Category: 6-Year-Old

Rubber Band Racer

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Rubber Band Rover (3)

This project unfortunately didn’t work as hoped for Travis, namely because we didn’t have a drill bit small enough to make the necessary tiny holes. But we decided to go ahead with the craft because it made the perfect “barge” in his make-believe games.

The idea is to make a racing car that can wind up on rubber bands, similar to the Mars Rover from his recent Kiwi Crate.

This time we needed to prep all the materials ourselves! Cut the tip from a wooden skewer to measure .75 inch. Cut two additional skewers into 4 inch pieces, and cut 2 lollipop sticks into 2 and 1/2 inch pieces.

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Well already we were in trouble! We didn’t have lollipop sticks. Instead, we thought straws might work, but soon realized this was going to be our first hurdle.

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Take 2 additional decorative straws and mark with a pen 1 inch and 2 inches in from each end (so 4 pen marks per straw). This is where ideally you’ll use a drill to make tiny holes. I tried poking with a straight pin, but this warped the straws. I was able to thread through our first axle (the first 4 inch skewer piece) but not the second.

Thinking quick, we turned to hot glue. We could put the racer together, but the glue meant our wheels wouldn’t turn.

If you have a drill, here’s what you’ll do: thread the skewers through the holes that are 1 inch in, and thread the lollipop sticks through the holes that are 2 inches in. Next use the drill to make a hole in the center of two large round plastic lids and two small round plastic lids (we used the tops from juice and almond milk cartons). Use hot glue to add the .75 inch skewer tip off the center of the back axle.

Since ours was now just a hot glue project, of course this meant that our wheels wouldn’t roll, so we skipped the step entirely of looping a rubber band around the front lollipop stock, to then stretch around the back skewer tip. Need a visual for all that? Check here.

But as you can see, Travis’s vehicle now was Jabba the Hutt’s barge!

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Can your child get the rubber band racer to truly race? Please share in the comments!

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Experience the Harvest

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With beautiful fall recipes that celebrate the harvest in Travis’s latest Raddish Kids, we wanted to make sure we ticked all the boxes for fall family fun. All of the following activities are ones we try to do every year. Start now and make them a tradition for your family, too!

Go Through a Corn Maze

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Corn mazes range from the easy to the truly harrowing. Aim for one-acre or less if your kids are young like mine. Meanwhile, big kids can tackle the biggies… Or the haunted ones!

Attend a Local Harvest Festival

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This was harder this year, under COVID-19 regulations. But we did go to a local farm, where the kids got to see animals like goats and sheep, and help feed them, too!

Pick Pumpkins at a Patch

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We headed to the pumpkin patch on a day where proceeds benefited the pediatrics department of our local hospital. The kids got to take home goodie bags, and three proudly picked pumpkins.

Hop a Tractor for a Hay Ride

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Bummer, the hay rides are closed this year, too. But the kids can still sit in the tractors at least. Vroom, vroom!

Drink Hot Apple Cider

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After holding his own apple cider stand (!), we made sure to save enough to enjoy mulled cider back at home. The kids marveled at how a little heat and spice transformed a regular cup of cider. It was the perfect pause for some Raddish Kids’ Table Talk cards, too.

Visit an Orchard for Apple Picking

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We lucked out with a gorgeous afternoon to pick apples from a local orchard. Travis was really into finding the best apples and carefully twisting them off this year. Veronika loved standing under the trees and staring up at the apples in glee.

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Everyone loved it.

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Need a recipe for your haul? Try Spiced Baked Apples!

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This recipe is great because it works best with a mix of sweet and tart, taking advantage of multiple varieties from your picking excursion.

Ingredients:

  • 6 apples
  • 2 tablespoons lemon juice
  • 1/2 cup brown sugar
  • 2 tablespoons cornstarch
  • 2 teaspoons water
  • 1 and 1/2 teaspoons pumpkin pie spice
  • 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
  • Pinch of salt
  • 2 tablespoons Earth Balance butter
  1. Slice the apples and toss with the lemon juice in a large bowl.
  2. Add the cornstarch, brown sugar, water, pumpkin pie spice, vanilla, and salt.
  3. Spoon the apple mixture into a 2-quart baking dish. Cut the butter into small pieces and arrange over the apple slices. Cover with foil and bake at 350 degrees F for 1 hour and 15 minutes.
  4. Uncover, stir, and bake an additional 15 minutes. The apples will look almost like a chunky applesauce. Let stand at least 30 minutes before serving.

Happy Harvest!

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Intro to Entrepreneurship: Apple Cider Stands & Donut Shops

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Apple Cider Stand (5)

Raddish Kids changed their lesson plan format recently, from one lesson to correspond with each recipe into more of an overarching theme for each month’s package.

