Sweet Tooth - Eat Your Veggies! Recipe

 My kids like junk food.  A lot.  And dislike vegetables.  A lot.  I keep serving 'em and they keep ignoring 'em.  If you don't count ketchup (and I'm sure you don't), the number of veggie servings they consume in a day is shamefully low.  So...

Today we read the book Sweet Tooth by Margie Palatini.  This book just couldn't be any cuter.  It's about a boy whose sweet tooth demands candy and sugar all. the. time. and he decides to defeat this sweet tooth with some vegetables!  (This reminds me of Samantha Loses Her Sweet Tooth.  That's a cute one too, but if you're only reading one Palatini's is better.)

Of course, it worked like a charm and all my kids eat now is carrots.  Well, no, not really.  But I decided to try a new veggie recipe for dinner, this one from Family Fun.  I have to be honest and admit that the kids didn't help me make it.  There was too much grating of my nerves vegetables involved.  (I don't have a food processor or this would've been less labor intensive.) Here's the recipe:

Veggie Pancakes (I called them space ships because if they heard "pancakes" I knew the syrup was going to come out-more sugar!- and "veggie", well...)

• 2 cups finely grated zucchini with the water squeezed out (doesn't it sound healthy already?)
• 1 cup grated carrots

• 1 cup corn kernels, drained

Toss together.  Add:

• 1 large egg
• 2 tablespoons low-fat plain yogurt
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/8 teaspoon pepper

Stir well.  In a separate bowl, combine:

• 1/2 cup flour
• 1/2 cup fine yellow cornmeal (I used regular because that's all I could find.)
• 2 teaspoons baking powder

Stir into vegetable mixture along with:

• 1/2 cup grated cheddar

Heat 1 to 3 tablespoons vegetable oil over medium heat.  Spoon 3 tablespoons of batter at a time into the pan, using a fork to flatten.  Cook about 3 minutes each side or until golden brown.  Drain on paper towels and serve hot or room temp (great for lunch boxes) with dipping sauce made of:

• 1 tablespoon pesto
• 1/3 cup sour cream

(Can be kept refrigerated for up to 3 days.)

Here are the reviews:
My one year old would take a bite, yell "Like it!", and then spit it out.
My three year old wouldn't even try it.  He must have smelled a rat vegetable. (Foiled again!)
My husband said they were "okay".
I liked it but that's a lot for just one person to eat on their own, even for me. Don't let that deter you from trying it though. They don't like 90% of what I make.  Or skip the recipe and read the book. It's a good one, I promise.

How do you get your kids to eat their veggies?

 

The Very Busy Spider: Invisible Pictures

Drew has been asking about spider webs lately because there are cobwebs all over my house he is very curious about nature. Today we read The Very Busy Spider.  (Diary of a Spider is also a great one and of course Charlotte's Web.)

We made "invisible" pictures by drawing spider webs with glue on white paper.

Once they were dry, we put another sheet of thin paper on top and made a crayon rubbing to reveal the spider webs.

If you're hungry, check out these spider web snacks. 

 

Displaying Books

We have books everywhere in this house.  We have two bookshelves just for kids' books; one in the living room and one in the upstairs hallway.  We have a basket of them in the family room.  We have a bin of them in the toy room.  They are even lined up on the guardrail of my son's bed.  So when I saw this in the Pottery Barn Kids catalog, I knew I wanted to do something like it in my daughter's room.  But I also knew we weren't going to be buying that shelf.

Instead, I found a shelf for $5 at Goodwill.  It was black so I just primed and painted it green.  The letters came from JoAnn's and I painted those also.  (I think they came to $12 total without a coupon.) I put some old children's book illustrations in dollar store frames, and chose some books I especially liked (the little one was mine when I was a kid).  Here's how it turned out:

Not exactly Pottery Barn, but not too bad for less than 20 bucks.

There are so many cute ways to display children's books.  Here's the shelves my sister made out of rain gutters:

Aren't they cute????  You can find instructions here to make your own.

