We’re back today with another edition of our ASL Lesson series! Today, we review 15 ASL signs for food. In this clip, we go over the signs for:
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Archives for March 2014
Edible Play Dough Dairy Free Recipe
My kids absolutely love sensory play and one of the best ways to have sensory fun is to make your own playdough! But if you want to take it to the absolute max, you make edible play dough. Just because you can. 🙂
Several people in our family are lactose-intolerant, so we generally follow a dairy free lifestyle. But when we started looking around for edible play dough recipes, a lot of them used butter. So we decided to make an edible play dough dairy free recipe!
The great thing is that the recipe is simple and delicious (even without dairy products), which means that even if you’re not following a dairy free lifestyle, your kids will still love it.
If you enjoy this activity, be sure to grab our free Beach Number Playdough Mats to use them with!
Dairy Free Edible Play Dough Recipe
We found a great allergy-free edible play dough recipe from the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology. The basic recipe uses several household food staples, including powdered sugar, but you can swap out any of them for allergen-free versions.
With 6 ingredients, this edible play dough dairy free recipe is a bit more involved than some of the others. This isn’t exactly a no-cook recipe, since you have to melt the vegan butter, but it still comes together quickly!
Powdered sugar and corn syrup go in the bowl first…
Followed by vegan butter, vanilla, and salt….
…and finally, food coloring!
The initial consistency of this dough was really greasy, kind of the like the cloud dough that went horribly wrong last month.
After a night in the refrigerator, though, it was much more pliable and easier to work with.
As you can see, Roo didn’t care either way. That boy is obsessed with play dough.
He played around with the texture a bit.
But when he found out that he could eat it, there was no stopping him! (A note: This stuff is basically frosting, so don’t let your kids go crazy with it or they’ll never go to sleep!)
See what I mean? 🙂 We had a “ball” working with this edible play dough!
Grab the full recipe below!
Edible Play Dough Dairy Free Recipe
Ingredients
- Adapted from AAAAI
- 3 cups powdered sugar
- 1/4 cup corn syrup
- 1/2 cup vegan butter melted
- Splash of vanilla
- Sprinkle of salt
- 5 drops food coloring any color desired
Instructions
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Combine the powdered sugar and corn syrup in a large mixing bowl. Stir well.
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Pour in the vegan butter and mix. Add the vanilla, salt, and drops of food coloring and stir until color is even throughout the dough.
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Refrigerate overnight before using.
If you enjoyed this post, see more of our homemade play dough fun below!
Plus, get more tips for sensory fun at home on my Sensory Play Pinterest board!
Using Pinterest for Unit Studies
Today we’re linking up with iHomeschool Network to share our five favorite Pinterest boards! As you can tell here, here, and here, I love unit studies! They’re so flexible that they’re adaptable for just about any age, grade level, and subject, which makes them a perfect choice for eclectic homeschoolers.
Pinterest is a HUGE help when it comes to unit study planning. I can find a topic I like and then pin several resources to use when we cover our units. I have a lot of Pinterest boards, but five of them play a major role in our unit study planning.
Pinterest Board #1:Â Seasonal Learning
Follow Selena @ Look! We’re Learning!’s board Seasonal Learning on Pinterest.
Our Seasonal Learning board is home to loads of great resources for unit studies! If you’re basing a unit around a particular season, it’s simple to take a few lessons, experiments, and crafts and combine them into one ongoing study. I got the inspiration for our All About Snowflakes unit study from several of our Pinterest finds. Since we’re coming up on spring, here are a few of our pins that would be great for a spring unit study:
Spring Tulip Painting with Forks
Spring Butterfly Craft with Toilet Paper Rolls
30 Indoor Activities for Spring
Pinterest Board #2:Â Learning for Little Ones
Follow Selena @ Look! We’re Learning!’s board Learning for Little Ones on Pinterest.
We have three learners aged five and under, so even with unit studies, it can be tricky to find activities for them all. Often, I can find an activity on Pinterest that’s geared toward young kids, and then adapt it for my oldest student (or vice versa). In fact, we’ll be breaking out the busy bags and such for Piglet soon! Some of the fine motor activities I’ve found are even good for older kids, especially those who have ADHD like Tigger and like to fidget during class. 🙂
Here are a few of our favorite pins for little learners that lend themselves to unit studies:
Sight Word Treasure Hunt (Pirate unit)
DIY Play Beach Sand (Beach unit)
Ice Cream Cone Letter Activity (Ice Cream unit)
Woven Paper Plate Rainbow (Weather unit)
Pinterest Board #3:Â Living History
Follow Selena @ Look! We’re Learning!’s board Living History on Pinterest.
