphagnum moss instead. Now if you haven't used sphagnum moss before, let me just say that it is a good staple to have around if you are the sort of person that takes in random creatures from outside. It is very versatile. It can live in water or on land and if it doesn't get enough water, it will just dry up until it gets more and then quickly become lush and green again. It available at most pet stores, though I would recommend a reptile store if you have one nearby. We bought a block of it (It came in a cube shaped bundle, tied together and covered in plastic) at least 5 years ago, and even though we have used it for many things, we still have most of it left. it lasts a long time for three reasons: 1- It EXPANDS when you get it wet. (You should soak it for at least 20 minutes before you use it so that it reaches its full size and becomes more pliable) 2- You can reuse it. I soaked WAY too much for my tadpole tanks, so now the portion I'm not going to use is drying in sun and will be put back away later. 3- You can't kill it. I mean I'm sure you could burn it or poison it or something, but you can't accidentally kill it because of its completely flexible water and lighting needs. So:

aTank

aPlants (to hide in)

aNon-chlorinated water (We have well water, but if you don't, you can just let some sit uncovered for a few days)

rFood

What the heck do you feed a tadpole? In the wild they eat pond scum, but I didn't have a good way to bring any of that inside. And it's gross. So my husband did some research and found out that they love boiled letuce. He chopped a couple of leaves and boiled them for 10 minutes. Then he froze it in icecube trays so that I would have single servings. After it was frozen, I popped them out and moved them to a ziplock.  If I have to make more later, I will probably just spread it out on some wax paper so that I can break it all up and have more more control over how much food they get at a time. Anyway, they love the lettuce. I've had them for about a week now and they've grown a lot off of it. They still attack the lettuce with tenacity every time I drop some in, which is once every few days. I haven't read anything about tadpoles and iceburg lettuce (the kind that comes in a round head like cabbage), but iceburg lettuce has basically no nutritional value and you should never feed it to turtles, iguanas, or other animals that live off mainly greens. I gave my tadpoles Romaine lettuce, but I assume they would also enjoy other types of greens. If you don't have lettuce, you could even try using chickweed or dandelion greens, both of which are non-toxic.

Ronan doesn't seem very excited about the tadpoles. I don't think he understands what they are and they are too small to catch his eye. I'm not sure how big they will get since the full-grown tree-frogs are only a little over an inch long, but he loves seeing frogs no matter how small they are, and with 300 tadpoles, I think we're going to get a LOT of frogs.

Garden Chicken Bake

I have a confession to make - I can't cook. I mean, most of my friends would say that I can -in fact most people would probably say that I can- but that's just because sometimes I do. I can read and follow directions, so if I have a recipe in front of me, it tends to turn out pretty well. When I say I can't cook, what I mean is that I absolutely NEED a recipe. If I'm baking junk food, I can just kinda make stuff up and it turns out good. I rarely follow a dessert recipe to the letter. If I use a recipe at all, it's more of a guide or an inspiration. I usually end up changing at least half of the ingredients. And I've always wanted to be able to do that with real food. But I can't. Even with simple stuff like chicken, I need a recipe. I don't know how long to cook it, or at what temperature, or if I need to turn it, baste it, season it, etc. And don't even ask me to add, remove, or substitute ingredients.

I know there are a lot of people that are like me when it comes to cooking. Being able to "make dinner" without the help of frozen entrees has become a dying art. Now that most women work, making dinner from scratch has become too much of a hassle and no one does it anymore. Which means that we aren't learning how. A little over a year ago, I became a stay-at-home mom. I quickly fell in love with Pinterest, taught my son sign language and myself crochet, and started spending time outside. This year I have a garden, and we are already having trouble eating everything it produces. I decided that we are going to eat or preserve everything that comes out of the garden. We are not letting anything go to waste and we are not giving anything away. Now I realize not giving ANYTHING away sounds kind of selfish, but I am doing it to force myself to learn how to make the most of my garden instead of just giving away everything that doesn't conveniently fit into my meal plan. To reach my goal, I will have to dehydrate, freeze, and learn how to can. I will also have to find recipes that use whatever vegetable I happen to have large amounts of or  *gasp* I'll have make to some up. Today I created my first recipe, and amazingly enough it tasted good.