The change hasn’t worked well for Travis. The scope of the lesson now seems aimed at older kids, and it’s difficult to engage a first grader in the activities. This month’s theme was: what is an entrepreneur and how do you turn an idea into a business. Here’s I engaged Travis in that!

As a warm up, I asked him to imagine his favorite restaurant and describe what he liked best about it. But since we don’t go out often, he couldn’t come up with much more than that it was fancy. The idea is that kids now take their answers and design a donut shop, in conjunction with the Apple Cider Donut recipe.

We watched an online read of The Donut Chef, a cute book, but Travis couldn’t really translate that into creating a shop or flavors of donuts. Older kids can use the provided Brainstorm Bubble Map (in the shape of a donut of course) to write out ideas for a store name, logo, menu, and more.

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Kids can also lay out the shape of their store using tangrams on grid paper. I simply had Travis use dollhouse furniture to create a little restaurant diorama.

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We also watched a quick clip on the history of the donut, and scrolled through images of successful donut chains around the country. Big kids can learn about innovations in donuts (the cronut!), or imagine a “donut of the future”.

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But I knew Travis needed something more hands on. So… we decided to open up an apple cider stand and put entrepreneurship into action.

Once we had the idea, Travis couldn’t wait for the big day. First we talked about a logo, and came up with a shiny red apple. This went on all of our cider stand materials, including an announcement poster, a price poster, and the jug we’d use to pour the cider. His color scheme was red, green, and brown.

He also watched Raddish’s provided clip of a child entrepreneur to get fired up for his own “business”.

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Kids can brainstorm what snacks to sell, or even invent one. We kept it simple with store-bought packets of candy corn. Time to open up shop!

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To put it simply, this was amazing. Travis was dismayed when the first few cars drove by without stopping. But once he had his first customer, the floodgates opened up. Within one hour he’d served ten customers, and we’d sold nearly all the cider.

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He loved waving down cars. And little sister Veronika helped!

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We finished with apple cider at home, warm with mulled spices. The perfect reward.

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Pom Pom Planets

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Pom Pom Planets (7)Here’s a quick and cute way to show the scale of the planets (roughly speaking) for kids who are learning about the solar system. Set out an assortment of pom poms in as many sizes and colors as you have, and find the perfect one to represent each of our 8 planets!

I dumped a big bag of pom poms into a craft tray, which immediately created excitement.

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Travis loved searching through this “universe” for each planet. One by one, he located the following:

A small tan one for Mercury

A small pink one for Venus

A small blue one for Earth

A small orange one for Mars

A large orange one for Jupiter

A large purple one for Saturn

A medium green one for Uranus

A medium blue one for Neptune

Note: Your colors and sizes might be slightly different, depending what you have on hand. Gray works equally well for Mercury, and yellow equally well for Saturn. Obviously we wished we had a red one for Mars, but our pack didn’t contain small red.

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We then wrapped Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune with belts of pipe cleaners to make the rings.

Next we cut 8 pieces of yarn, making sure they were roughly the same length. Tie or glue these onto each pom pom.

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It was time to build the solar system. As I tied each one to a wire hanger, I had Travis tell me which planet should come next, working from Mercury to Neptune. This was great review for a topic we haven’t covered in a while!

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I had originally intended to make a star decoration along the top of the hanger, but Travis was adamant that we couldn’t have a solar system without the sun. He colored in a paper plate with yellow marker, and it was soon proudly affixed atop the hanger.

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It looked perfect against his star lamp!

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Mars Rover Kiwi Crate

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Kiwi Mars (9)

Travis has long had a fascination with Mars and the NASA rovers, so he was thrilled to discover this month’s crate from Kiwi Co. A chance to make his own rover! He wanted to know if it could really go to Mars, and although the answer was sadly no, there was lots of fun to be had.

We jumped right in to making the Mars Rover: Travis enjoyed helping with the axles, one featuring square holes and one round so kids can tell them apart.

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The base of the rover is made from a wood frame, but Travis grew frustrated with the following step to thread through string that attaches the spring.

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The tension of this spring is what makes the rover move forward, similar to a pull-back car toy. With a little grown-up assistance, the rover was complete.

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He loved the second part of the project: Make the Flag. Using the wooden flagpole as a scratching tool, kids can scratch off the black surface of the flag to reveal rainbow paper underneath.

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The sky’s the limit for what design to put on the flag, but Travis just loved revealing the color underneath and spent such careful time on this.

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Once my artist declared his flag done, we threaded it onto the wooden flagpole. Insert the flagpole into the stand on the rover, and then i’s time to wind up and give it a test.

Alas, I can’t say any of us were wowed by the results. Yes, the rover moves forward, but neither very fast nor very far. Perhaps our strings or spring weren’t taut enough?

