Mrs. Malo

Hockey FUN Day

Posted on March 27, 2011 by Mrs. Malo

Today was the big wrap up day for hockey – the annual Beginner Fun Day. For the third year the Simcoe Learn to Play teams participated in the fun day. Learn to Play is a unique program started by my father, who works a lot with Development in the OMHA. The program is for 3 and 4 year olds who have never played hockey before, and most of them can’t skate when we start in September. I have been helping my dad with the Beginner program for years (the level above LTP) and also helped him when he started up LTP 3 years ago. The past two years Kaitlyn has participated in the LTP program and in the fall she will be graduating to Beginner. We may put Eileen in LTP this fall but not sure right now. All of these programs are part of the Canadian Hockey Initiation Program.

We love hockey in our house but we were very happy to see today come for two reasons: it is so much fun for the kids, and it means hockey season is over for the year. Today was especially cool for us as it merged two of our favourite things: hockey and books. Kaitlyn’s team played two 24 minutes games and they had a one hour break in the middle where they could eat lunch (hotdogs provided) and hang out in the fun room. For the first time this year we had the people from the Brady Brady book series at the Fun day. This is a great series of kids books for any child who loves hockey, and we had an arena full of them. The illustrator Chuck Temple was there today and he was signing books for kids and drawing illustrations for them. Of course each of my own three kids got to pick a book and we got them signed (Kaitlyn’s picked Michael’s for him). There was a special treat for the two LTP teams. The really Brady Brady (well it was a mascot costume) came on the ice with them. He played goalie during part of their game and then he gave them their trophies at the end. With the exception of one poor little guy who was terrified of Brady Brady, most of the kids were thrilled! A great day and a great way to wrap up the season!

Cooking with the Kiddies

Saturday in the Kitchen

Posted on March 27, 2011 by Mrs. Malo

I woke up this morning made myself a cup of tea and enjoyed a nice banana muffin, which I made with the girls last night. In an attempt to make my life easier I now do weekly meal plans for my family. On Sundays I sit down and make a plan for dinner for each night of the week. I try to have some sort of format and Saturday night are fun dinner nights. This means we make dinner together. It may not always be our healthiest meal of the day, and is usually is our messiest, but it is also the most fun.

Last night was pizza night – a very easy dinner to make with the kids. We make dough in the breadmaker but you can usually find dough in any grocery store. Yesterday was a bit of an adventure as our breadmaker stopped working but Gramma came to the rescue and made a batch for us in her breadmaker. Another easy tip is to get pizza sauce in the easy squeeze bottle – it is very kid friendly. I just keep filling it up with the cheaper canned variety. The best thing about pizza is that everyone can put on their favourite toppings.

Now back to those banana muffins. We had a bunch of bananas that were getting a bit old so we did what any person would do – we made muffins. I pulled out Kaitlyn’s Kids Do Snacks cookbook, and found a recipe for “Fanana of Banana Muffins”. This is a great cookbook for kids that gives them clearly laid out steps. My kids are still a bit young to follow the steps themselves so this is a great activity we do together.

The most important thing when baking and cooking with kids is to go with the flow. It sometimes is difficult to do but don’t worry about the messes. At one point Eileen poured half a tsp of baking powder all over herself – I just simply brushed her off and game her another tsp.

I am always looking for new hands on dinner ideas with the kids – if anyone has any suggestions please add them in the comments.

New For You Friday

nfuf: Homemade Fingerpaint

Posted on March 25, 2011 by Mrs. Malo

So taking some inspiration from TeachMama we set out to try something new today. This week I received an email from Today’s Parent with a link to simple craft supplies you can make with things in your pantry. I make homemade playdough all the time and might try slime one day but today’s experiment was the fingerpaint.

We paint a lot in our house but usually it is with brushes, sponges, potatoes or other objects. Not often do we use our hands. We have fingerpainted in the past but usually we use the store bought varieties.

