Fruity Rainbow "Ice Cream" Cake

I had quite a bit of smoothie mix (click the link for the "recipe") left over after our "welcome spring", first of March, rainbow smoothies.

It seemed a shame to waste it, so instead, after I had layered the fruit into each of our glasses (I made eight smoothies), I layered what was left into a 2.5 liter mixing bowl, to freeze for later.


The cream in each layer, along with the blending, gave it a somewhat ice creamy like texture (somewhere between sorbet and ice cream), that worked perfectly for an ice cream -type cake.

So, when we were ready for another rainbowy treat this weekend, I simply removed the bowl from the freezer, and dipped the outside of it into warm water to release the "cake" from the bowl, before turning it upside down on a plate, and allowing it enough time to thaw (about 20 minutes) until it was soft enough to cut, and serve...


...with whipped cream.


It's great to be a homeschooler.

A Simple Experiment With Light and Color for Children

While our colored finger lights still have battery power left (an amazing feat considering how often I've found them left on over the course of the week) I thought it might be fun to use them for a fast and simple Science Sunday experiment.

First, I had C (age 5) color a rainbow on white paper.


Then, we moved into a dark room, and took a look at her picture under each of our lights...


...red, blue, and green. It was interesting to see how the colors of the rainbow appeared to change, or even disappear, depending on which color of light we were shining on the picture.


We tried the experiment out on a handful of jelly beans too...



...before I turned them over to the children to snack on, while watching The Magic School Bus Makes a Rainbow (click the link to find it on YouTube). The episode discusses light and color, and does a pretty good job explaining what we observed in our experiment.

It's great to be a homeschooler.

Linked with:

Hamantashen

I'm not officially ending my spring blogger break just yet, but I wanted to pop back real quick to share a fantastic recipe for hamantashen - the three cornered cookies given and enjoyed as part of the Jewish celebration of Purim.

We made ours as part of the Kay Arthur Bible study of the book of Esther, the children are working through right now. But, I realized, from reading the small print at the bottom of the page, that the recipe included in the book is from the kids' Purim pages of Chabad.org (the site we usually visit when we want a child friendly explanation of any of the Jewish holidays).


Anyway, you can find the recipe, here, at Chabad.org, and I highly recommend it. It's a simple enough recipe for children to take on, and it makes for delicious, cake-like cookies, that hold their shape when baking. We didn't have lemons, so we substituted orange rind and juice for the lemon in the recipe, but other than that, we followed it faithfully, and were very pleased with the results.

They're supposed to be shared, but not being Jewish, and not knowing anyone else celebrating the holiday, we gobbled them down ourselves (we did cut the recipe in half, though), while reading Barbara Diamond Goldin's beautifully written Purim tale, Cakes and Miracles. Her book also contains a recipe for hamantashen (which actually calls for orange juice, instead of lemon), as well as a very good lesson on the history, traditions, and spirit of the holiday, all told within a touching story of a blind boy who finds his own way to share what he can see, even without sight, on the special day.

Next year, I think we'll make some hamantashen earlier in the day, and share some with the neighbors - just to surprise them.

It's great to be a homeschooler.

Cookie Map Correction - Eritrea

I was informed in the comments under our cookie map of Africa, that I had missed making a cookie for Eritrea.


Actually, I'm sure I missed more than one country, the country borders in Africa seem to move and reshape every time I glance away, but I had some left over dough, so I figured we could at least rectify the lack of Eritrea on our map...



...with the help of a photo editor, anyway.


In reality, we enjoyed our plate of Eritrean shaped cookies later in the week, separately from the rest of Africa, along with a couple of very good picture books, set in that country.

The Mangrove Tree, Planting Trees to Feed Families, tells the true story of Dr. Gordon Sato's "Manzanar Mangrove Initiative", planting mangrove forests in dry, desolate areas of the world, like Eritrea, to alleviate poverty, and reduce global warming. The story is told in short verses above mixed media illustrations, with longer text boxes to the side. You can read more about the project detailed in the book, here.



Trouble by Jane Kurtz, who grew up in Ethiopia while Eritreans were fighting for independence, tells a fictional story of a young boy, and the gebeta board his father gives him to keep him out of trouble. The game (one of the many forms of the game also known as mancala) doesn't exactly do its job, but it does lead the boy on an interesting, and eventful journey around the countryside, and safely home again.


Mancala is one of the oldest board games in the world. What it's called, and how it's played varies from country to country across Africa and the Middle East.

Depending on the rules of play, some of which you can view here, it can be a simple count and capture game for children, or a challenging strategy game, akin to chess, for adults. Like many folk games, the board is simple, and can be reproduced at home, with holes dug in the dirt, carved into wood, or even made out of recycled egg cartons. However, we purchased ours, for less than six dollars, after friends introduced us to game, last summer. Naturally, we've been playing it with renewed interest, and hopefully keeping out of trouble too, this week.


It's great to be a homeschooler.