Still, we forged ahead to make the Crater Course. Layers of cardboard are piled up and put on a felt “Mars” surface. Send your rover over them and see if it can make it across the bumpy ground.

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There were lots of suggested ways to vary the course: Space the craters further apart, arrange them in different ways, or pile them on top of each other.

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After that, there was still more experimentation to try! We turned to the crate’s suggestion of rubbing cooking oil over the strings, to see if this resulted in a faster rover. Well, no, but the kids thought it was funny!

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Then we set up a little course for the rover, with a piece of cardboard angled off two books. Could the rover make it up?

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Alas, still no, even when we added other items (a paper towel, a fluffy towel) to give it more traction. Well, at least it could zoom down!

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As a final experiment, it was time to make our own Mars sand. We filched some from the playground, then poured it into the Kiwi box.

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Add a little bit of water, along with a steel-wool scrubber. Ideally we’ll see the sand take on a reddish hue in a few days as it turns rusty from the iron, just like the sand on the Red Planet!

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Monster Headbands

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Monster Headbands (4)

Here’s a fun costume craft from Travis’s latest Highlights magazine, perfect for spooky dress-up in October! We made two of the four suggested versions.

To start, wrap craft feather boas around plain headbands from the drugstore. You can simply wrap the boas, or use hot glue or adhesive dots to secure at the ends for more security.

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Our first monster had three big eyes on top. Glue black felt pupils onto white ping pong balls, and hot glue on top. If you want the eyes further above the head (which we did not do), attach them to the ends of boa-wrapped pipe cleaners instead.

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For the second monster, we made one big cyclops eye. I glued a large piece of felt onto a thin piece of cardboard, with two pipe cleaners glued in between. Add two more colors of felt, followed by a black felt pupil. Wrap the pipe cleaners around the top of the headband to secure.

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Note: You could also use this method of felt-glued-onto-thin-cardboard to make horn shapes, too, another version that we skipped.

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Travis loved making silly monster faces.

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And we even had an appearance from Baby Monster!

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Little Passports: China

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LP China (18)

Travis journeyed to China with this month’s delivery from Little Passports. On the night it arrived, he affixed the country sticker to his suitcase and passport, found China on the map, and dove into the information online and in the booklet.

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The booklet had a nice variety, including riddles to solve about Chinese inventions, calligraphy to trace that Travis really enjoyed, and a panda picture puzzle.

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Souvenir:

One let down this month was that the “souvenir” inside wasn’t a toy. Instead, it was his own pair of chopsticks. Since he recently received chopsticks from Raddish Kids, it wasn’t the best timing.

Further Activities:

Further activities with this kit had some hits and some misses. Travis was not a fan of a symmetry drawing of the Forbidden Palace, with 8 hidden differences for kids to spot. Admittedly, these were tough to find! We turned it into more of a lesson on what “symmetry” means, and I colored the differences in red for him.

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Much better though was making our own Terracotta Warriors! To prepare the clay, Travis helped mix up 3 cups flour, 1 cup salt, and 1 and 1/2 cups water.

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This mixes quickly into a very workable “clay”. Press onto the provided template and you’ve formed your own mini warrior.

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It was tough to sketch true details with a toothpick, but that hardly mattered. Travis soon had so much fun making his blobs of clay battle and jab at each other with toothpicks instead. What brave warriors!

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We did set aside two of our figures to truly air dry, which will take about 2 days.

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Meanwhile, we turned to the materials for a Chinese New Year red envelope craft. First, sew together the two pieces of provided red felt using a helpfully illustrated whip stitch. This was tricky for Travis, so I took over after a few stitches.

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He then loved assembling the provided felt stickers in the shape of a pretty fish. Add the Velcro closure, and it’s finished.

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As a surprise, I filled it with a few chocolate treats while he slept!

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Recipe:

As always we ended with a recipe, this time for Chinese dumplings (jiaozi).

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I’m not going to lie; this recipe was time-consuming, messy, and impractical with small kids in the house. Travis lost interest quickly, and I did my best to finish up and at least give him a taste of China.

Ingredients:

For the dough:

  • 3 cups flour
  • 1 and 1/4 cups water

For the filling:

  • 1 and 1/2 cups minced cabbage
  • 1 cup ground meatless crumbles (such as Lightlife)
  • 1/2 green onion, minced
  • 1/4 cup bamboo shoots, minced
  • 1/4 teaspoon minced fresh ginger
  • 1 minced garlic clove
  • 1 tablespoon soy sauce
  • 1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar
  • 3 tablespoons sesame oil
  1. To prepare the dough, spoon the flour into a bowl. Make a well in the center and add the water, stirring until combined. Turn onto a floured surface and knead, then roll into a ball and let rest for 30 minutes.
  2. Meanwhile, prepare the filling: combine the cabbage and remaining ingredients in a large bowl.
  3. Divide the dough into thirds. Working with one portion at a time, roll to about 1/8-inch thick on a floured surface. Use a round (2.5-inch) cookie cutter to cut out circles. Fill each with 1 tablespoon cabbage mixture, then fold over into a half-moon shape and pinch the edges. Repeat with the remaining dough and filling.
  4. Bring a pot of water to a boil. Add half of the dumplings. Stir and cook until the pot returns to a boil. Add 1/2 cup cold water; let the water return to a boil again and then the dumplings are done!
  5. Remove with a slotted spoon and repeat the cooking process for the second half of the dumplings.

