NurtureStore

I’m looking for fun ways to teach shapes – got any ideas for me?

We started our mission by eating a lunch of circles, easy to make a whole meal of circles once you start looking!

Happily shared with ABCand123
and Weare ThatFamily

I am taking no credit whatsoever for this idea as it was entirely inspired by Valerie and a post she wrote on her Frugal Family Fun Blog. Ever since I saw her story stones idea I have been dying to try it out as I knew B & L would love them. So making the most of our trip to the beach the girls and I collected a few smallish, flat pebbles to make our own set of story stones when we got home.

We used pencil crayons and felt pens to decorate our stones and used the shape of the stones to suggest some characters.

The illustrated stones have now moved into our fairy garden and the girls have spent a happy afternoon playing out stories with them. Make sure to pop over to the Frugal Family Fun Blog to see how Valerie added some extra play-factor to her set.

Happily shared with…

ABC and 123

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One of my favourite memories from childhood is going blackberry picking along the lanes near where we lived. The scrapes we got from the brambles were worth it once we’d collect a bucket full of berries for mum to turn into a crumble. I remember always finding the ripest, juiciest, plumpest berry just a little too high to reach.

And one of the best things I think about being a parent is sharing your memories with your children and getting to do all the fun things again with them. This week we’ve made the most of a few sunny evenings and been blackberry picking on the lane nearby. B and L had a little wicker basket to fill – although most of theirs were eaten before we got home.

(If you haven’t got any wild blackberries near you, how about visiting a pick your own farm?)

And what to do with your blackberries?

The girls wanted to make juice so they squashed and sieved some berries and mixed it with apple juice. It tasted great (and gave you a wonderfully purple moustache when you drank it!)

I love to make a blackberry and apple crumble with a topping made from 3oz butter rubbed into 6oz flour, with a 1oz of butter and 3 tablespoons of oats sprinked in – maybe some cinnamon too.

English Mum has a recipe for blackberry jam I’m going to try.

The Pioneer Woman’s recipe for blackberry ice cream would be great to go in the homemade cornettos we made yesterday.

Do you have any blackberries growing near you? Or any recipe ideas to share?

This post is happily shared with The Gallery at Sticky Fingers which this week is all about ‘A Memory’

and with SevenClownCircus Wordful Wednesday

and with Life as a Mom’s Frugal Friday

One of our favourite summer treats is homemade ice cream cornettos. Great fun to make and ever so yummy.

To make some you will need: wafer ice cream cones, soft scoop vanilla ice cream, raspberries, icing sugar, chocolate, fudge

Keep the ice cream in the freezer until you need to use it – you don’t want to melt it and re-freeze it.

(The quantities given below made 10 small cones, with some tasting and nibbling as we went along)

Chop up 100g chocolate and 100g fudge into small chunks.

Melt 200g  chocolate in a bowl over a pan of boiling water.

Whizz 100g of raspberries and a dessert spoon of icing sugar to make a raspberry sauce.

Wrap each cornet in a strip of greaseproof paper, held in place with sticky tape.

Paint the inside of each cornet with melted chocolate using a pastry brush. Make sure you get a nice pool of chocolate in the bottom  so you get a chocolatey treat at the end of your cornet.

Wait until the the chocolate has set  inside the cornet (about 5-10 mins)

Fill with layers of ice cream, raspberry sauce, fudge and chocolate. Work quickly so the ice cream doesn’t melt. Fill over the rim of the cornet, inside the greaseproof paper for that authentic cornetto style.

Pop back in the freezer for a little while so the sauce can set, then remove the greaseproof paper and…

Enjoy!

You can’t beat home made cornettos for a great summer treat.

Happily shared with We Are That Family and

*****Have you entered our giveaway to win fantastic Annabel Karmel goodies?*******

Welcome to the third edition of #goplay Twitter Tips. This week we have ideas for getting the most from water play.

#goplay Twitter Tip #1 water play is great for kids of all ages, free, not too messy, and accessible: bucket, bath, water pistol, beach…

#goplay Twitter Tip #2 No children should ever play unsupervised with water. Safety first, then have some fun.

#goplay Twitter Tip #3 Water play is great for exploring maths: add funnels & containers of different size to play with volume & dimension.

#goplay Twitter Tip #4 Explore the science of freezing &melting, treasure hunt objects frozen in ice, make ice lollies.

#goplay Twitter Tip #5 Add in some songs at bathtime to develop language: Row, row, row your boat. 5 Little ducks. Thou Shall Have a Fishy.

#goplay Twitter Tip #6 Add some food colouring to bath water to create a magical water world. (Thanks to A Mother’s Ramblings for this idea.)

#goplay Twitter Tip #7 Bath time is a lovely time to bond esp. if you’ve been apart in the day. A sensory play time to relax before sleep.

#goplay Twitter Tip #8 A tub of water is transformed with props: boats, fishes and rods, shells, pots and pans.

#goplay Twitter Tip #9 Bubbles build brains: make kids think. What seems solid suddenly pops. How does that happen? Have a look at these giant bubbles at the Frugal Family Fun Blog.

#goplay Twitter Tip #10 No such thing as bad weather only the wrong clothes. Seize the day, put on wellies, go #playoutdoors in the puddles!

Catch our #goplay Twitter Tips each Friday at 8.30pm (GMT). Previous tips have looked at Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Playdough and Encouraging Reading and Writing.

Come and join us next week by following @nurturestore on Twitter.