Mapping Picture Books

We tied our "March in like a lion" morning, back into our study of Africa, by reading Mary Pope Osborne's Magic Tree House Lions at Lunchtime - at our own lunchtime, yesterday. It is set in Kenya, the same as Mama Panya's Pancakes, but focuses in more on the wildlife, than the people of Africa.


We also read The Sabbath Lion: A Jewish Folktale from Algeria by Howard Schwartz, which as the title suggests, is set in Algeria. I'm not usually a huge fan of legends and folktales, but this particular one is extremely well written, and has a captivating fairytale like quality, which makes it enjoyable to read, and mesmerizing to listen to. The children really enjoyed it.


After lunch, we added thumbnail printouts of the book covers to our map of Africa, onto the countries in which they are set.


A library search this week, turned up so many good picture books from all across Africa, that I decided we needed a map to keep track of which countries we were reading about. Owl & Mouse, has free printable maps in a variety of sizes, from single page to 7x7 page versions. We opted for a 4x4 page map of Africa.


It's large enough to fit thumbnail printouts of our book covers into most of the countries...


...but still small enough to fit on the wall near our table, where we will see it often.



It's an older map, so there are a few countries missing, but we'll add the necessary borders, as we go, along with the names of each country we add a book title to. Just three books into our reading, we're already loving this type of geography and literature connection, I think we'll be using more maps as backdrops for our reading, whenever possible, in the future.

It's great to be a homeschooler.

Linked with What My Child is Reading at Mouse Grows Mouse Learns.

Rainbow Fruit Smoothies

I finally got around to out 1st of March, welcome spring (keep your fingers crossed), rainbow, fruit smoothies at lunchtime, today. Yes, I do realize that's probably a run-on sentence. That actually makes it the perfect sort of sentence for expressing how I feel about the 1st of March, this year. We have so many fun and educational things going on, and crashing into each other all at once, that I hardly know which to post about first.

The smoothies aren't exactly educational, but they were simple, so I'll start with the smoothies.

Last year, I made the children rainbow slushies...


...from smashed up freezer pops.


They were a big hit, but a lot of sugar. This year, I decided to start out with fruit - fruit's healthy right?


It's also harder to come by, in great abundance, in our neck of the woods at this time of year. So, I went with a combination of frozen, canned, and fresh, to gather all the colors of the rainbow, ending up with blackberries for purple, blueberries for blue, kiwi for green, pineapple for yellow, peaches for orange, and strawberries for red. I dumped out the canned fruit, and peeled the fresh, and froze all of it overnight, in seperate containers. Then, I let it thaw part way today...

...before blending it up, and layering it into glasses. I didn't get any pictures of the blending process, but you've all seen smoothies in a blender before, right?

Anyway, I worked on one fruit at a time, rinsing the blender, and sticking the glasses into the refrigerator after each layer. I added about a cup of milk, 2 tablespoons of heavy cream, and two tablespoons of sugar for every 2-3 cups of fruit - lowering the health factor somewhat, but greatly increasing the likelihood the children would drink the smoothies.

I also added a few drops of food coloring to the blender for each layer, except for the purple, to make the colors pop a little more. It wasn't totally necessary, but it kept our colors from being completely pastel. Other than that, it was just spoon...


...serve...


...and enjoy.

It's great to be a homeschooler.

A Rainbow Shadow Room At Home

March is most definitely blowing into Montana like a lion. The snow was just beginning to fall this morning, when I noticed a robin, shivering in our tree. It's my first for the season, and I was very excited to see it.


The ground is now completely covered with snow, and the trees are full of starlings, flickers, finches, and even more robins, waiting out the storm. D (age 9), and I were so busy rushing from window to window, binoculars and bird books in hand, that I totally forgot about the rainbow breakfast smoothies I had planned for today.

Instead, while the muffins were baking, I set the children up with a fallback project, using little finger lights to turn our bathroom into a rainbow shadow room, like you might see at a children's museum.


I found the lights on Amazon, for about 18 cents a piece, and they worked perfectly for making rainbow shadows - at least the ones that would turn on. You get what you pay for, and these little lights are not only cheap, as in inexpensive, they are also cheap, as in poorly made, so you need to pick up about twice as many as you think you'll need, if you want to try this project.


I placed them in the bathroom, because that's one room in our house without a window, that can be made dark at any time of day, and because the shower curtain made a perfect screen for our shadows, but any dark room with a smooth, white, wall would work.


It's really difficult to photograph colored shadows in a dark room, but let me assure you, the effect is stunning. Not only could we produce the whole rainbow of colors with the shadows, but we had a lot of fun rearranging the lights, and turning one, or more off at a time, to see how it would change the colors of the shadows.


Working with colored light and shadow is very different than combining pigments in paints. In fact, the results of removing or adding a color are often the opposite of what you might expect - it's very counter intuitive, and quite entertaining, especially if you happen to be stuck inside on a blustery, Montana morning in March.

It's great to be a homeschooler.