Here are the directions directly from the website:

Five Fingers (and a HAND) Paint

For quick fingerpaint, dissolve ¼ cup (60 mL) cornstarch in 2 cups (500 mL) cold water. Cook and stir over medium heat (use a wire whisk to keep it from getting lumpy) until it becomes clear and thick. Add a little food colouring or liquid tempera paint. Cool and apply to shiny paper, a high-chair tray or a tabletop.

This seemed simple enough and I even had all the ingredients in the pantry. The girls were playing in the living room and the baby had just been fed so it was time to experiment. I mixed the cornstarch and water and got it heating on the stove – then the baby started to cry. Lesson #1 – When making fingerpaint don’t leave it on the stove too long, it gets lumpy. I managed to save the creation with a bit of heavy duty whisking. Lesson #2 – You need a fair amount of food colouring to get any colour that is not transparent. Once it was made I let it cool on the counter before letting the girls use it.

It seemed pretty slimy and rather translucent when you used it. Parts clumped up while others were runny. Kaitlyn’s first comment was “Mom this stuff doesn’t work very well”. It doesn’t compare at all to the store bought fingerpaint when trying to make a masterpiece. I do however like the fact that it is totally non-toxic. Eileen is still at the stage where she likes to taste everything so I didn’t worry if she tried our fingerpaint.

The one use that worked O.K. was for practicing letters. Kaitlyn used her finger and our homemade fingerpaint to practice all of her upper case letters. They weren’t the easiest to read but it gave her the practice of writing them.

I would love to know if anyone has had any success creating homemade fingerpaint. There are many uses I would love to explore with the girls, especially Eileen as she works to improve her fine motor skills, and the non-toxic aspect is very important.

Craft Thursdays

Tin Can Herb Gardens

Posted on March 25, 2011 by Mrs. Malo

On Monday night Kaitlyn’s homework was to walk around her neighbourhood and look for signs of spring. Tuesday we took a walk around the house (outside) and we saw shoots for my iris’, daylilies, and tulips and we also saw buds on our flowering cherry and maple trees. Then we had a snow storm on Wednesday, and a snow day, and all our signs of spring were under a foot of snow. We decided that we needed to harness some signs of spring so this Thursday’s craft was Tin Can Herb Gardens. I found the idea when searching for kids gardening ideas, on Kaboose. Due to paint drying time this week’s craft took us both Thursday and Friday to complete.

First thing Thursday morning we took a drive to the local Walmart to look for a few supplies we didn’t have. The most difficult thing to find was the liquid Gesso but now that we have it, and have used it, I am hooked. Gesso allows kids to paint objects they normally would not be able to paint – and the paint stays on.

As we were using aluminum cans, paint normally won’t adhere to the can but after one coat of Gesso the girls were able to paint with normal acrylic craft paints and it only took two coats of paint to get a nice solid finish. The Gresso was painted on like you would with any paint.

We used simple acrylic paint to paint our cans. Be careful when using acrylic paints as they don’t wash out as easy as tempra paints. We have a drop cloth, purchased from a decorating store, that we always put down when we are painting, and we always wear paint shirts. I would rather the girls just have fun painting and not have to worry about any messes, as they are often part of the fun. After two coats of a solid colour I gave them a pallet with a variety of other colours to decorate. Kaitlyn took her time and created a pattern of hearts, circles, and lines on her can. Eileen loved mixing colours and seeing what she could create. The key is to let it be their designs. After the final drying I brought out some special flower sticker I had picked up for the finishing touches. After they were in bed I took the cans to the garage and sprayed them with an acrylic sealer and let them dry overnight. This is important to prevent any running of the paint when they water their plants.

This morning we were planting. We picked up a couple of Pesto Basil plants at our local nursery, Eisings. It isn’t the easiest time of year to find plants so we couldn’t be too picky. Ideally it would have been nice for them each to have a different plant but these were the only ones that would fit in our cans. We used 28 oz. tomato cans. It gave them a larger work space an there is more room for the roots of their plants to grow. After transfering the herbs to their beautiful cans the girls each made a small stake out of a popsicle stick to label their basil. Voila!

