Activities For Kids - 2014

The kaetoo blog is all about my inspirations and activities, so a lot of the posts that you read here are about keeping small children entertained and happy. This year, I have been playing with a new baby and a three-year-old.

Below are the most popular children's posts at kaetoo for 2014. Refresh your mind on what we got up to or try out some of the activities that you missed.

1. Keeping big sister occupied after welcoming a new baby.

2. Fitting a new baby into your family.

3. Ideas for play with a four month old.

4. Recycling old art into new art.

5. Ideas for play with an eight month old.

6. Cooking coconut ice.

7. Experimenting on your child with the lying cake test.

8. More experiments with the delay of gratification test.

9. Preserving memories of small children.

10. Encouraging reading.

Read all of the children's activities for 2014.

Preschooler Cooking: Pikelets

I share quite a few recipes for cooking with children here and here, but most of the recipes are sweet foods. We do actually cook savoury food in my house as well, so today I'm sharing a very simple recipe for pikelets.

Get your little one to put 1 cup of self-raising flour in a bowl. Whisk in 3/4 a cup of milk and one egg, until smooth. Melt butter in a fry pan and then drop in tablespoon-fulls of batter. Cook until bubbles appear on the surface, then flip and cook until both sides are golden.

Too easy!

When these are done, top with cheese and Miss 3's favourite at the moment, grated carrot (she has it on everything). Or mix grated vegetables through the batter. Yum.

Read up on more activities for children.

Preschooler Cooking: Sweetened Lemon Juice

Have lemons, will make lemon juice!

If you have a lemon tree, you probably find yourself with an abundance of lemons at certain times of the year. One of the easiest things to do with lemons is make them into juice.

Start with room temperature lemons (they will give more juice). I set Misses 3 and 3.5 to juicing them.

Pour the liquid into a heat-proof jug and add about double the volume of boiling water. Then stir in sugar (how much you add depends on your taste, I like mine quite sour) until it dissolves. Dilute the juice with water.

And then the secret? Add a dash of almond essence.
Go on, try it, it's yum.

And that's it - easy sweetened lemon juice.

What easy-peasy-oh-so-tasty recipes do you enjoy? Investigate more activities for children.

Preschooler Cooking: Food Exploration

As you may have noticed, we bake a lot. It's funny that before having children, I couldn't cook a sweet dish to save myself. But when Miss arrived, I started trying to actually follow a recipe and voilà! Sweet food success.

The preschoolers love baking, mostly because they get to lick the beaters and then eat the cake. I decided that they should also start to learn the difference between all of the (mostly) white powders that go into a cake. I sense an activity!

I put out our commonly used baking ingredients on spoons and wrote next to them what each one was (so I wouldn't forget). Sugar. Salt. Caster sugar. Cocoa. Raw sugar. Self-raising flour. Flour. Corn flour. Brown sugar. Icing sugar. We looked at the differences in colour. We smelled each one. We felt and compared the textures of the grains of sugar and salt and the smoothness of the flour. We did a taste test of a pinch of each one.

(It happened to be Miss 3.5's day to visit. Hello Miss 3.5! She liked the icing sugar.)

What a great way to explore the kitchen. Sugar, was of course, the best. I was surprised that they thought that the plain cocoa tasted nice (I thought it would be bitter). Salt was a big shock to them.

Do you do taste tests in the kitchen? Read more activities for children.

Preschooler Cooking - Fine Motor Skills Colour Sort

We have been asked to make some gingerbreads for a party, in a blue and red colour scheme. Of course, I couldn't find any red pearls to decorate the blue icing, so I bought a rainbow pack instead. Miss 3's job (after washing her hands) was to pick out all of the red pearls and sort them from the other colours.

This is a deceptively hard task for a three-year-old, combining fine motor skills and colour recognition. She did a brilliant job.

And the biscuits are beautiful!

In what ways do you incorporate learning into every day activities for children? Read more activities for children here.

Preschooler Cooking - Gingerbread Biscuits

 

Six three-year-olds.

