The Making of a New Family Mix and Match Recipe for GFCF Chocolate Cake

Remember the Bill Cosby skit:  “Dad is great.  Give us the chocolate cake!”  It is exactly what was going through my mind one Tuesday morning last month when I realized that I was out of many of our usual breakfast food ingredients, but had just spied a recipe for Gluten-Free Chocolate Cake on the side of our light buckwheat flour bag.

A more thorough perusal of the recipe revealed that we did not have all the ingredients listed in it in the house either.  However, we did have substitutes that I thought would work, such as almond butter for peanut butter and clementines to blend in place of apple sauce, agave in place of sugar.  With these, the cake would not just be doable, but seemed like an almost healthy option for breakfast.  Sure, the recipe called for a fair amount of sugar.  But, with the way we were making it, that sugar would be low glycemic-index sugar and would be countered by fresh produce and organic nut butter protein.  That makes it good for the body, right?

A Plan Comes Together

So it was that I decided that my children and I would all indulge in chocolate cake as our “filling breakfast” that morning even though we usually reserve chocolate for Sundays. 

As my children ate a fresh, produce power appetizer, I set the oven to pre-heat and assembled ingredients and baking tools.  Then, my baking assistants got to work helping me to prepare the cake.

Fifty minutes later, after the cake had baked and cooled, Luke asked if he could “decorate” it by carving letters into it with a knife.  Permission granted, he carved a small F L B into it, which he told me stood for “for lunch and breakfast” – the times he felt we should eat the cake.

Decoration done, we dug in.

The verdict?

Luke gave it a thumbs up an wanted more-more-more.  Jack liked it, too.  Nina thought it needed butter or powdered sugar atop it, which I nixed. 

Later that day, Daddy devoured the portion of the cake we had saved for him.   So, the recipe is a keeper.

A keeper, that is, for everyone but Nina.  She whined loudly about the cake the first time we made it for breakfast until she finally wound down  and decided to munch upon a self-selected cold, alternative from the fridge for breakfast (leftover sea-salted edamame). Now, this begs the question, What child does that?  Whines over chocolate cake and eats cold edamame?  Really?  But while I will continue to wonder if Nina really is mine and Mike’s (because how can a child of ours not devour anything chocolate), I will not complain about her choice.  (It meant all the more cake for the rest of us.)

Nina's balking also inspired me to experiment with the recipe further in a quest to find a combination of ingredients that would please her palette as much as the rest of ours.  Thus...

The Mix and Match Recipe

I developed the cake into a mix-and-match recipe, which you can access as a Mix-and-Match GFCF Chocolate Cake printable freebie here.

Enjoy and let us know which combination you find the tastiest!

Read Aloud to Real Challenges: Mr. Bear's Chair and Constructing A Sabbath Chair

Sharing creative ideas with one another...

Three things that I do in training my young children up to know and love God are:

1.      Regularly surround them with others who live and love our faith, such as with families in our local Catholic homeschool co-op.

2.      Weave together traditional learning (such as language and literacy studies), out-of-the-box experiences (such as engineering challenges) and faith (such as discussion of Bible stories and the Catechism).

3.      Encourage them to recognize that God made each of us with our own unique gifts, talents and creative genius, and  He expects us to share all these with others.

The other day, Amy, a Training Happy Hearts Facebook Fan, reminded me of a course I put together with these three things in mind:  the Read Aloud to Real Challenges: An Early Literacy and Challenge Course that I planned and taught for our Catholic co-op in Spring 2011.  Amy also asked me to share what books I used for the course, besides the ones that I have previously written about (Albert’s Alphabet , which inspired us to build self-standing letters in honor of the Holy Spirit and My Friend Rabbit, which brought us to building towers to point to God.)

3 Chair Designs

Determined not to let my recent computer failure prevent me from answering Amy’s question in a timely manner, I spent some time last night searching old photos that I had on a different hard drive.  Success!

Beaming over rocking chair design...

I found photos from the third lesson that I taught both at co-op to 5-7 year olds and at home on my lawn with my then 3 and 5 year olds.    These helped me to reconstruct the lesson plan for the third class session of my Read Aloud to Real Challenges Course.

Delighting in cushioned chair design...

So, today, please enjoy this plan for a class centered around Thomas Graham’s Mr. Bear’s Chair and constructing a Sabbath Chair – a plan that would work for any week, but would tie in particularly well with:

• exploration of the Creation Story.
• discussion of the Sabbath
• Father’s Day (since Dad’s work hard, but need rest, too!)