Literacy Tuesdays

Posted on March 23, 2011 by Mrs. Malo

For a few weeks now we have been doing craft Thursdays. This week we are starting Literacy Tuesdays. Now don’t worry we really do literacy activities every day in our house. There are always books around my house, the girls have a number of ABC puzzles that Eileen is always in to, the number of workbooks and activity book we have is a bit scary, and they won’t go to sleep without their two stories each (one from Mommy and one from Daddy). There is also Kaitlyn’s work from school, so we are always doing literacy activities. What we will be doing on Tuesdays are a variety of new and different activities just to reinforce literacy concepts – and most important they will always be fun.

Today we did Fruit Loop names. We never have sugary cereal in our house so I was happy when Fruit Loops were on sale for 1/2 price at Sobeys yesterday. I may just have to give in and let them have a few for snack but the majority will be for crafts. I wrote each of the girls names on a piece of construction paper and then they glued Fruit Loops over the writing. This time I wrote both of their names for them but I think we may try this again and have Kaitlyn create the letters of her name without following my writing.

Growing Pains, Milestones

The Toothfairy’s First Visit

Posted on March 20, 2011March 20, 2011 by Mrs. Malo

The Toothfairy will be visiting our house for the first time tonight! Kaitlyn’s tooth started to get loose a few weeks ago and it just fell out. It may have helped that her Uncle Ian (who is also her dentist) visited earlier today and told her she should try and wiggle it out. Right now the biggest problem is that she is too excited to sleep!

A number of years ago I picked up a book for just this occasion: Throw Your Tooth From the Roof by Selby B. Beeler. As Kaitlyn was already in bed when it fell out tonight we will start to read it together tomorrow but I thought I would take a look at it myself first. The two most common customs are leaving it for some sort of creature to come and take it – most commonly a fairy or a mouse, or the other custom in many places is to throw it somewhere: on the roof, outside, at the sun, or even in the chicken coop. There were a couple more unique traditions. In Chile a young girl gives her tooth to her mother and she makes it into a charm that she can wear. The Aboriginal Australians put the tooth into the shoot of a pandanus plant and as the plant grow the tooth with grow too. My favourite, however is that of the Yellowknife Dene (a native Canadian tribe) where mother or grandmother puts the tooth in a tree and then the family dances around it ensuring that that the new tooth will grow in as straight as a tree. This is a very cool book to teach children about a variety of traditions.

What does your family do when a child looses a tooth? If you give money what is the going rate?

Day Trips

Maple Syrup Time

Posted on March 18, 2011 by Mrs. Malo

I am a big proponent of working with your child’s teacher to maximize learning. Education is a partnership. One of my big pet peeves are parents who believe that education is soley the responsibility of the teacher, and only the teacher. A parent is a child’s biggest role model and as parents we need to play a large active role in their education. I am very fortunate that Kaitlyn has an excellent Kindergarten teacher. The communication between home and school is excellent. We get a detailed calendar every month, all expectations are clearly outlined and we always know what she is studying in school. At home we strive to reinforce the concepts and skills she is learning at school and sometimes we like to extend her learning in ways that can’t happen in the classroom. Last fall she was studying dinosaurs at school so over the Christmas break we packed up the van one day and took the kids to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.

This February & March Kaitlyn’s class has been learning about Maple Syrup. They had a field trip to a local sugar bush which was awesome but yesterday we also decided to take the kids to the Bronte Creek Maple Syrup Festival. One of Kaitlyn’s friends from her class, and her mom, came with us. This is our second year attending the festival and it is a great way to spend a March Break Day. We had a beautiful spring day for our trip, which made things even better as everything is outside. When we arrived at Bronte Creek we started with the guided tour of Maple Lane. Our guide was in period costume (Victorian) and took us to the different stations where we learned about the making of maple syrup throughout history. On their class trip the girls learned how maple syrup is made today and it was great for them to see how it use to be made. After our tour we visited a number of the historical buildings where they watched how fresh maple sugar is made (and tasted it), saw a number of farm animals, tried maple taffy and visited the farmhouse. We then took a wagon ride to the pancake house where we enjoyed pancakes with maple syrup. Before heading home we stopped at the Children’s Farm & Playbarn to burn off some steam for the ride home. This is a great day trip for anyone living within driving distance from Oakville, Ontario. The key is looking for exciting things for your kids in your community and in neighbouring communities. There is so much out there to give them concrete experiences and make their learning real and meaningful.

