This sweet side dish is so easy it hardly merits being called a recipe. It’s the perfect hack for adding a little sugar and spice to dinner!
First, bake sweet potato fries according to package directions. Just after they come out of the oven, sprinkle with cinnamon and brown sugar to taste.
Serve with your favorite vanilla non-dairy yogurt for dipping!
When you’re craving muffins but don’t want a whole batch sitting around in the fridge or freezer, these individual mug-sized muffins are the answer to your prayers.
Ingredients:
My son likes his muffin plain…
…but I like adding a little extra chopped apple and a spoonful of vanilla non-dairy yogurt to serve. Or try a little dollop of soy whipped cream!
We’re pretty crazy about St. Patrick’s Day around here (despite not being Irish!), so be on the lookout for several shamrock-themed crafts and recipes this week. In this first version, kids will love the reveal of the shamrock shape after they finish dotting their paint!
First, cut out a shamrock, either free-hand or using a template.
You can tape the shamrocks down to construction paper or poster board, but we actually did ours on foam board – this allowed us to later use it as a sign at our town’s St. Patrick’s parade.
Now you have two ways to dot paint around the shamrocks. First, there are good old dot paints.
For a novelty version, set out a tray of green paint and use pencil erasers to make small dots.
We liked doing both, to compare the big and little dots side by side.
Once you’ve finished dotting, peel up the shamrock shapes – voila! The silhouette is left behind. Now off to the parade!
This month’s offering from our Early Explorers subscription was quite different than past kits. The booklet features many preschool readiness activities – mazes, matching, counting – but no suggested crafts or projects. As a result, we supplemented from Little Passport’s blog to add some additional fun.
The booklet featured great information, though, introducing children to habitats such as mountains, deserts, forests, and more. Travis loved the usual finds like the flashlight page and affixing his sticker on his luggage.
Habitats Art:
First up, we needed a craft! Papier-mâché mountains were perfect for the habitat theme – and so neat that they merited their own blog post!
The craft turned into a great way to supplement the info in Travis’s booklet about animals that live in the Himalayas and other mountain ranges.
Habitat Science:
We also snagged the perfect science project off Little Passport’s blog – a rainforest in a jar! To recreate this warm, humid environment (one canopy tree can produce 200 gallons of water in a year!), we first added about 1/2 cup potting soil to a large mason jar, then filled with 1/4 cup water. I rather zealously added a little extra water, which may have been a mistake.
Next we rubbed flower seeds with sandpaper to break them up slightly, then added to the jar.
We also added some moss (I bought the moss at the craft store; I hate to disturb moss from nature).
Seal the jar and set it some place sunny.
Within a day or so you’ll see the condensation on the inside of the jar – neat! Keep a record of any changes you see, and make a note of how long it takes for your flowers to bud.
Habitats Keepsake:
This month’s keepsake was an instant hit, and I think the highest quality one we’ve received: a sticker book with four different habitats and reusable animal stickers to go in each setting.
As far as reusable stickers go, these are the best I’ve ever come across! Thick and durable, easy to peel off, and they match right back up on the sheets they came from when you’re done with play. Travis loved how floppy the stickers were!
He had to put every animal in a home before he tired of the game.
Habitats Field Trip:
We decided to get as close to a tropical rainforest as we could here in the northeast – by visiting a butterfly exhibit! The humid room lives up to the name, and the butterflies are truly amazing, perching on fresh fruit…
hovering on leaves right before you….
and staying still enough to marvel at their curled tongues.
Habitats Further Activities:
Further activity suggestions this month really were about sitting down, talking and thinking together. I worried I might lose a preschooler’s attention, but Travis was quite engaged. First, we made a list of possible habitats, and he did great remembering – arctic, mountains, rainforests, etc.
I asked which was his favorite animal and he surprised me with polar bears, so we watched some online clips for kids about polar bears and their arctic habitat.
He also said that this is where he’d like to live, and to be a polar bear. (Brr!)
Since Travis’s drawing is still a little, well, abstract, I also set out coloring book pages of various animals and habitats that he could color.
Finally, we headed off to research and check out our local habitat. We take lots of nature walks anyway, so to capture what’s truly unique about our area, we went to where forest gives way immediately to the shore of Long Island Sound.
The only animals we saw on this cold snowy morning though were geese!
To be frank, I’ve never seen a recipe quite like this in my life! It came to us care of Travis’s March issue of High Five magazine, and has multiple steps that are sure to delight your sous-chef in the kitchen. Pineapple with noodles? Yes, apparently this is a thing.
You can find eggless egg noodles, but I was unable to this time around. Instead, I chose a bag of curly pasta, both because the curls are reminiscent of the way wide noodles loop after they cook, and because it came in the right kind of bag instead of a box (more on that below!). Curly noodles also have the advantage that you won’t need to cut them into much smaller pieces for young eaters.