Materials Needed

To facilitate Mr. Bear’s Chair and A Sabbath Chair, you will need:

• a copy of Mr. Bear’s Chair  by Thomas Graham.  (A Chair for My Mother by Vera B. Williams could also work.)
• a bag of mini-marshmallows (or gum drops)
• a box of toothpicks
• old magazines or catalogues
• one sheet of address labels for each child or pair of children (These can be recycled from freebies you get in the mail; we were out of those, so I used blank labels.)
• a “great stuff” box of materials and supplies leftover from prior classes or donated by children for this class
• scissors
• white boards and markers (or scrap paper and pencils)

Welcoming Prayer and Stretch

Welcome students back and ask if anyone can remember what we should do with our bodies to help our minds work. That’s right – stretch and move! Lead the following stretch, adding in movements according to students suggestions:

We thank you God for the sky above, (Stretch onto tip toes, arms up high, really reaching for the sky. Reach with one arm way up as high as you can. Reach with the other. Reach with both.)
and for the ground below. (Bend over and touch toes or floor. Tickle your own toes. Walk your hands up your ankles, calves, knees, thighs, tickling and/or squeezing your legs with your hands.)
We thank you, God, for everything (Lunge to one side, really stretching arm out. Press toward the wall.)
that we come to know. (Lunge to the other side. Then, feet together, bend over and touch the ground again, Roll up. Stack knees on top of feet, hips on top of knees, shoulders on top of hips, head up… Scrunch shoulders up to ear together. Then, one shoulder, the other, back to the first, back to the other. Up and down with both. Wiggle the entire body, turn around and sit down.)

Warm-Up Challenge: Make a Person

Let students know that now that their bodies are warmed up, it’s time to use their minds.  Ask if they can recall the Creation Story... Who made the world? (God!)  And us?  (God!)  Why? (To know Him, to love Him, to serve Him in this world and to be happy with Him forever in the next.)  Discuss how amazing God’s design for the world and for us is.  Ask them if they know in whose image God created us? (His.)  Then, take out a bag of marshmallows (or gum drops) and a box of toothpicks. 

Challenge children to take only ten minutes to make likenesses of people with only these two items, people.  Each created person should be able to sit on the edge of a table or chair without falling off.

After ten minutes, congratulate children on their creative figurine making and ask them to set their toothpick-and-marshmallow people aside until alter in the class.  If any child, however, has not finished creating a person, offer that child a choice of quietly doing so as you read the day’s story or waiting until later to do so.

Read Aloud: Mr. Bear’s Chair

Ask children if they can guess what today’s story might be about.  Then, show the cover of Mr. Bear’s Chair and take a picture walk through it.  Have children make predictions about what the text will be about.

Read Mr. Bear’s Chair, asking children to read text that they are capable of and taking time to stop to really look at the pictures and to make predictions as you go.  Be sure to identify what the problem in the story is and what Mr. Bear does to solve it.  Also ask what they think will happen next after the final page of the story.  How might Mr. Bear solve the problem suggested by the final illustration?

Ask children how Mr. Bear applied the strategy for solving problems that we have used for the past few weeks. How did he identify the problem, come up with a plan for solving it, test it and, if necessary adapt it?.

Finally, discuss themes and values related the book—loving relationships, enjoyment while eating together, care in work, serving one another, etc.

The Main Challenge: Building a Sabbath Chair

Ask what Mr. Bear and Mrs. Bear might do in a chair besides eat?  Respond to all answers, and, if no one suggests it, bring up the idea of resting.

Harken back to the Creation Story and ask if anyone knows what God did on the seventh day?  (He rested.)  What is a day when we honor God and rest?  (Sunday.)  Does anyone know another word that begins with “S” and means “a day of worship and rest from work”?  (Sabbath.)   

Suggest that just like Mr. Bear and Mrs. Bear might use their chairs for resting on the Sabbath, our newly created “people” might need a Sabbath chair. Review how to approach a problem: identify it, come up with a plan, test the plan, revise it as needed and, finally, share the results.

Present the day’s main challenge and its guidelines:

• We will design and build chairs that the people we created can sit down to rest on.
• Chairs must be self-standing.
• Each chair must be able to support a marshmallow-and-toothpick person without the person falling off or the chair falling part, breaking or collapsing.
• Only materials (address labels and magazines) and tools (scissors) provided may be used.  (You may also wish to include leftover materials from prior lessons or use items from a “Great Stuff” box.  All of the children in my class opted to go this route, and I honored their choice.)

Encourage students to plan their chairs out first on mini white boards (or scrap paper) and to meet the challenge on their own or through their collective creativity and problem-solving.  Encourage them to look critically at any problems they may run into with their designs and to helps each other discover ways to overcome these or to revise their plans.

Finally, of course, share the results!

Notes

If any students finish early, offer related mini-challenges, such as building people out of paper scraps, designing three-legged stools, creating rocking chairs, etc.

