Pizza (and a Craft) for Everyone!

Do you ever feel like you're loosing your mind? Yesterday, I came across a fabulous idea for making homemade Easy Bake Oven pizza, using refrigerator biscuit crust. Today, I can't find the link again to save my life. It wouldn't be so bad, except the site also mentioned making Easy Bake Oven monkey bread, and I really wanted to check that out.

The pizzas turned out terrific, though. And, true to their name, they are very easy to make.

Just pat down the biscuit dough (half a biscuit if you are using "grands") into a greased, Easy Bake cake pan...


...spread on a spoonful of sauce (we used pizza, spaghetti, or whatever)...


...sprinkle on cheese (we used shredded string cheese)...


...and add a single topping. I splurged and picked up some mini pepperonis, but almost any flat topping would do. You just don't want it to get too bulky, or it won't fit in the Easy Bake.


Place it into the preheated oven for the amount of time listed on the biscuit packaging (15 minutes in our case)...


...for a perfect little pizza.


My intention was to have the younger girls make a couple, for before lunch appetizers (also known as a mid-morning snack)...

...but all of the children decided they wanted to make one, so we switched over to a cookie sheet, and the big oven at 350 degrees Fahrenheit (another idea from the website I can no longer locate).


While we waited for our pizzas to bake, I read the children Pizza for the Queen by Nancy Castaldo. It's a fun retelling of the history of Pizza Margherita, the basil, cheese and tomato pizza made in honor of the Italian queen in 1889.

In fact, there's even a recipe for Pizza Margherita at the back of the book, as well as some fun pizza facts. Did you know, for instance, that Americans eat 350 slices of pizza per second?

We already had our pizza for the day, so instead of trying out the recipe, we followed up the book with a cardboard, and paper pizza craft from babies, toddlers, and preschoolers, oh my! via Watcha Making Wednesday at The Ramblings and Adventures of a S.A.H.M....


...that called for cardboard crusts, paper toppings, and red paint (we opted for red colored glue) for sauce. The girls helped cut, and scrunch (for the sausage) the toppings.


Then, they happily put together pizzas, that might not have the Italian color scheme of Pizza Margherita...


...but our certainly fit for a queen.


It's great to be a homeschooler.

Linked with stART(story + ART) at A Mommy's Adventures, and the History and Geography link-up at All Things Beautiful.

Penguin Place Mats (sort of)

For our stART project (a weekly story + art link-up hosted by A Mommy's Adventures), I had the girls help me with a little more penguin party prep. We have a penguin birthday coming right up, but tomorrow is also National Penguin Awareness Day. This craft could work for either one.

To begin with, I laid out three long strips of freezer paper, that will serve as our party table cloth, with the waxy side down.

Then, in I drew a rough, egg shaped, penguin outline around a dinner plate, at each spot around the table.


Since I'm not sure whether we'll be eating our lunch on the "table cloth" or just our cake, I traced a circle for the penguins' white middles around a dessert plate. That way the penguins are large enough for dinner plates, but cake plates will be able to cover all their white middles.


Finally, the girls started coloring in the black part of the penguins, using the side of peeled crayons (penguins look very strange without their beaks, but trust me those are penguins).


I didn't want to tape the paper down to the table and risk tearing it when I went to roll it up before the party, so I placed books on top, to keep the sheets of paper from moving out of place as the girls moved around the table, coloring.




While they colored, I read Margret & H.A. Rey's Whiteblack the Penguin Sees the World out loud. The story is about a penguin radio host, who sets off to see the world in hope of finding new stories to use on the air.

The children balked a little bit as his friends, Seal and Polar Bear, see Whiteback off on his journey. But, since the story begins and ends in fictional Penguinland, rather than Antarctica, and has an amusing refrain repeated throughout the story, that made them giggle, they decided to forgive the authors' mixing of North and South Pole creatures.

After the girls were done coloring, I rolled the papers up to keep them safe until the party, when I'll tape them down, and add beaks, feet, and forks (see it does look like a penguin).


It's great to be a homeschooler.

Darth Paper Strikes Back - The Return of Origami

We spent our morning folding origami Darth Vaders, with step-by-step instructions from Tom Angleberger's Darth Paper Strikes Back...


...a sequel to his earlier story of Dwight, an introverted middle schooler, who gains attention if not popularity, when he discovers he can communicate, and dispense "sage" advice through a folded paper Yoda finger puppet.


Darth Paper Strikes Back finds Dwight in trouble due largely to misunderstanding, and a few malicious forces. It's up to his friends, and some emergency folding, to straighten things out.