36 gingerbread cookies.

Four bowls of royal icing.

One bowl of sprinkles.

What could possibly go wrong?

Preschooler Cooking: Coconut Ice

Whilst the baby was sleeping, Miss 3 and I made coconut ice. It's quick and requires no cooking - really she could do this by herself if I measured out all the ingredients. It's also tasty and terribly unhealthy!

Pour a 400 g tin of condensed milk into a bowl.

Then sift in 350 g icing sugar

Add 350 g desiccated coconut and stir until there are no dry bits left. The mixture gets quite stiff, so your little one might need help with the stirring. Then line a tin with plastic wrap and pat half of the mixture into the tin.

Add red food colouring and stir again (Miss 3 has a fascination with food dye. She poured blue dye on the carpet once. I have learned. Don't leave small children alone with dye.), then spread the pink mixture over the white. Place it in the refrigerator for a few hours to set.

When set, remove the coconut ice from the tin, cut it up into bite-sized pieces, and eat it.

More preschooler play ideas, including art, cooking and play.

Toddlers and Preschoolers - 2013

The 'kaetoo' Canvas Photo Boards Blog has a collection of posts about my creations for my Madeit and Etsy craft stores and about goings on in the online handmade community. But the majority of this Blog talks about my inspirations and activities, including the renovations to our home, recipes and the activities that I get up to with two little girls, who are currently three years old and two-and-a-half years old.

Here are the 'kaetoo' top 10 most popular toddler and preschooler Blog posts for 2013. Read through the activities that you missed and refresh your mind on what we got up to this year.

1 - Teaching kids to deal with missing their family and explaining absence
2 - Taking over the living room and making a cubby house
3 - Practising colours and matching with a colour sort mail box
4 - Distracting children when combating fears with food
5 - Getting crafty making playdough monsters
6 - Spending time with each other doing fun activities, including painting together
7 - Feeding the local wildlife by making bird feeders
8 - Finding things to do with 102 cookie cutters
9 - Rescuing escaped pets in the neighbourhood, including a rabbit
10 - Getting ready for the Christmas season with Operation Christmas Child

Read all of the toddler art, cooking and play and the preschooler art, cooking and play activities.

Preschooler Cooking - Rocky Road

Rocky Road is a great recipe to make with kids because it requires very little heating and is super easy. This is my recipe for Rocky Road, adapted over several years.

Line a baking tray with foil. Get your little ones to put around 200 g marshmellows (we buy the little ones, so that we don't have to cut them up) in a large bowl.

Have them add around 160 g nuts (we used hazelnuts and almonds for this one, but I think that macadamia nuts are my favourite), around 100 g glace cherries and around 60 g shredded or dessicated coconut. You can be flexible on the amounts. Then melt about 700 g chocolate.

Pour the chocolate into the marshmellow mix and get the kids to stir it until well combined.

Then pour the whole lot into the baking tray, spread evenly and refrigerate for several hours.

Let the little ones lick the spoon.

And then lift out the set Rocky Road, peel away the foil and cut it into small pieces. Yum.

Read up on some more toddler art, cooking and play and preschooler art, cooking and play posts.

Preschooler Cooking - Halloween Jack-o'-lanterns

Halloween is not very big in Australia. But since today is Halloween, today Miss 3, Miss 2.5 and I made some jack-o'-lanterns. Not real carved pumpkin ones, but jelly ones in oranges.

First, grab some oranges, cut off the tops and scoop out the insides.

Then make up some jelly. We made two packets for four oranges, which gave us a small bowl left over as well.

The girls poured the jelly into the oranges, put the tops back on and then we put them in the fridge.

After a few hours, I carved some faces into the pumpkins with a sharp knife (note - I actually started carving a face before filling with jelly, with some idea that I could seal the face up with tape to stop the jelly escaping... then I decided that this was a terrible idea and it turned out that I was right).

Pretty fun! And pretty tasty too.

More fun things to do with nearly-three-year-olds? Check out the preschooler art, cooking and play, and the toddler art, cooking and play posts.