St George's Day Bunting and a Patriotic Muffin Tin Dinner!

I like to mark some national and multi-cultural festivals and celebrations with the children, but I like to keep it simple and make it meaningful to the children. I plan them all along similar lines - food, craft, story telling and celebrating. Keeping this format means that although the event may be from another culture, it is recognisable to even the youngest children as a special celebration to someone. It also makes it simpler for me to plan them as I know roughly what I am looking for and even if pushed for time, I can often pull them together at the drop of a hat - like I did this week for St George's Day! 

This was our lunch time meal - a Muffin Tin Dinner (MTD). I am proud of my creativity on this one with very limited fridge contents - I shall elaborate!!! From the top left there are carrots (for St George's charger of course!!), sticky rice horse shapes, spicy chorizo to represent the dragon's fire. On the bottom row from left to right there are bread shields (made using a heart shaped cutter then inverting the top to make the shield shape), these are covered with cream cheese and tomato slices to make the red cross. Next are boiled eggs painted as the English flag and lastly - red jelly - it has become customary to have red jelly in our MTD's!! Thanks Mum for the proper muffin tins to put them in!! Here are some more MTD's we've enjoyed.

We also made some very simple paper bunting using red paint on the edge of a piece of folded cardboard, that I cut into triangle shapes and threaded onto wool to hang up. Whilst we ate lunch under our bunting, I read to them two poems that tell the story of St George, which they found very entertaining - we had the paper mache castle and the happy land people out after lunch to play out the story!

I had this message today from the Mum of one of the little ones that I care for:

"I've just been given a gallette des rois that you have at the beginning of jan for the three kings/wise men... I thought the girls would like. It is like a cake and whoever gets the little model in their slice is the "king"..."

We shared the cake for afternoon snack.... the explanation continues with whoever gets the little model crown is the King and they present the cardboard crown included in the bag to their Queen.... of course I made sure that the crown was in my slice and of course all four girls are special so all of them took turns to be my Queen.... here is Faith proudly taking her turn!! the Mum that brought the cake speaks fluent French and works for a multinational company as PA to the Chief Executive, who is French, and she has often shared French customs with us to enrich our days together.... she even nipped out of work to bring us the cake!

Cinco de Mayo!

This is a Mexican festival marking the day that an important battle was won.  The celebrations are not about the battle, but about the patriotism, love and bravery shown by the soldiers for their township.  Now round here we love a good theme day and are looking forwards to all things Mexican tomorrow!! 

 

Some books to set the scene:

• Colours of Mexico
• Cuckoo/cucu: A Mexican Folktale
• Adelita: A Mexican Cinderella Story
• M Is for Mexico
• Mexico! 40 Activities to Experience Mexico Past and Present

Some crafty activities:

• Dolly peg Mexican dolls - the idea here is to make dancers but I'm planning on looking in our children of the world book and making some with traditional dress.
• Simple weaving to make a 'God's Eye'.
• Mexican maracas.
• Mini sombrero
• Paper plate pottery

If you want to make a display or book of your celebrations, have a look at these colouring pages with the flag, map and other cultural pictures.  Try some Spanish words for things the children are familiar with, like colours (two pages here and here) or numbers 1-10.

And last but not least some recipes to whet your appetite!

• Guacamole - serve with taco shells or tortillas and vegetable sticks with the salsa too!
• Easy Salsa - except I'm not using three jalapeno peppers in mine, and am taking a tip from 'Katy cooks' and will get the children to chop up fresh tomatoes in a bowl with clean scissors instead of blending tinned tomatoes!
• Charro beans.
• Polvorones (sugar biscuits with cinnamon)

Have fun!!!!

Friday's Favourite's!

Well it's Friday again and it's been another busy, happy week that has flown by. I love watching the children and seeing their little mile stones, this week one of my little ones learned how to clamber up the metal bars of the climbing frame to go down the slide all by herself.... a real WOW moment for her!!

• These garden play mats look so lovely.... how about a bit of old mac underneath them and turn them into picnic mats that roll up really small?
• This new website is building up some wonderful resources - have a cruise round their site and see..... they'll even print it for you if your printer is out of action!!!!

OK so this post didn't make it onto the blog for Friday, it has been one of those weekends, but there has been plenty going on behind the scenes, look out for posts on Cinco de Mayo, a Mexican festival chalked in for Wednesday, group plans for Child Safety Week in June, and some water activities!

Baisakhi Planning 2010

I have struggled to find resources on the web that are ready planned to help explore Baisakhi.  There doesn't seem to be a lot around but what there is will be lots of fun! Here are my ideas:

• Look at this picture of the 5 K’s and talk about why they are important to Sikh people (scroll down, I think it's about page 17!!)
• Look at the traditional bhangra dress (for men) and giddha dress (for women), read about them here.
• I could only find a good colouring picture of a bhangra dancer.
• Play some bhangra music and dance to it: the dances tell stories of everyday life so make up some moves related to gardening (as baisakhi is the Sikh harvest festival), cooking and eating as a fun story line!
• See a picture of the Dholak hand drum used to drum the beats here.
• Make anklets and bangles to wear.
• Cook Halwa.

St. David's Day Planning!

I will be joining forces with another childminder on Monday to enjoy some St. David's Day treats, and then we will do some more activities at home in the afternoon.  I have a CD of children's songs in Welsh that we will play (CLL, KUW). There will be welsh lamb casserole bubbling in the slow cooker ready for lunch, I always talk about where meat comes from as I think it's important for children to understand their place in the food chain, obviously in a amnner sensitive to their age and temperament!! (KUW, PSED) We will make daffodil paper chains (PD, CD). I have bought some wooden spoons and we are going to get creative and decorate them as welsh love spoons, talking about who we love and why, and who we would give them to! (CD, PSED) For the children that enjoy the challenge of colouring in templates, I have printed some welsh flags and welsh children to colour.  My husband is Welsh so I will be getting him to talk to the children in Welsh and we will make a book in welsh with numbers and colours, animals and food for the book basket (CLL, KUW), if you want to the same, there are great language resources here! And I think that will happily take us through the day.... there are many more ideas out there, please come back on and comment to tell me what you did, or e-mail me!

Happy Australia Day!

We had a really great day trying out some of the Australia Day ideas..... we made petroglyphs on sandpaper:

 chose Australian animals to make dot pictures of:

 and made damper dogs for lunch!!

After damper dogs we made and ate fruit kabobs together at the table, it was really fun and sociable and all the children helped each other out, not to mention eating a treat that was so healthy!!  they asked if we could have damper dogs and kabobs EVERY day for lunch!!!!  Weeeeell, maybe not every day but it's made me keen to plan fun recipes into every month!