Sunday, December 22, 2013

Salt Dough Ornaments

Making Salt Dough Ornaments is one of my favorite things to do at Christmas time. Crafts can be intimidating with your little one, but be encouraged, with the proper prep work and sense of humor you and your kiddo will have a great time!

Here is how we make our ornaments with an almost two year old...

1. Preheat oven to 250 degrees.
 2. Prepare ingredients ahead of time, if little hands will be helping to make the dough.
 You will need: 1 cup of flour, 1/2 cup of salt and 1/2 cup of warm water.You will probably not need quite all this water, but this is a good estimate.

 3. Pour salt and flour either in a large bowl or in a zip-lock bag. I thought the zip lock back would be easier, it was in some ways because it meant one less thing for me to wash, but my toddler wasn't as into mixing the ingredients as I wanted him to be. After salt and flour are mixed add a little water add a time and knead together to get to a dough consistency.


4. I put down a plastic cutting board under the dough. Your dough should not be sticky it should have a smooth consistency before you start rolling it out or it will stick to the rolling pin and the cutting board.
 Little ones will need some assistance to get the dough thin enough. I let my son roll it and I press down on the roller as he rolls it. Your dough can be as thick as you like, but probably 1/2" thick seems to cook well and be a good thickness. (Too thin and it will not cook well.)
 5. Cookie cutter fun!

6. Take a straw and poke a hole at the top of the ornaments. (to put string in the ornaments after they are painted and cooked.)
 7. Have a cookie sheet with parchment paper ready for the ornaments to go on after they have been cut out.
 8. Put dough back together into a ball and have it rolled out again.


 9. Place ornaments slightly spaced apart, just be sure they aren't touching or they may stick together.
 10. Bake for two hours.
 (About half way through take ornaments out and flip them over.)
After the ornaments have cooked they will need to get to room temperature before they can be painted. We waited to paint ours until the next day, but you could make the ornaments and cook them in the morning and paint them in the afternoon.
LATER THAT DAY or the NEXT DAY...
Materials needed: Acrylic paints (assorted colors), paper plates, paint brushes, paint shirts, water cup, wipes (ready and open in case of emergency), paper towels
 11. Place ornaments to be painted on paper plate. (I also wrap my sons highchair tray with a garbage bag to be safe. We paint with acrylic paints, so you will need to pay extra attention to your little ones during painting. Acrylic paint will NOT wash out of clothes and it is not good for children to ingest or get on their skin of you can help it.)
 I usually limit his colors at the beginning of painting, I wouldn't put all the colors on the paper plate right away unless you want a brown ornament. I hold the plate with the paint on it to keep my toddler from getting too much paint and keep him from painting the paint plate instead of the ornament.

Allow ornaments to dry completely after they have been painted.

 Painted ornaments!
 The rest of the work will be done by you as the adult. Children should not handle the clear spray paint, there are harmful fumes and this should be done in a well ventilated area, outside on a dry day. If it is raining or went outside the ornament will not dry properly. Spray one side of ornament and allow to dry and then turn over and spray the other side. Ornament should be completely sealed with the clear spray.


I also like to write with either acrylic paint, or bubble paint the year and the name of the child who made the ornament. This can be done before you spray it so the year and name are sealed as well.

Attach a ribbon or string through the hole in the ornament and they are ready to hang on the tree or give as gifts!

Hope it works out for you! Happy crafting! Remember it doesn't have to "Pinterest perfect" to be a successful craft!

Monday, October 7, 2013

The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat. (2Thessalonians 3:10)

Recently I've been researching Montessori activities to enhance the time my son and I spend together. If you're at home with your children, it's definitely worth checking out some of the ideas from dedicated blogs. Here's an example of such an activity, promoting self-confidence, responsibility and safety in the kitchen, and the tasty rewards of hard work.

Baking Sour Cream Chocolate Chip Muffins with a Toddler...

In an attempt to be more intentional in my time with my son we did some cooking and baking together today. It takes a lot of time and patience, but I would encourage you to try cooking with your child! My son is a toddler, so I measured out all the ingredients ahead of time. I talked to my son as I measured the ingredients out and talked to him about what we needed to make the muffins.

