3 Things We Learned from the First Week of Kindergarten

We survived the first two weeks of Kindergarten and here are a few of the take-aways that we learned.

1. Snacks - Have a snack ready upon arrival home from school. Kindergartners are famished by the time they leave school because so many are used to a mid-morning snack. The first day of school my daughter was in tears on the way home because I had told her that we could have warm cookies and milk after school, and I hadn't baked the cookies yet because the key was that I wanted them to be warm. In subsequent days the snacks have varied from popcorn, veggies with ranch, "dessert bread" a.k.a zucchini bread (she had no clue it had vegetables in it), to simple pb&j's. 

2. Relax - This is my first child to start school and I was starting to become a bit neurotic about it. I walked away from Back to School Night feeling overwhelmed, and started to pick trivial silly things to worry about such as the fact that there was a little boy in my daughter's class with the same name who has a mom that is less than pleasant. I fretted and worried for several hours trying to decide whether I should call the school and have her switched to the other class, but ultimately decided that it really wasn't an issue. The funny part is it must have bothered the other mom too, because the first day of class her son had switched. I also thought I would bawl my eyes out letting her go to school, but it wasn't that bad. It is only a few hours and my two-year-old is thrilled to have extra attention.

3. Pictures - We took some fun "first day of school," pictures a day or so before the first day of school and it made me a lot less stressed about trying to get a few great pictures while getting up early for the first time. Years from now when we look back at the pictures, we won't even remember that they weren't taken on the first day. 

Summer Cooking Lessons with Kids

My daughter finishes her online preschool in a few weeks and I've been trying to come up with ways for her to practice the things that she has learned this year in a fun and active way. Since she already likes to help me cook, we can work on reading, math/measurements, and cleaning in an enjoyable way. For the past few months I've been having her help with the grocery shopping. We've been comparing sizes and prices as we've shopped in an effort to help her become more familiar with numbers. For our first cooking activity we read through the ingredient list together and added anything that we needed to our grocery list. Before we started she helped me to get out all of the ingredients. Then I let her do the measuring and mixing and rolling. Pretty much the only thing she didn't help with was putting the tray into the oven and taking it out. We had so much fun making the cookies and eating them together!

Here is a great resource I found for helping with our lessons:

• This is an excellent article that lists cooking activities that kids are capable of helping with by age with a few recipes that kids will enjoy helping with. 

I was looking through some old cookbooks the other day trying to eliminate the ones that I don't use, and I stumbled upon a recipe for Lemon Coconut cookies that I thought my five-year-old would enjoy helping to make because there is a step where the dough is rolled into balls (reminded me of playing with playdough.) This is the recipe that we cooked together this week. She has helped me quite often with baking in the past, but this is the first recipe where I really let her do most of the work.

Lemon Coconut Pixies

Slightly adapted from Hershey's Recipe Collection, 2008

(The recipe said it makes about 4 dozen cookies, for us it was more like 2.5 dozen. We must have rolled the cookies slightly larger.) 

1/4 cup butter, softened

1 cup sugar

2 eggs

2 1/2 tsp freshly grated lemon peel

1 1/2 cups flour

2 tsp baking powder

1/4 t salt

1 cup sweetened coconut flakes

powdered sugar 

1. Heat oven to 300 F
2. Beat butter, sugar, eggs, and lemon peel. Stir together flour, baking powder, salt.
3. Mix the lemon and flour mixtures together, stir in coconut.  Refrigerate for about an hour or until firm enough to roll.
4. Roll into 1 inch balls and roll in powdered sugar.
5. Place on an ungreased baking sheet and cook for 15-18 minutes. Immediately place cookies on cooling rack. Store in airtight container.