Inspiration for this lesson plan came from I Need to Sit Down and  A Chair for Mom at childrensengineering.org.

As always, enjoy this plan, inspire creativity and remember:

• process over product
• experience and imagination over end-result and teacher-direction.
• Credit where credit is due.

Honor each child’s problem solving and teamwork abilities and give thanks for creativity and personal interpretation that God grants each one of us.  And, most of all, enjoy!

Can my chair hold me?

Plus, if you happen to borrow ideas from this plan to use in your own home or co-op, please point folks back to this post (or series), and also, be sure to stop by and let me know how it went. I always enjoy hearing how others adapt my plans and collaborating to improve plans for future use.

We Build It: An Impromptu Family Time Game

When our family is actually all home together after dinner at the same time, we sometimes play games as part of our quest to SMILE.  Not too long ago, we came up with ain impromptu post-dinner family time game that was a big hit.

We Build It

A Family Time Game that Promotes Early Reading, Early Math, Creative Thinking and Cooperation

Materials

·       a basket or bin of SmartMax Extreme (one of our favorite Timberdoodle splurges ever; other building materials could work too, such as pipe cleaners, Tinker Toys or Wikki Stix)

·         a spinner with numerals on it (We have one from an old Game of Life with missing pieces that we tossed. We like its 3-D aspect and the fact that it has numerals 1-10 on it.) 

·        scrap paper with target words written on them (We used basic CVC words, with some challenge words and words from favorite DK Star Wars early readers thrown in, such as "blaster", which Nina surprised us by reading!)

·         imagination



a blaster gun

Goal

Cooperatively design and build a creative structure.

Building a Star Wars Blaster

Set Up

1. Place bin of building toys and deck of word cards in the center of all players.
2. Spin to see who will go first.
3. Have Player One draw and read a card.

Simple Steps to Play

1. Player One draws a word card and reads it.  Whatever it says is the inspiration for what the group will build.
2. Player One spins the spinner and chooses the same number of pieces from the building toy pile as is shown on the spinner.
3. Player One begins building the structure with those pieces.
4. Player Two spins the spinner, chooses pieces according to the number shown and adds to the structure.  (No one may take another player’s pieces off the structure.)
5. Play continues as such until a player finishes adding his or her pieces to the structure and suggests that the structure is complete.  when this happens, the other players must come to a consensus of if the structure is, indeed, complete, or it other turn should be taken to complete it.
6. Once a structure is complete, Player Two begins a new round by drawing a word card.
 

Skills

• Reading (decoding phonics, recognizing sight words or both)
• Fine Motor Skills (picking up cards, spinning spinner and manipulating building pieces)
• Numeracy (recognizing numbers, adding pieces, etc.)
• Creative Thinking (creating and adapting structure)
• Cooperation/Teamwork (working together to create a design)
• Problem Solving and Flexibility (figuring out how to adapt the design someone else has begun match the one you envision in your own mind)
• Focus (concentrating on the goal of building the structure to match the word card)

Quick Tips/Extensions

• If the youngest children in the family don't get how to play, simply give them a chance to add a few pieces on theri own.
• This game can work for individual play, too.  After playing as a group, my children liked simply reading cards, spinning the spinner and building creations singly at times while I was occupied with chores.
• To encourage crossing the midline,  set bin of buildable pieces on one side of the playing space and designate the other side as the building area.
• For children who need extra proprioception, set spinner and pieces at one end of a hallway or room and a tray for building on at the other.

We’d love to hear your ideas for variations an extensions of this game, as well as TV-free ways you enjoy post-dinner for family time!

Fold or Hold: Giving Voice and Choice to Little Ones at Mealtime Prayers

Hold, please.

“Fold or hold?”

 When Jack was but an infant laying next to us as we pegged prayer to our Breakfast/Morning Circle time, he began hearing this simple question and, then, witnessing his older siblings exercise their power to choose whether they wanted to offer a mealtime blessing while introspectively folding their own hands in front of themselves or holding one another’s hands in a circle of love.

One night last month, Jack made his response to the question very clear before it was even asked. 

As Daddy filled water glasses and I transferred food from stovetop pots to serving dishes, Nina and Luke fingered appetizers.  Not Jack. He piped up with an eager noise and held his hands out intently.  His smile was as wide as his arms were as they reached to hold his sibling’s hands during a mealtime blessing. 

At that moment, it struck me: The simple ritual of our pre-grace question had given our youngest child a way to communicate his desire to pray.  Even though Jack has mastered only a few spoken words as of yet, that night he began asking the rest of us to join him in prayer.

It seems that the Lord took the tool of “Fold or Hold”, that I began using a few years ago at mealtime to offer Luke and Nina some choice an ownership regarding grace, and morphed it into a way for our virtually speech-less Jack to have a “voice” at mealtimes.