Serve with extra soy sauce and sesame vinegar on the side for dipping.

Light-as-Air Parfait

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Light as Air Parfait (5)

Here’s a snack with some science behind it! Travis read that shaking dairy cream rapidly would result in whipped cream, thanks to the addition of air. Could we achieve the same with non-dairy creamer? We had to try two times before we were successful, so read on!

First, we tried a liquid non-dairy creamer, and opted for oat milk. Pour 1/2 cup into a jar with a lid, along with 2 teaspoons sugar and 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract. Shake for a few minutes (take turns so your arms don’t get tired!) and see if it turns from liquid to solid.

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Well, it turned out that the oat milk didn’t work. For a surer bet, we next turned to full-fat coconut cream. Chill a can of coconut milk in the fridge overnight. Scoop off the solid portion of cream; stop scooping when you hit the watery liquid underneath. Repeat with the same process as the oat milk above, adding the sugar and vanilla, and then shaking.

Well, this time the creamer was firm after just moments of shaking! So the answer is yes, it does work if you choose the right non-dairy alternative.

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To enjoy the fruits of our labor, we spooned some of the coconut whipped cream into parfait glasses and topped each serving with fresh berries. The perfect reward.

Can you shake other non-dairy creamers into whipped cream? Please share in the comments if you find a successful method!

Mansion of Mystery

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Cardboard Haunted House (10)

We’re kicking off Halloween with a big BOO around here! This project is definitely a complicated one, but so worth the effort when your kids see not just a dollhouse but a haunted dollhouse… that includes its very own witch!

To assemble the house, start collecting cardboard boxes, empty paper towel tubes, and empty toilet paper rolls, and wait until you have a good assortment. Paint all of the cardboard pieces with black acrylic paint and let dry. I recommend two coats of paint for maximum spookiness.

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The next day, I mixed and matched the boxes and tubes until I liked the arrangement, and then used hot glue to attach everything together.

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On the third day, I added adornments. Cut squares of yellow construction paper to be window panes and arrange in groups of 4 around your boxes. I also had one arched window for added spookiness.

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For tower tops, cut circles from black construction paper and cut one notch in toward the center of each, then fold into cones and use tape or glue to attach atop each paper towel tube

For doors, cut shapes from brown construction paper, either rectangular or arched. One door couldn’t actually open, and had a red bead glued on as a handle.

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Because Travis requested we actually be able to put figures inside the house, I cut one box so it was open in the back and added doors that could swing open and closed.

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You can get a lot crazier with decoration, using construction paper for a fence or shutters, or adding additional boxes cut on the diagonal for a roof. But I reined in the haunted-housiness there.

All we needed now was a witch! Paint a toilet paper tube black. Once completely dry, paint a green square on the top for the face. You’ll need several coats of green to hide the black. Cut a rectangle from black felt and fringe the bottom with scissors, then glue on for hair.

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Add facial details with marker. So as not to spook the kids, we had a happy witch.

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You can make a whole witch family if you have enough cardboard tubes. Want to get really crafty? Add brooms! Just glue fringed brown construction paper around the bottom of a short stick.

Needless to say, I think the kids will find ways to play with this house all October.

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Sibling Picture Book

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Sibling Picture Book (5)

Here’s an adorable activity that can make older siblings feel important and special, as they craft a book just for a little brother or sister.

Travis and I sat down to look through magazines and I encouraged him to find pictures that would appeal to little sister Veronika. He was most interested in a Halloween magazine, so picked out lots of frightfully spooky images, like carved pumpkins, silly witches, and snacks in the shape of ghosts and goblins.

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Veronika wanted to help go through the magazines too!

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Travis cut out the images, and we used a glue stick to attach one picture per piece of construction paper. I cut the construction paper in half so the book would easily fit into little hands. Staple your pages together, and then it’s story time!

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I absolutely loved watching Travis “read” this to Veronika. Older kids might want to craft a careful narrative, or write words below the images. Travis just loved flipping through the pages for her and making up a silly story based on what he saw, sillier each time the kids looked at it.

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Veronika clearly adored being the center of his attention.

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This was a beautiful bonding activity, and one we can repeat the next time we have a batch of magazines on hand.

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