Creative Family Fun

Your one-stop shop for kids activities and family fun

Terri Thompson

Gift Guide for the Young Scientist

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I’m a big fan of gift guides. I love having a themed selection of ideas to choose from when it’s time to do my holiday shopping and I hope you do too. I plan on sharing a few with you over the next couple of weeks in the hopes that it will give you some new and fun ideas for holiday gift giving.

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My Lizzie is a scientist. She loves everything about science… questioning, exploring, and experimenting. I know she would love all of these items and I hope your young scientist does too.

For the older kids, this crystal growing kit from Imagine Childhood would be a fascinating look at geology.

Educational Insights Geosafari Talking Microscope will help your child take a close look at a micro-world in addition to learning facts along the way.

I can think of few things more fascinating that watching the metamorphosis of a butterfly. You can give your kids that gift with the Insect Lore Live Butterfly Garden.

My girls love their magnifying glasses. The Melissa & Doug Sunny Patch Blossom Bright Magnifying Glass is a fun option. (Melissa and Doug has has a Mombo Snake Magnifying Glass for those who want something a little less girly.)

Not only is this nature study kit from Imagine Childhood beautiful, but it’s also a practical kit for finding and keeping all sorts of nature treasures.

Another fun find from Imagine Childhood are these fabulous nature cards. They’re easy to bring along on nature expeditions and would make a perfect stocking stuffer for your young scientists.

A set of binoculars is a must-have for any young scientist. The Melissa & Doug Sunny Patch Happy Giddy Binoculars are fun, affordable, and useful.

You don’t have to travel very far to make some cool scientific discoveries. My First Backyard Explorer Kit will guide your young scientist to some fun science experiments right in your own backyard.

Get Crafty: Gratitude Leaves

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This year, a lot of our Thanksgiving activities have centered around gratitude.

We’ve been practicing gratitude at the table as well as celebrating all the things, big or small, that we are thankful for in our everyday life.

As a way to illustrate all that we are thankful for, we made these simple gratitude trees.

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Supplies Needed:

Orange, yellow & brown construction paper
Leaf template
Empty paper towel tube
Brown paint
Pipe cleaners
Tape

Using your leaf templates, cut several different leaves from the construction paper. We made nine leaves.

While you’re cutting out your leaves, you’ll also want to prep your cardboard tube by painting it brown.

Once your leaves are ready, it’s time to start talking gratitude. What are you grateful  for?

We included the big things like family, God, and sisters. We also included such things as sunshine, trees, and flowers.

There is no wrong answer! Write one thing you’re grateful for on each leaf.

Once the paint is dry, punch one hole for each leaf in your cardboard tube. I used a tiny screwdriver to punch my holes. I also put all the holes in the top third of the tube to mimic a tree.

Using your pipe cleaners, which have been cut in half, lace them through the holes from one side to the other.

You should have one end of each pipe cleaner half on each side of the tube. By lacing them through the holes, you won’t need glue to hold them in place.

The final step is to tape a leaf onto each pipe cleaner.

Now you have a fun and easy gratitude tree to use as a reminder for all the things you are thankful for.

What are some of the different ways you’ve taught your kids about gratitude?

10 Ways to Play This Weekend: Week 16

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We’ve been battling a stomach virus at our house this week, so I’m more than ready to do a bit of playing this weekend. Here are 10 fun ideas of ways to play this weekend.
  1. Play a timed-building Lego game with Frugal Fun for Boys
  2. Make a cute turkey craft with Blog Me Mom
  3. Play Turkey in the Bag with Little Family Fun
  4. Make colored salt jars with At Home with Ali
  5. Play in a miniature construction site with Dirt and Boogers
  6. Make and send glow-in-the-dark cards with Kids Activities Blog
  7. Take dinner to go to someone special with Connecting Family and Seoul
  8. Make thankful trees and talk about what you are thankful for
  9. Make simple kazoos for some music fun with The Chocolate Muffin Tree
  10. Play in autumn goo with Science Sparks
How are you going to play this weekend? (I think we’re going to play Turkey in the Bag!)

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Around the World in 12 Dishes: Brazil

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This month, Around the World in 12 Dishes is visiting Brazil.

When I asked Lizzie what she learned about Brazil, the first thing she said was, “they make good chocolates!” Why yes, they do.

The food we chose for Brazil was the brigadeiro, a popular chocolate candy. They were fun to make and definitely yummy.

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I followed the recipe I found on Allrecipes. (Click here for the brigadeiro recipe.)

The recipe was simple and had only three ingredients. But, like all candy recipes, there are some tricks for success. Make sure you cook the ingredients over the stove until it is thick and comes away from the bottom of the pan. You can see in the above picture that when I poured the chocolate mixture into a pan to cool, it stayed in a big blob. I also popped my pan into the freezer for a quicker cool down. If you try to make the balls while the mixture is too warm, you end up with a sticky mess.

Traditional brigadeiros are covered in chocolate sprinkles, which I didn’t have in my cupboard. Instead we rolled out candies in cocoa. The girls took over the candy making. They made the balls and rolled them in the cocoa. While they were making the candy, we watched a few on-line videos to learn about Brazil.