I’m a huge history buff, so history makes up a large part of our homeschooling curriculum. A lot of the unit studies we do are based around historical figures or events, and we’ve found great history resources on Pinterest. Since we have so many active learners, weaving in activities and crafts with history helps our kids get more involved in our lessons. This is where the crafts in the other boards really come in handy. Â Here are a few of the ideas for teaching history that we like on Pinterest:
Lewis and Clark Expedition Study
Dinosaur Activities for Kids
Smithsonian Natural History Museum Virtual Tour
Pinterest Board #4:Â Seeing the World
Follow Selena @ Look! We’re Learning!’s board Seeing the World on Pinterest.
Geography is a natural tie-in for history, so it’s fairly simple to add it into a unit study. When we did our series on ancient Africa, we naturally talked about the geography and people of the continent as we covered the historical events. But sometimes I find separate geography resources that are too good NOT to include in a unit study…lol. As much as I love history, I find geography kind of boring, so the geography lessons and units I’ve found on Pinterest have been a big help. Â
Here are a few of our favorite geography pins for unit studies: Â
30 Ideas for Studying the World
Free Printable State Notebooking Pages
50 Books for 50 U.S. States
Pinterest Board #5:Â Unit Studies
Follow Selena @ Look! We’re Learning!’s board Unit Studies on Pinterest.
Naturally, here’s where I keep pins that are for completed unit studies. I like to make up our own, but I’ve also found lots of great unit studies written by other homeschoolers on Pinterest. Here are a few of our favorites, including one of our own:
Early Elementary Canada Unit Study
 Inuit & Arctic Circle Unit Study
And that’s how we use Pinterest to help us plan unit studies! How do you use Pinterest in your homeschool? Do you have any particular topic you search for on the site? What are your favorite pins for homeschooling? Let us know in the comments!
This post is part of the Our Pintastic Pinboards linkup from iHomeschoolNetwork! Click on over to visit our fellow bloggers and see their favorite Pinterest boards!
The Living History Series: Duke Ellington
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If you’ve been following along with our blog for a while, you’ve probably caught on to a recurring theme in our Living History series for the past few months. We’ve learned about Nat King Cole, Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald, and Miles Davis so far. Naturally, we’re focusing on giants of jazz! Of course, we can’t do a jazz series without talking about Duke Ellington, so he’s our focus for March. 🙂
I’m a little more familiar with Duke’s work than I have been with the previous artists in the series. I’ve heard his music pretty often. In fact, “In a Sentimental Mood”, which is one of my favorite jazz songs ever, was on an episode of The Cosby Show. I’ve loved that song ever since.
 We’ll be learning more about Duke Ellington’s life, career, and legacy this month, and we’ll be using some of the books below to help the kids get to know his music.
Books about Duke Ellington
Duke Ellington: The Piano Prince and His Orchestra
Duke Ellington: His Life in Jazz with 21 Activities (For Kids series)
Duke Ellington (Getting to Know the World’s Greatest Composers)
Stay tuned to find out how you can grab our Duke Ellington Biography Unit!
ASL Lesson 4: ASL Family Signs
We’re back this week with another installment of our American Sign Language lessons on YouTube! We’ve already covered letters and numbers in ASL, basic ASL greetings, and days of the week in ASL, so it’s time to learn family signs in ASL!
In this video, we cover the signs for:
Simple Science Experiments: Coffee Can Condensation Science Experiment
Winter is coming to an end, but we wanted to sneak in one last winter-themed activity this school year. Tigger is a science fanatic, and she’s always up for an experiment, so it was a great time to learn about condensation and frost. 🙂
I was reading through one of our science workbooks and found this super easy Coffee Can Condensation Science Experiment, so we got to work!
Coffee Can Condensation Science Experiment
We picked up the workbook Science Projects & Experiments: Grade 2-3 at Target a while back, but I’d totally forgotten about it. (It was recently unearthed during a School Supply Scavenger Hunt.) One of the experiments in the book uses a coffee can, salt, and ice to create frost.
What often puts me off from science experiments is that they often seem to consist of things I don’t have on hand. I just happened to have an empty coffee can, though, so this was perfect!
We put several ice cubes in the can, then added 1/2 cup of salt.
Tigger stirred the ice and salt together, then closed the lid.
The experiment instructions said to observe the can at 10 minutes, 20 minutes, and 30 minutes to observe what would happen. After 10 minutes, I looked at the can and wondered why nothing was happening.
Then I realized that we’d never see anything with the wrapper still on it. Duh, Selena.
This was 20 minutes in. Frost was clearly developing on the outside of the can.
Not only was frost developing, but there were a few drops of water at the base.
After 30 minutes, the entire bottom of the can was frosted over. As the book explained, the ice inside the can made the outside of the can extremely cold. As water vapor in the air touched the can, it immediately condensed and froze, becoming frost. Pretty neat!
Tigger wanted to see what happened to the ice inside the can. We observed that the ice was melting, because of being mixed with the salt – which explains why road crews are always using salt to de-ice roadways!
This was a super quick and simple experiment, but Tigger loved it. So I’ll count that as a homeschooling win. 🙂