Books, Cooking with the Kiddies, Craft Thursdays

Happy Shamrock Day!

Posted on March 18, 2011March 18, 2011 by Mrs. Malo

On St. Patrick’s Day morning my 5 year old Kaitlyn ran into my bedroom yelling “Happy Shamrock Day!” I was thrilled, and not for the reasons you may think. We had been learning about St. Patrick’s Day for a few days but she could never remember the word SHAMROCK. When I asked her the symbol for St. Patrick’s Day she would draw one but could not remember what they were called. I found pride in the fact that our activities throughout the previous two days finally reinforced the word “Shamrock”.

We started our exploration of St. Patty’s Day by picking up some books from our local library. We live in a county that has many different library branches so before driving down to our local branch of the county I went online to request a few books that were at different branches. We ended up picking up three books which I blogged about on my library blog. Two of the books were fiction stories that probably would have been better for older children but the third, Shamrock Days by Elizabeth McKinnon was filled with great ideas perfect for my aged children.

Our first activity was our craft for the week. Normally we do crafts on Thursdays but we were going on a day trip this Tbursday so we did our craft on Tuesday. First we explored the introduction in Shamrock Days and learned about the Shamrock. With Kaitlyn (the oldest of my three) we talked about symbols for other holidays so she could appreciate that the shamrock is the symbol for St. Patrick’s Day. I was reading my RSS feeds last week and came across a great craft idea on Teach Mama – Shamrock Sun Catchers. This was a quick and easy craft that my girls loved! Eileen is always ripping paper and was thrilled that I was encouraging her to rip up the tissue paper. They turned out great and have adorned our patio door since Tuesday.

It was March Break this past week but Eileen still went to daycare on Wednesday. She is a creature of routine and I din’t want to disrupt her too much. We thought it would be fun to make some green treats for her to take and share with her friends. I am guilty of trying to send really cool snacks with the kids on birthdays and holidays but I find that usually that they prefer the simple snacks and ones that they can take pride in helping make. Gramma sent over her shamrock cookie cutters so we decided to make green shamrock sugar cookies. You can use any sugar cookie recipe, we used one in my copy of Pillsbury’s The Complete Book of Baking. The trick is to add green food colouring to one of the liquid ingredients before mixing. We added it to the milk. By adding the food colouring to a liquid ingredient the colour is much more uniform than if you added it to a solid ingredient. Sugar cookies are easy for kids to help with, I have a miniature rolling pin the girls use and they are in charge of the cookie cutters. The one thing I did learn is that I need to invest in another kid sized rolling pin – it is one item they both really like to use.

When learning one of the rhymes in Shamrock Days it suggested picking up a shamrock plant for the kids to grow an observe. I wasn’t too sure how easy it would be to find one in a flower shop but Gramma found one for us and it only cost a few dollars. It has become our perfect first plant for the spring.

Finally we had to plan our St. Patty’s Day feast. We try to eat a healthy well balanced diet in our family but the trick for the day was to make it green. Our main dish was Pesto-Stuffed Chicken Rolls from Rose Reisman’s The Art of Living Well. This was a big hit, even Kaitlyn loved it (after being coaxed to try it) and she normally only eats mono-coloured food. Our side dishes were Green Potato Pies (from Shamrock Days) and green beans. We added one special treat with dinner and made Shamrock Shakes (also from Shamrock Days).

A great couple of days, some fun activities with the girls, and I think they understand a bit more about St. Patrick’s Day.