National Geographic Kids is a fantastic resource for kid-friendly information about the different countries of the world. We viewed the photos and the map and also watched the short video on the site.

Brazil was a fun country to learn about and we hope to learn more about the rain forests. Would you like to participate? Here’s how:

Welcome to “Around The World in 12 Dishes”. We will be taking you on a journey around the world, (loosely) following in Phileas Fogg’s footsteps, exploring 12 different countries with our children, by cooking 12 dishes with them. One for each country visited.
 
The world is such a wonderfully diverse and colorful place. Our children see maps, flags and books. They see postcards and maybe they see films about the world.. but let’s really bring it to life through food! Taste and smell don’t often get explored, we think this would be wonderfully fun and interesting for you and your children.
 
Not only is it an exciting and different way to learn about cultures, but cooking with children brings a host of benefits – from numeracy to science. How can you beat that?

Around the World in 12 Dishes

We had started our journey the same way Phileas Fogg did in London, UK, and now are arriving in Brasilia, capital of the biggest South American country Brazil.!

  • March 4 – First country was the UK
  • April 1 – The second country was Sweden
  • May 6 – The third country was Russia
  • June 3 – The fourth country was India
  • July 7 – The fifth country was Japan
  • August 5 – The sixth country was Australia
  • September 2 – The seventh country was French Polynesia
  • October 7 – The eighth country was Mexico
  • November 4 – The ninth country is Brazil!

How to join the fun!

  • The only mandatory part is the dish, the rest is all up to you, we just thought it would be fun and more concrete to the kids as to why we are making a unusual dish.
  • Cook a dish from Brazil: The goal is to explore this country through FOOD and activities if you wish. Make a typical dish (sweet or savoury) from the country with the kids, take photos and have fun!
  • Typical dishes: Feijoada, Baião de dois, Sarapatel, Galinhadaplus Queijadinha, Moqueca de peixe and Bridgardeiros.
  • Print your passport: Click here to download, comes with space for a photo of the child with the dish. Here is a little cover for it if you wish 🙂
  • Color a placemat: Once colored/painted or whatever other way you want to do this, you can laminate it or put it between clear contact paper to use it over and over. Great conversation piece for you and your kids. Click here to download it.
  • Make a craft: you can make a country related craft with the kids [optional!]
    • Fun fact: Brazil has one of the New 7 Wonders of the World, the Christ Redeemer statue, located in Rio De Janeiro.

Gratitude at the Table

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So many of my family and friends are focusing on gratitude the month of November.

While I believe gratitude should be practiced year-round, I love the special focus that Thanksgiving brings.

I want to share with you a special way we’ve incorporated gratitude into our daily life.

I know some people say a blessing before every meal. We didn’t. It’s a wonderful habit and one that I wanted to incorporate into our nightly meals.

Disclosure: There are Amazon Affiliate and other affiliate links in this article which means, at no additional cost to you, we could receive compensation for our recommendations. You can read our full disclosure policy on our Disclosure Page for more details.

Instead of selecting one particular blessing I chose several from the many traditional blessings that are said across the world.

The wonderful thing about saying a blessing is that it crosses all boundaries, both religious and cultural.

I chose from my childhood and my life in the Christian church. I selected five blessings that I loved, and typed them up so that they were easy to read. I cut them out and now we keep them in a little bowl at our table.

Each night the girls take turn choosing a blessing and we say it before eating. I love how this sets the tone for dinner. Instead of shoveling down our food or playing too much at the table, dinner has been more peaceful. This little change has been a huge blessing to our life.

My idea was not original. I found it in the pages of The Family Dinner: Great Ways to Connect with Your Kids, One Meal at a Time by Laurie David, a book that has been truly inspirational to me in more ways than one. She devotes an entire chapter to gratitude at the dinner table. I have poured over the discussions and ideas in this chapter several times. My take-away was our gratitude bowl.

Saying a prayer before dinner isn’t the only way to show gratitude at the table. Many religions already have practices, but even if you’re not comfortable incorporating religious practices at your table, the act of showing gratitude for your food can be incredibly valuable to both you and your kids.

Here are a few additional ideas for showing gratitude.

Go around the table and have everyone share their highs and lows of the day. Talk about gratitude in conjunction with those highs and also find ways to be grateful for the lows.

Find quotes about gratitude. Print them out and share one nightly or even weekly before dinner. You can find many quotes at Quote Garden and BrainyQuote.

Have each person share something they are grateful for. Is is family, friends, or even sunshine after a string of rainy days?

Learn about where your food came from. We buy our beef directly from a farmer and often share with our girls how the meat came to our table. Are you eating ice cream for dessert? Share with your kids how the food in the bowl started with a cow and went through many steps to get to your dinner table. (The book Ice Cream: The Full Scoop by Gail Gibbons provides a thorough and kid-friendly explanation of this process.)

November is the perfect month to start practicing acts of gratitude with your family. Do you say a blessing before your meals? How else do you show gratitude at the dinner table?