Activities for kids | picklebums.com

August 31, 2010 | Filed in: Activities for kids,Fun for Everyone

If Quatro sleeps in the morning I attempt to take advantage of the ‘un-baby’ time to get on top of housey kind of things. If I am organised I do the laundry and cook dinner (or at least make a start) and maybe sneak in a little baking.

This all sounds blissfully domestic, but it’s not exactly all monogrammed wooden spoons and frilly aprons. You see I have this other child… A sadly neglected three year old middle boy child, and he desperately wants someone to play with him. If I leave to his own devices while I get on with things he’s been known to seek out a play mate by waking the sleeping baby, or worse, destroying something in the girl’s room. So rather than picking up the pieces afterwards I find it much easier to be proactive and find ways that he can ‘play’ with me. Lucky for me he still thinks cooking and cleaning are fun!

So today we got dinner going and put on a load of laundry but there isn’t many ways he can help with those things, so we made Pita Chips.

Pita Chips have to be one of the easiest, yummiest, ‘use up your left overs’, treat in the world, and there is lots of things little hands can do to help.

I used the pizza roller to cut up the pita bread into ‘chip-ish’ shapes (the girls are able to do this safely without help, but Muski can’t quite manage to keep his fingers out of the way of the sharp bits yet) and Muski put them on the trays. It’s kind of like fitting together a pita puzzle, trying to get the chips on the tray with as little space between them as possible but no over laps!

Then I gave them a quick spray with olive oil and we sprinkled them with salt and some mixed herbs and baked them in a low oven (about 100C) until they were nice and crispy (takes about 10 minutes, maybe less, maybe more, keep your eye on them).

And that’s it…. now you have a bowl full of yummy crunchy herby chips, and a happy boy!

For more easy things to cook with kids you can check out my guest post at Childhood101. We’re also joining in with We Play this week – so head on over and see what everyone else has been playing!

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While I helped with reading activities in the Twindaoes’ class this morning, Muski spent the time taking out every little thing from the maths manipulative shelf. After he and I had packed away all the counters and dice and quesenaire blocks we went home and were inspired to get out some of our own little bits and pieces to play with.

Not quite as impressive as the prep class’s collection of goodies, but we still managed to find a good collection of little treasures to keep us busy for a while. We sorted and then arranged the items in various patterns. We counted them together and then I tried making some simple repeating patterns to see if Muski would cotton on to the concept, which he did.

When the big girls came home they got into the fun too, making more patterns and using the testing each others addition and subtraction skills.

Who’d have thought a tray of tiny treasures could be so much fun?!? I’m going to have to collect some more bits and pieces I think.

These are some of the things we had in our collection –
Large plastic threading beads, buttons and cotton reels
Shells
Gum nuts (we need to collect some little ones too)
Small pony beads and wooden beads.
Glass buttons
Large sequins

We’d like to add some more bits and pieces too, perhaps some marbles and buttons in various shapes sizes and colours. Can anyone think of anything else that would be good to add??

It’s We Play day over at childhood101 today – head on over for some ‘freash, fun, family play ideas’.

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