Here are all of our ingredients laid out. This is really important with a toddler because he is on a step stool while we are baking, so I can't leave his side once we get started.
There are some loose chocolate chips for a snack while baking and mixing. :) I left the stick of butter whole, and helped my son cut it to the right amount. (We used a dull knife.) Then I microwaved the butter while we started mixing the ingredients.
 Two mixing bowls and two spatulas ready for mixing!
 My son put the paper cups in the cupcake pan.










Now for mixing the dry ingredients! (This was not a perfect experience...he tried to mix the ingredients with his hands...and he also is a very strong mixer, so some ingredients made it to the counter rather than the bowl, as you can see from the picture!)
He mixed together the wet ingredients, but needed some assistance with this because he was losing focus and wanted to eat the chocolate chips.
 Dry and wet ingredients mixed together and chocolate chips added! Ready to go in the cupcake pan.

 This time I added the batter to the cupcake pan, but maybe next time I will have him do it. Now the muffins are ready to go in the oven!

Muffins done! I think someone enjoyed them (Let's be honest if it has chocolate in it, who doesn't like it!)!










  
Pizza making time!
 I made the dough for us to make some pizza tonight. You can also buy dough at Publix if you don't want to make it yourself. It is really easy to make it from scratch though. I use my KitchenAid Mixer, which makes it really easy!
 Pizza making station.
 I moved the ingredients off of the pan until we are ready to use them. I don't have a small rolling pin, but my son patted it out most of the way and I helped him thin it out more before we moved to putting the sauce on.
 Time to add the sauce! I made the mistake of just giving him the spoon with the bowl of sauce, so after he dipped the spoon in the sauce he started digging the spoon into the dough. CHANGE OF PLANS! I dumped the sauce out onto the dough and showed him how to spread it out. This worked a lot better!
 He did a great job spreading out the sauce.
 The cheese was too much for him...I showed him how to put the cheese on the pizza and he proceeded to eat whatever I put down. So I put the cheese on for him and gave him a bowl of cheese to eat. :)



 Baking and cooking with a toddler means being flexible and not getting upset when things don't work out or go as planned. It is good for there to be a mess! A mess means a fun time and a mess can be cleaned up.

 Another change in plans! The pizza ended up being a pizza turnover because I couldn't get it off the cutting board so I folded it over to get it off the board. Next time I would have him just do it directly on the sheet we are cooking on.
 Adult pizza!


Monday, September 30, 2013

A Toddler's Daily Planner

My son is 19 months old and for a while we have been talking about letters, the days of the week and we talk about our daily schedule. My husband had this great idea to make a planner of sorts for our son to be able to look at and know what is going on for the given day. As he gets older he should be able to tell us what will happen each day. We color coded each paper depending on what it is, for example all social outings like playdates, babytime at the library will be yellow, church is purple, nap and bedtime are blue and so on. Later, we may put different chores he will need to accomplish at different times of the day.

 We bought a whiteboard from Target that had this black frame to make it look a little better since we are putting it in our foyer. We bought the black container to put the cards we aren't using. It is magnetic, but I didn't have room for it on the board so I used the two sided foam tape to attach it to the frame.
 We made four different sections for the different parts of the day. The morning, afternoon, late afternoon and night. I used 3x5 notecards cut into fourths to make the magnets. The days of the week I used the tape with Sharpie marker written on top.
 I made an arrow to focus him on the current day.
Nap card

Playdate card


Close up

 We don't have a laminator and I didn't want to spend the time on each of these little cards to have them be ruined in a week....so we found these great self-seal laminating pouches! The best things about them is I can put more than one card in each pouch, seal it and then cut around the card.
 I hot glued these magnetic buttons to the back of each of the laminated cards.
 Being the crazy Type A personality I color coded everything into different categories. The problem is that we didn't want to have a giant white board and we didn't have space for one so the cards are a little small, which means the words and pictures are small. We want to also make cards with grandparents faces on them for when we go visit them. There are a lot more cards I want to make for different things we do and already my son is excited.
I used Scotch Duct Tape to create the dividers between the different categories.