Timing Dinner, shrimp in shallot and white wine sauce

Some Fall Updates

This is one of the views on the way to our train station. I like these peaceful Philly streets.

Meanwhile, Matt and I have done some alphabet activities this week.

I need to get back on my food photography but this week we kept it simple. Meatballs....

... And a staple I like to make in the fall, butternut squash and red cabbage stirfry with tofu and ginger. This is just perfect in the fall, even though the picture looks weird.

Camping on the Beach-

We somehow pulled it together for our annual camping trip on the beach, even though it was a quick one. Ger really spearheaded this one, even though he was exhausted from shifts he still managed to get all our stuff in the car in record time.

Muesli!

Used the last of homemade vanilla to whip up a batch if everything muesli. I'll have to post the recipe later in but it rocked the house, almonds, walnuts, flax, oats, poppy seeds, sesame seeds, coconut, goji berries, cranberries, apricots and more. It was truly luxurious.

Fall Craft

First day of school!

Pre School Activities Documentation

 

I wanted to document some of the things I’m learning about, as far as pre-school and kindergarten activities to do at home. This one took about 30 minutes with Matt all told, plus about 10 to set up but he’s been asking to do it again and again.

 

First you take a book, sometimes a simpler book. This Curious George “My Favorite Things” book is a bit young for Matt now but perfect for this exercise. What I’m about to detail below is a great way to extra bang from older books actually.

 

 

 

This book talks about household things in each environment. For example bowl and cup in the kitchen, umbrella and boots when you go outside, etc.

 

It also has the added benefit of having little pictures as decorations at the back of the book. Perfect, cause the activity starts with photocopying and cutting out one item for each page in the book.

 

You can see the bowl and cutlery ones below. I didn’t take pictures of the whole activity before I started, but I had about 7-8 or so (there’s only 7-8 pages in the book).

So step 1. is  to read the book together as normal.

Step 2. is to play a sort of i-spy with the cut outs. Then Matt earns all the little cut-outs. For example..

“Matt, so I’m thinking of something George uses, in the kitchen, for eating and it’s white, and your dad eats cereal from it, and you eat pasta from it and it’s round and can hold stuff. What is it?” (The bowl).

This way he’s earned all the cut-outs. You can even go back to the book for reference if needed.

 

(Matt does everything with his storm troopers).

 

While I was cutting out one thing from each page, I also printed off some quick icons about each environment. A snap to find with a quick google search.

 

Step 3: Asking questions about each item. So where does George like to use his bowl? In the Kitchen! Then you match up the item to the environment.

 

 

Step 4: Is whipping out the glue stick and documenting all the hard work!

 

 

A snap shot of the top of the final project, we had 7-8 matches. Which you then display!

 

This hits a lot of things, speech, reading comprehension, matching, fine motor. Plus it’s fun!