Happily shared with…

For a quick tea after school, an easy meal at the weekend, or to mix-and-match a bit to suit kids with assorted fussiness, you can’t go far wrong with:

Quesadillas : Cheese Tortillas

Quick photo grabbed before the kids started eating!

You will need:

A pack of tortilla wraps (8 wraps makes enough for a family of 4, or for 6 kids)

A mound of grated cheese

A selection of flavours: we like finely chopped onion, peppers, sweetcorn, coriander

You need to:

Place a tortilla wrap in a frying pan (no oil needed).

Pop some cheese on top.

Let the kids choose which extras they want to customise their quesadilla and pop them on top of the cheese.

Add another tortilla wrap on top to make a sandwich.

Dry fry for a couple of minutes, then flip with a spatula and dry fry the other side for a couple of minutes.

Slice like a pizza & it’s ready to eat.

We like to serve them with soured cream and guacamole.

This is a nice recipe to use if you fancy trying some new ‘international’ food with your kids and links in very well with the book Come and Eat with Us (Discovery Flaps) which was created with Oxfam and shows families in different countries shopping for food, cooking and eating. It introduces the idea of there being many similarities and differences around the world and gives lots to talk about.

So imagine you are your child’s teacher. You’ve spent the last school year taking care of 25 lively, noisy, energetic infants. You’ve listened to all their news, wiped noses, fastened coats, resolved squabbles,  as well as rather a lot of teaching too. Wouldn’t you like to walk into the staff room at playtime on the last day of term to find this…

We couldn’t decide what to make for L’s pre-school teachers as a thank you present. We knew we wanted something homemade that L could help make. These cakes fit the bill perfectly. We used our never fail cake recipe with a butter icing topping. L helped with the weighing, sieving, mixing, egg cracking, cake case counting and spoon licking. The little flags add a cute flourish on top. We wrote ‘with love from’ on one end of a strip of paper and L drew a picture on the other, but you could go with whatever design you like and even print images from a photo. Each strip was folded round a cocktail stick and held in place with a little glue. Super easy, super cute.

Fruit of the Week Challenge

featuring Handa’s Surprise (Walker paperbacks)by Eileen Browne

We all want our children to eat well but it can be hard work.  Sometimes children are simply reluctant to try something new, which can be so frustrating when you’ve planned, shopped for and prepared a new treat, only for them to take one look (let alone one bite) and turn their noses up at it. As fruit is super healthy and so handy for picnics and lunchbags it would be wonderful if children ate it happily: this is where the Fruit of the Week challenge comes in!

First of all you need to get inspired. Handa’s Surprise (Walker paperbacks)by Eileen Browne is about a girl called Handa who lives in Kenya. She packs a basket full of delicious fruits, including pineapple, mango and passion fruit, to take as a nice surprise for her friend Akeyo. On the way to Akeyo’s village several sneaky animals including a monkey and an elephant come and steal the fruit from on top of Handa’s head. When she finally arrives to see Akeyo, she discovers the basket isn’t quite the same as when she left and she’s the one who gets the surprise. It’s a good book to bring a multi-cultural aspect to your bookshelf and interesting for the children to compare the animals they see in their neighbourhood with the ones Handa meets. It also, of course, brings you on to talking about the different fruits mentioned.

So now for the eating! How about trying some of the fruits in the book? You could do this in one taste testing session, or try our ‘Fruit of the Week’ challenge.

You’ll need to make a chart with several column so you can record:

• what the fruit is called

• what it looks like outside and inside (my kids loved guessing what colour would be revealed when we sliced it open)

• words to describe how it looks and how it smells

• and a column for each child to draw a sad or happy face to show whether they liked it or not

Even children too young to do any writing can join in, adding the right colours for each fruit and drawing their own smiles or frowns. And you don’t have to be limited by the fruits mentioned in the book. We mixed in different varieties of melons (to try and catch them out on their colour predictions!) and some very unusal ones like dragon fruits too.

The children I’ve done this with really enjoyed it and our ‘Fruit of the Week’ became quite famous, with friends and family hearing all about it. The kids were eager to try the new fruits each week, and as it was more playful and away from a mealtime they were all keen to taste every new fruit .

So, why not give it a go!

I’m off to the Cybermummy conference in London this weekend thanks to great sponsorship from Imperial Leather’s SkinKind. If you’re going too, please come and say hello and ask me for some of the SkinKind goodies.

For those of you at home, the forecast for this weekend is glorious.

Make the most of the sunshine by getting outside to play! Our Outdoor Games archive has lots of ideas to give you some inspiration. You could make a fairy garden,

enjoy some water play

or how about some snail racing?

Whatever you’re up this weekend, have a great time with your kids.

Have you ever used air drying clay? My girls love it – it’s maleable, not too sticky, and you can poke embellishments into the clay to create wonderful effects. And as the name suggests, when you’ve made your model you can simply leave it to dry instead of having to bake it. You can paint the dried model, or leave the clay in its natural state. As it’s long-lasting its a good material to use for gifts and decorations too.

So, what did we make today? Well, I don’t you know if you’ve seen The Gallery over at Sticky Fingers, where Tara posts a prompt each week to inspire readers to take photographs of a particular topic, but this week the theme is ‘Creatures‘. So that’s what we made. Do you like them?

Why don’t you try some air drying clay with your children and see what they can make?

And if you’d like to see how everyone else interpreted the theme ‘Creatures’ why not pop over to Sticky Fingers and see?