         

Alphabet Under Construction: Building Activity

Because my son loves all things construction, the book Alphabet Under Construction is a favorite at our house.  He picks out his favorite letters when we read it (he especially likes O).  The Construction Alphabet Book is another good one.

We paired these books with constructing our own letter A.  I cut some styrofoam into strips using a serrated knife.  This is messy - I would recommend doing it outside.  Then we got out the play hammers and some golf tees.

I had lots of styrofoam so they were busy for a while.

 

The Foot Book: Movement Activity

Sometimes the simplest activities are best.  The one we did today to go along with The Foot Book by Dr. Suess was a big hit with both my one year old and three year old.

We started by tracing our feet onto construction paper.

 
They wanted Mom to have a turn too.  Pay no attention to the huge, unpedicured feet.  Look at those sweet little heads instead.

 Then we cut out our footprints.

Next, we stuck them on the floor with a little piece of tape in a random pattern.  There were only about 40 fights about where to put them.

 Then the really fun part.  We jumped across the room only touching the footprints and not the floor.

Lainey just ran back and forth totally disregarding the footprints, but she had a big smile on her face while she was doing it.

Linked to:  http://counting-on-me.blogspot.com/2011/05/toddler-activity-link-party.html

Finding the Right Book

As a reading teacher, I saw many students struggle with picking a book that was just right; not too hard and not too easy.  Here are a few questions you can ask to help your child figure out if a book is a good fit.

• Do the cover & back look interesting?
• Can you read most of the words on the first page?
• Have you read a book like this before?  (If they haven't that doesn't mean they shouldn't try it.  They should just be aware if they're choosing a book that's 300 pages longer than they usually read.)
• What do you already know about the subject or setting of the book?

It's also not a bad idea to check in after the first few pages or chapters.  You can ask:

• Can you tell what you've read in your own words?
• Is it interesting?

When they've finished the book and are ready to choose another, you might want to ask:

• Did you like it?
• Can you tell what it was about in your own words?
• Would you read another book like this one?

As a teacher, I encouraged my reluctant readers to try a series.  If they liked one book, they were sure to like the others and they already had background knowledge about characters and storyline.  Good Reads also has a great list of book suggestions.



Hungry Harry: Snack

Hungry Harry is about a little frog who goes off in search of his own food for the first time.  Dragonflies are too quick, caterpillars are too tickly, snails are too clever, and worms are too squiggly and squirmy.  Eventually, Harry finds a picnic to share with everyone.

The perfect snack to go with Hungry Harry is fruity frogs from Disney's Family Fun.  Quarter an apple and cut the mouth.  Halve three grapes for the arms and legs.  The eyes are made of cream cheese and chocolate chips.  Here's what ours looked like:

I didn't have any chocolate chips so those are Curious George fruit snacks cut into little pieces.  Drew only ate the eyeballs and Elaina only ate the legs and feet but they both still liked the frogs.  Maybe next time they'll actually take a bite of apple!

We're Going on a Bear Hunt: Sound Activity

A great way to make a read aloud more fun is to let kids make the sound effects.  A perfect book for this is We're Going on a Bear Hunt about a family that goes looking for a bear.  They travel through a field of grass, a river, mud, a snowstorm, a forest, and finally end up in a cave where they actually find a bear!  Then they run out of the cave and do everything in reverse order.

We used whatever we could find around the house:

Here's what we did (though of course kids can come up with their own):

• For the grass "swishy swashy": they ran the broom along the floor.
• For the river "splash splosh": they shook their water bottles.
• For the mud "squelch squerch": they shook a container with a little jello in it.
• For the forest "stumble trip": they banged the pot with their spoons.
• For the snowstorm "hoooo woooo!": they blew into the top of an empty bottle.
• For the cave "tiptoe tiptoe": they banged the pot softly with their spoons.

The sound effects team in action:

This is a nice book to use with this activity because kids get to do the sound effects twice - on the way to the bear and while they're running away.