Garden Chicken Bake

1 zucchini, thinly sliced
4 banana peppers, sliced in rings (mine taste more like bell peppers though every once in a while you get a bite with a little bit of kick)
2 chicken thighs, cooked, deboned, and chopped
barbeque sauce (I used Jack Daniels Steakhouse)
parmesan cheese
mozzarella cheese, shredded

In an 8x8 pan, make a layer of zucchini, then a layer of peppers. Next sprinkle on a layer of Parmesan cheese. Add a layer of chicken and another layer of zucchini. Then put the barbeque sauce on. I didn't use much barbeque sauce, but my chicken had also been grilled with barbeque sauce, so if your chicken is plain you may want to be more generous. Then add the rest of the peppers and the rest of the chicken and cover with mozzarella. bake at 350 for 25 minutes.

It turned out great and used up zucchini and peppers from the garden AND leftover chicken without me having to add a bunch of new ingredients, so I call it a success! And now I'll be less worried making up dishes in the future :-)

Update: My zucchini are doing terrible this year, but the peppers are still going strong so I ended up making this recipe again, but layering it with cooked yellow rice instead of zucchini. It was also very good.

birthday cakes

I adapted this recipe from Brown Eyed Baker's chocolate buttercream recipe, which can be found here. My husband and I do not generally like whipped frosting. In fact, we don't like whipped food at all. Eating flavored air kinda makes me want to gag. I don't know why I thought this recipe would be worth trying- aside from the fact that pretty much all the other recipes I could find call for heavy cream, which I have never purchased in my life. But I tried it, and it wasn't good. Now if you like whipped frosting, I would recommend it. I could almost taste it, and for flavored air that's pretty high praise. I added an extra cup of powdered sugar, which made it thick enough for me to eat, though another cup or two probably would have been even better. It tasted very sweet but not very chocolaty, so I added some unsweetened cocoa powder, and I think the resulting frosting is delicious. In the future, I may try adding more powdered sugar and chocolate. I'll have to see how it tastes with the cake and how it stands up to the heat. Our party is outside and it's supposed to be in the 80's that day. Anyway, here is the recipe as I made it:

Whipped Chocolate Buttercream Frosting

1 C butter or margarine, at room temp
3 1/2 C powdered sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 C semisweet chocolate chips, melted and cooled slightly
1 Tbsp special dark cocoa powder

Whip the butter with the whisk attachment on your mixer for 5 minutes on medium. Slowly add the other ingredients, starting with the powdered sugar, mixing the whole time. (While adding the powdered sugar you will want to mix on low speed) You will need to stop occasionally to scrape the sides of the bowl. Once everything has been incorporated, mix for another minute or two. Enjoy!

The white cake (which is actually confetti cake) also got buttercream frosting, but I just used this recipe from my homemade Oreos:

1/2 C (1 stick) of butter (or margarine), softened
4 Tbsp half and half (or milk)
2 tsp vanilla
pinch of salt
7 C powdered sugar

Mix everything except the powdered sugar together. Then add the powdered sugar one cup at a time.

I made both cakes from boxed mixes because I don't feel making cake from scratch is worth it unless it is a  flavor you can't get in a box (like Apple Dabble Cake - YUM!)

update: I wasn't really thrilled with how plain my cakes turned out, but they ended up sagging in the heat so I'm kind of glad I didn't spent too much time on them. Luckily, Ronan is only 2 years old so he didn't know the difference. Maybe next year I'll learn my lesson and have an indoor party. I didn't take a picture before we left because I was going to put toy trains on my son's cake before we served it, but after sitting in the heat so long it wasn't stable enough to put the trains on, so this picture was taken right before we cut them.