Wow.

The amazing ways He magnifies our simple efforts never cease to amaze me.

If you have a regular opportunity to pray alongside young children, whether it be at mealtimes or another time, I encourage you to try the Fold or Hold strategy.  As you do so, who knows how He will transform the experience.

I would like to thank readers who have patiently waited for over a month this series to begin again after my recent computer break down and would also like to Elaine, at Commotion from the Ocean of Life and Elisa, at Tercets, for linking up with the last Training Happy Hearts: A Call to Faith Formation for Young Children.

June 2012 Monthly Menu Plan and Shopping List (for Special Diet)

Okay, if anyone has them, bring them on:  I want some spring/summer gluten-free, casein-free, preservative-free, artificial-dye free recipes and meal combos that won't make me a slave to my kitchen all summer AND that my kids will eat. (If it were just me and Mike, I'd be all set with salads, fruit, smoothies and sides of protein, but with my kiddoes... well, I am befuddled.)

The other day as my eyes went back and forth between our almost bare refrigerator and the wall calendar page, which was almost ready to be turned,I posted this message on my personal Facebook page. I was feeling discouraged as a grocery trip to purchase ingredients for part of another month's worth of the same repertoire of "special diet" foods that we have been eating for six months loomed ahead.

Friends and family jumped in with suggestions, empathy and the reply that made me laugh: " Lol. Martianne. That's called filtered water!" 

The Facebook conversation was just what I needed to get motivated and, over the next day or two, I created our June 2012 Menu Plan and Shopping Lists, which may be a little ambitious and not-quite economical and are sprinkled with typos, but which happily accounts for the change in menu repertoire that I desired.

Despite the menu and accompanying shopping list being less than perfect, I am sharing them here in case anyone else needs some special diet menu ideas or just wants to try out some new recipes.  To access my June 2012 Menu Plan an Shopping Lists, click here.  (Really!  The links should work now.  Thank you, Elisa, for pointing out that it was broken.)

And, of course, if you have favorite recipes, tips or menu ideas for eating mostly unprocessed, GFCF, additive/preservative/artificial flavor and dye-free stuff, please share in a comment!  I am always seeking new inspiration.

P.S.  Please forgive the lack of images in recent posts.  I am still sorting things out after my last computer "death" and have not gotten back access to old images nor downloaded any new ones to choose from.  Visual interest will return to this blog in good time.

This post is linked to I'm an Organizing Junkie's Menu Plan Monday, where anyone with time can find inspiration and recipe ideas.

Seeing It's Time...

Here I sit in the corner of my living room.

Around me I see evidence of life -- messy but blessed. 

The couch is pulled out because earlier my children wanted to access their toy shelves, which are temporarily housed behind it.  They worked their muscles to it happen, getting in some natural heavy work first thing this morning.

There are small puddles of water trailing from our bathroom to the low cupboard in front of our living room window, which my children use as a play table.  Why?  Because my two youngest "carefully" carried play pots of water over to set up a pretend meal.  Self-directed dramatic play and cooperative conversation at its best -- with some practical life skills thrown in.

In every direction I see piles -- of clothing, boxes, play things, learning things, work items.  Stuff I need to sort, organize, tend to, gift forward.  Each pile is a cairn directing a a path I could take today.  Or one I will delay at least until nightfall.

On my lap is the computer that beckoned me to take up blogging again this morning after a month long haitus when my last computer's motherboard went.  I am so exicted to be able to blog again that my laptop tempts me to spent far too much time doing so.  But, the month's break -- and all that did and did not get don durin it -- helped me see a need for more intentional balance.   I cannot give into temptation to spend too much time in front of a screen and not enough engaged in real life. 

Outside the windows, I see sunshine, blue skies, green leaves dancing in the breeze...  I see an invitation to enjoy the day to the fullest.  Living life in its full glory with my children.

I am about  to accept that invitation -- to act on freedom afforded to my family through our choice to homeschool.

The mess of our "home" can be brought into better order when the Lord is not inviting us outside with such welcoming allure.

The "school" we attend does not demand that we remain clositered in an indoor learning space, occassionally day dreaming as we gaze out to a day we wish we could get outside into.

Nope, today homeschool does not mean attending to home, plus school.  Rather it means that home's cool.  Or, more literally, delightfully warm.

Here we go...

This post is being shared as part of Five Minute Friday, an intiative that I felt would be a great way to get back into blogging without allowing it to further tip the balance of I am trying to attain and maintain here at home.

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

Now that I stepped forward by creating a FB page for this blog, life has set me back a couple steps.  I woke up Thursday to a dead computer and learned yesterday that it cannot be resurrected.  So, until I can get a new computer, I will be taking a hiatus here.  Hopefully, it won't be long.