Make Ahead Breakfasts

I've made a commitment to myself to eat healthier this school year. One of the ways that I'm going to do this is by making Overnight Steel Cut Oats for breakfasts.  They are packed with protein and staying power to keep me full until lunch time.

I've spent the summer trying different recipes and perfecting one.  The nice thing about these little gems is that they can be mixed with different fruits, nuts, and spices to make each breakfast unique and tasty.

Here is the basic recipe:
1 cup Greek Yogurt
1/2 cup Milk
1/2 cup Steel Cut Oats
2 T Sugar or Honey

In a medium bowl, mix together the yogurt and milk until it's creamy.  Add the oats and sweetener and mix until the oats are well coated.

Now for the fun part- Spoon the oat mixture into 4 small containers.  I like to use small wide mouth Ball jars.  Stir in berries, nuts, raisins, cinnamon, pumpkin pie spices, apple slices, pumpkin pie mix, coconut, etc.  You get the idea.  Try different combinations for different tastes.

Mix In Ideas:

Apples, cinnamon and walnuts

Blueberries and coconut

Blueberries, strawberries and almond slices

Peaches, vanilla and almonds

Rasins and spices

Raspberries

Blackberries

Apricots and blueberries

Cherries and almond slices

Craisins and mandarin oranges

Pumpkin and pumpkin pie spices

Bananas and walnuts

I love the portability of these.  I've grabbed one from the fridge and taken it in the car.  By the time I got to my destination, it had come to room temp and was delicious.  

So, this is my plan for healthy filling morning meals that take no time at all and are completely portable.

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Pancake Day is Almost Here!

Are you looking for a fun way to practice sight words with your emerging readers?  Why not celebrate Pancake Day?  February 28th is the date for 2017.

The Tuesday immediately before Ash Wednesday is called Pancake Tuesday or Pancake Day.  It's the perfect day to play this fun game!  Kids use a real spatula to flip pancakes, read the sight word, and then write the sight word.  Great reading and writing practice that is highly engaging for kids.  They absolutely LOVE using the spatula to scoop the pancakes.  I even put a real frying pan and a plastic plate at the center for them to use.

Click here to grab this activity.

I also use this activity on our Pajama Day.  On that day we make real pancakes for breakfast and graph how we liked them best.  Two uses for this fun activity.  It's easy prep too!  Just print on card stock and cut out the pancakes.  I outsourced the cutting to two of my kindergarten kids with the best cutting skills- you know the ones who always want to help you out during their free choosing time.  They were so excited to help make this center!

Here are photos of how we make our graphs.  I show them two different ways to organize the data.

Thanks for stopping by!

Leave a Comment Cooking, Literacy Actvities, Literacy Centers

Pancakes on Pajama Day

Each year my school has a pajama day.  This is the parents most favorite day as they don't have to argue with kids about clothes or breakfast.  The kids love it because it's fun to wear their PJs to school.  I like seeing the kids so excited for the day and I like all the fun activities that we do, but quite frankly, I don't like wearing my pajamas to school, but I'm a team player so I do it with a smile.

On pajama day we cook pancakes in my classroom.  The kids try them different ways, plain, with butter, with syrup and with butter & syrup.  Kids decide which way is their favorite and then we graph the results.  

First we lay out the strips making a bar graph.  This is a very easy way to interpret the data.

After that we put the strips in a circle to make a pie chart.  It's a different way of looking at the data and a lot of fun to see how it all breaks down.  By using a pie chart you can see the percentages of how the data breaks down.  We figured out that half of the class likes their pancakes with both syrup and butter.  Yum!

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Leprechaun's Lunch

Look what Silly McGilly brought for us... a magical leprechaun lunch!

He left bags of pudding, milk and spoons.  All we had to do was record our observations, mix and enjoy!  The kids were amazed watching the white powder turn green right before their eyes.  They even discovered small pieces of gold in the green pudding- yes, they found gold!  (Don't you love their imaginations?)

After tasting this treat, I asked them if they liked it or not and we graphed the results.

You can grab the directions for mixing your own Leprechaun's Lunch here.  It's a great math and science activity.  You can pre-measure or have the kids do it, depending on time.

2 comments Cooking, Fun Stuff, Holidays, Math, Science

No Children Were Harmed in the Making of This Graph

I went to a lot of really great presentations at the SCKC and I came away with a lot of great ideas.  The conference was only a few days ago, and I'm busy, busy, busy sifting through my handouts and making things for my classroom.

I think one of the most funny (and thought provoking) things I heard was from Vanessa Levin.  She mentioned a few times that, "none of the kids in her class were harmed in the making of this ___."  After laughing and nodding,  it caused me to step back and think, is it really the process or the product that is important?  Some of the time, a great product is the goal, but for the nitty gritty every day lessons, it's really the process that matters the most.