The back of the book has instructions for folding a paper Darth Vader (the puppet of choice for the villain of the book). There are also separate, and different instructions on the author's website. The large white Darth Vader in the picture at the top is what we got following the website instructions as closely as we could manage. The Darth "Penguin", black and white versions are what happened when we followed the instructions but switched to origami paper (our black paper had white on the back).

And the skinny fellow, with lady bugs on his "teeth" is from following the instructions in the book, using whatever origami paper we happened to have had left.


The book also contains instructions for playing out the Star Wars "Death Star" battle, on paper. It's not particularly pretty...


...but we found it surprisingly entertaining.


I noticed Amazon has the book listed for ages 8 and up. As far as reading level goes, that's probably about right, but since the story revolves around a group of middle school aged boys, I would suggest a slightly higher age recommendation. It should be clear to older readers, that Dwight speaks through his puppet, because of shyness, and that the puppet, even though it looks like Yoda, does not have any special powers or knowledge of its own, younger children might be confused.

Still, it's a cute story, and inspired my 14 year old to spend a few minutes doing origami, and playing a game that didn't have to be plugged in, which is a good enough recommendation for me.

It's great to be a homeschooler.

Pipe Cleaner Wigwam

We've been reading Charlotte and David Yue's The Wigwam and the Longhouse this week, and it's been spawning quite a bit of creative play - fire pits...


...and Indian camps in the backyard, and that sort of thing.


The Yue's, while leaning pretty heavily in the direction of the "noble savage" in their depiction of the eastern Native American tribes, do a fantastic job presenting the details of their daily life gone by in a way that makes it seem very real, and appealing. We will definitely be looking for some of the authors' other titles, dealing with the history of native cultures from across North America.

The easy to read text flows along almost poetically, accompanied by engaging black and white illustrations of the objects or scenes described, drawing the children in. My girls, in fact, were very excited to learn that wigwams and longhouses were once the property of the women who made them, or more specifically of the matriarch, or oldest woman of the families living in them.

In fact, they were very keen to build a wigwam of their own to use as a fort in the backyard. But, when I refused to give them an ax for cutting down the saplings on the green space, they opted for a smaller, pipe cleaner version, for their Polly Pockets, instead.

Following the Yue's instructions, they traced out the footprint of their wigwam in the dirt (or in their case, on the cardboard).


Then, since they could not push the spiked ends of their "saplings" into the dirt, they secured them in place with bits of air-drying clay...


...overlapping, wrapping and...


...lashing them together with string...


...until they had a wigwamish sort of frame, with an opening left in the front for a door.


They covered the frame with strips of felt - light brown to represent the reed mats women might have once used, and dark brown for mats of tree bark...


...being careful to leave an opening for smoke from the fire pit to escape through, at the top.


They briefly considered sewing the felt to the pipe cleaner frame with a few stitches at the top of each strip, but it sounded like a lot of work, and the afternoon weather outside had turned unseasonably warm, so they secured the mats with an external pipe cleaner frame, to keep everything in place...


...and headed out, I can only assume, to play Pilgrims and Indians.

It's great to be a homeschooler.

Linked with :

The Geography and History Meme at All Things Beautiful










And, the stART (story + ART) link-up hosted by A Mommy's Adventures.

Turkey Letters

I found a new favorite Thanksgiving picture book in Tanya Lee Stone's T is for Turkey A True Thanksgiving Story. It is a rhyming alphabet book, telling the story, and dispelling the myths of American Thanksgiving, through an adorably illustrated, imaginary school play.

Stone went all out finding interesting phrases, or events connecting to the holiday for each letter of the alphabet - including X. Really, that alone might have been enough to have won my esteem, but there is so much more to the story. From Pilgrim dress to Sarah Hale and Abraham Lincoln, there are enough facts and details to interest and educate the entire family.

Not to mention the fact, that it went perfectly with a craft idea I'd been wanting to try out with the girls since seeing The PolkaDotLady's applique turkey alphabet on Etsy (through pinterest, of course).

To start out with, I gave the girls each a set of turkey letters, beaks, snoods, eyes and feet cut from construction, and scrapbook paper.


First, the girls sorted their letters out, to spell "turkey" on top of two sheets of construction paper glued together to make one long piece, using the title of the book to check their spelling.


Then, they glued legs on the backs of the letters, before flipping them over and gluing them down to their papers.


Finally, they went to town gluing on eyes...


...and beaks, and snoods.


E (age 6) tried pretty hard to arrange the pieces in a way that suggested turkeys. C (age 5) on the other hand, decided to make alien turkeys. Either way, there were a lot of giggles, and stories being told, as the strange birds appeared.


For more story stretching arts and crafts for children, check out this week's stART (story + ART) link-up hosted by A Mommy's Adventures.

It's great to be a homeschooler.