"Mum? Can I have a snack?? "
"I'm a bit hungry, is there any snacks?"
Hand on heart, how many times have you heard these over the last week of being at home with your little darlings? Funny how my daughter never wants to bring fruit or anything to school to snack on. She has breakfast, lunch, snack when she gets home mid afternoon and dinner. Yet while at home they demand snacks every half hour or so. This is a pretty accurate representation on their schedule :D
As shopping is not something I am doing much of at all and I did not fancy my kids consuming their body weight in snacks and me always having to be nagged and saying no I decided to open a shop :)
They get £1 each in the morning and can spend it as they wish.
Well my original pricing was a mistake. They were able to buy more than I liked :D So I had to adjust pricing after day one. The kids have a ledger and have to write down how much they have spent and what they have left so they get to practice their maths and maybe learn to budget too :D I might include some higher value items too I think!
If you don't have enough change and want to be using money to demonstrate you can make your own. You just need a card paper (or just regular paper) crayons/colouring pencils and various denominations of change. You place the coin under paper and rub your crayon over the top of the coin over the paper. Then cut out and voila your own money :D OR use monopoly money, or anything else you might have.
I am thinking of using my shop to demonstrate inflation to them next week. I will keep raising prices more but I will only raise their allowance in 5p increments. You know, teach them about real life :D
As for activities we have done in the last few days...we made home made bread which was great fun and kids enjoyed learning about how yeast is a living organism and how it works to help us make bread. We watched this short VIDEO and then we got making our bread. We used 500g of flour (I split it between them so they weighed out 250g each), 1tsp dried yeast. 300ml warm water and something to feed the yeast (we used honey but you can use sugar).
We mixed our yeast, yeast food and water in a glass. We mixed four with a little bit of salt in a bowl and added water with yeast. They they mixed it all together and on a surface with a little bit of oil kneaded the bread till they were happy with it. We then covered their bowls and put them in the sun for about an hour for the bread to rise. Then they kneaded it a bit again, shaped the loaves, left them to prove for 30 minutes while I heated the oven to 180 (we scored the bread on top as well). Then we baked it for about 20 minutes in the oven. The kids LOVED eating their own bread and loved how hands on the activity was.
There is a recipe I tried the following day which was SOOO easy, no kneading involved. It is very similar to this one (VIDEO) but mine was a bit shorter time and really yummy. If you want the recipe I used please let me know. I love sourdough bread and this is the closest I got to it and we ate it all in one day :D
How are you all doing? Any activities you can recommend? We did something super special this weekend, I will blog about it next and I have many more ideas about entertaining the little monkeys while we are all staying safe at home.
Love,
Magda
xxx