So, I spent Friday and Saturday at the conference, Sunday at Disneyland with my coworkers, then when I returned to my room on Monday, it was not only a new month (calendar change) but Dr. Seuss Day (green eggs and ham).  Talk about feeling unprepared for the day!  I had everything prepped ahead of time, but in the rush of starting the week, I couldn't find my cute Green Eggs and Ham graph!  Yikes!! So I had a parent whip this up as the eggs were cooking.

It isn't as pretty as my other one, but the kids don't care!  They were thrilled to taste green eggs and ham and to graph if they liked it or not.  It is hanging on my blackboard (yes, I still have one of those in my room) and tomorrow we will revisit it and discuss the data.  It's not pretty, but it got the job done!

I had to remind myself that the process in this case is more important than the product.  Thank you Vanessa Levin (pre-kpages.com) for reminding me of that! That is such an important thing to remember!

1 comment Cooking, Math

Tasting Mother Bear's Famous Porridge

After reading many different versions of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, I make porridge for my kids to taste.  I use real Scottish porridge and cook it right in my crockpot in the classroom.  As the porridge is cooking and before we taste it, we discuss what porridge might be like.  I tell them that each bear likes their porridge in a different way- Papa Bear likes his with brown sugar, Mama Bear likes hers with honey, Baby Bear likes it extra sweet with both.  Then I ask, “Does Goldilocks like porridge?”  The kids decide that she does (after a bit of discussion-surprisingly) and that she likes it plain because she ate it all up without adding anything to it.  

Then I hand out the worksheet Mother Bear’s Famous Porridge and we make a prediction if we will like it or not. (Check the box).  Then we taste the porridge.  We use our five sense each step of the way.  What does it look like? smell like? feel like? sound like?  taste like?  This kids all laugh about the sound like question.  We all taste it plain at first, then I add a drop of honey to their porridge and they taste it that way.  Next I add a small bit of brown sugar and they taste it, finally I add both honey and brown sugar and they stir it up and taste that.  Some kids ask for seconds and I happily supply it.

After the taste test concludes, I pass out a small square of paper with a bowl on it and the kids color the porridge bowl and write their name on the square.  They add it to the graph under the category of how they preferred the porridge.  I always have a few kids who don’t like it at all so I have one section labeled YUK.  When all of the students have put their preference on the graph, we look at the results and complete the worksheet by adding the totals for each category.

We finish our day by writing about the activity.  I ask them to compare themselves to the characters.  Which way did you like your porridge and which character also liked it that way?  They enjoy writing about tasting the porridge and comparing themselves to the characters in the story.

Leave a Comment Bulletin Boards, Common Core, Cooking

Pajama Day

You would think that Pajama Day would be my favorite day of the year, but for me it's literally living my stress dream.  Each year when I have a lot going on in my life, I have the same dream... I am rushing around my classroom trying to get everything ready for the day but the copy machines are down, I don't have the paint colors I need, all the pencils, and crayons are missing, nothing that I need is ready! In short, I have too much to do and not enough time.  Then, the bell sounds and when I open the door to let my kids into the room I realize that I am still in my pajamas- I didn't even have enough time to get ready for school!

Sound familiar?  I'm sure we all have things that stress us out and you might have your own stress dreams.

Well, on Pajama Day, when I have to spend the day in my pajamas, I am literally living my stress dream.  I try to relax and enjoy the day- just like my Kinders do, but all day long I'm uncomfortable in my jammies.  Even though I'm not enjoying being in my pajamas, the kids love the day and the parents look forward to a stress free morning getting their kids ready for school. We even make pancakes for breakfast so the parents don't even need to feed their children breakfast on Pajama Day!  Seeing the smiling faces of the kids and their parents helps to make Pajama Day more tolerable for me- ok, actually fun, but I do look forward to the moment that I can change back into real clothes when the school day is over.

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Gingerbread Men

We read many different versions of The Gingerbread Man during the month of December.  We then made our own gingerbread cookies and baked them in the cafeteria's ovens.

The kids were really creative this year.  We had gingerbread ninjas, gingerbread cowboys, gingerbread hula dancers, gingerbread angels, gingerbread pirates, and of course the classic gingerbread boys and girls.

When the kids had found out that "somebody" peeked in the oven before the cookies were finished cooking and the cookies all ran away, they were concerned but thrilled at the same time.  They decided to make wanted posters and canvas the school looking for our run away cookies.  They were so happy when the cookies were located and returned to the classroom!

You can visit my TpT store to download the Wanted Poster!  Enjoy!

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Bear Week

Bear Week was a lot of fun.  

We did so many things that were memorable, but the kids  really loved baking bear biscuits.  YUM!

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