Ingredients:
For the noodles:
For the topping:
*To make a quick vegan “cottage cheese”, combine 1 package firm tofu and 1 tablespoon lemon juice in a bowl. Mash with a fork until the mixture resembles cottage cheese curds. Refrigerate until ready to use.
Need a way to beat the blues on an indoor rainy day? This game can be thrown together with materials you likely have on hand, and turns raindrops into the cutest playing pieces ever.
First, we filled a big bin with rice and used a scoop to add about 2 tablespoons to each of 8 sandwich baggies.
Wrap rubber bands tightly around the bags to seal.
Bonus points: you can use leftover rice in a great sensory bin!
Next we wrapped the baggies in two layers of blue tissue paper, and secured with a second rubber band; now they looked a bit like raindrops.
To make them friendly raindrops, glue on googly eyes and pipe cleaner smiles.
While the glue dried, we made “puddles” on squares of craft foam. Paper plates would work well, too – anything you can draw or paint a blue puddle on. We added numbers so that we could keep score as we played, but that’s optional.
Set out the puddles and divide the raindrops among your players, then take turns trying to throw to the puddles.
This game is easily adaptable for multiple skill levels and ages, depending how far back players stand.
A splash!
Snow day here! The school snow day caught me unawares (I was sure they wouldn’t cancel!) which means we had to come up with lots to do indoors and quick! Enter this easy two ingredient game, and you have endless varieties of play.
Travis was intrigued watching me set up. I laid down piece after piece after piece of white paper in a row, and taped them together, until we had a long scroll.
I told him it was for a story, and if he told me what was happening in each frame, I would draw it in. He ended up dictating a fantastic tale involving a crocodile on a boat, who likes to vacuum.
Later there were some bells with feet who come to the crocodile’s rescue.
I happily followed along with my limited art skills.
Once our scroll was filled, he immediately wanted another story. This time, I posed the challenge that he be the author and illustrator.
His story turned out to be all about bells (bells are big here, these days), who got progressively bigger, and had hair and large eyes to see bugs.
Even though the story was a bit nonsensical, I loved watching his artistic process, and seeing the way he used markers to capture what he was trying to say.
Using your same pictures, you can weave new tales with different words, or grab more paper and keep making up new stories. The only limit here is when you run out of paper or tape, whichever happens first.
Happy snow day!
When we first moved into our new home, we used a huge packing box to make a puppet theater… but it wasn’t very convenient to keep something so big around for long. This little version is much easier to keep and store, and is sure to delight!
We made ours from poster board, but if you use cardboard, your theater will be even sturdier. First, I used a ruler and x-acto knife to cut a square from the center of the poster board; this will be the TV “screen.”
Next, I showed Travis images of old-fashioned TVs online – he was instantly thrilled, and loved designing his own on our frame.
He made sure to add antennas and lots of dials and buttons.
To stand the TV upright, I cut the center piece of poster board in half, and affixed each piece with masking tape to the back of the TV. It was a bit wobbly, but it worked well enough!
Travis “turned” a dial, and the show was on!
He loved being behind the frame with silly puppet antics.
And was absolutely thrilled when mommy took a turn and put on a show.
Pretty soon he had a microphone” set up and singing puppets (even if they didn’t quite fit in the frame anymore).
Later I caught him playing at being a “repair man” who needed to come fix the TV. So all-in-all, endless good fun with this one!
French fries in tacos? Kids and adults alike will say, ‘Yes please!’ to this tasty twist on a weekday staple.
Ingredients:
Add toppings like salsa, non-dairy sour cream, or guacamole, if your family likes ’em.
It’s rare that I can grab Travis’s interest for more than 30 minutes of crafting these days, so when this activity occupied us for nearly an hour, I knew we had a winner!
I came home with a new package of oven-bake clay, quite different from the white air-dry clay we normally use.
Travis was thrilled with all the colors, and in no time he had an assortment in front of him for chiseling, shaping, and rolling.
To make a lasting project, we used our collection of stamps – animal and pirate-themed sets worked perfectly – and pressed images into the clay. Once baked, I knew these tiles could be used for numerous games!
For the cleanest method, press the clay into a square, cover with plastic wrap, and press the stamp on top.
Travis didn’t always use the plastic wrap, which was just fine.
He mostly did his own thing with the stamps and clay while I made an actual set of tiles we could use in the future. I confess my fingers hurt by the end from warming up so many different colors and flattening to 1/4-inch thick! Travis meanwhile pretended he was baking some of his in an “oven.”
When it’s time to really bake the clay, arrange your tiles on a parchment paper-lined baking sheet and bake according to package instructions – ours went in at 275 degrees F for 30 minutes.
Now what to do with them! We decided we could use these as a more permanent version of our printable story cards.
You can also play games with the animals, assigning them by habitat or finding other ways to sort them.
If you want any of your tiles to be jewelry, make sure to poke a hole with a toothpick before baking. However you use them, these tiles are great for arts and crafts, fine motor skills, imagination, and more.
joyful parenting 