Summertime means camps... Theater camp, VBS, dance camp, gymnastics camp... And of course, my favorite: Camp Mommy, where I plan activities around a particular theme, and we have tons of fun making things and going places, all in the name of not going crazy over the summer.
Last week's theme was all about food: where it comes from, how it's made, and even fun things to do with it. We started out by reading this book:
The kids liked reading about where bread comes from, starting as wheat from the field, all the way to the bakery and store. Each page spread teaches kids where the different parts of a sandwich and other common lunch items come from. In that spirit, we made our own "Sandwich Shop" with some
printable sandwich parts I found on Pinterest.
The kids loved making each other paper sandwiches. Of course we ate real ones for lunch too. Then for a snack, we talked about different parts of a plant and learned that we eat all the parts of a plant in one way or another.
They ate everything on the plate.
The next day we focused more on animals and the foods they give us. First we played
farm animal charades.
For round one of the game, we acted like the animals. For round 2, we acted out what the animal gives us (milk for cow, bacon for pig etc). We had fun, and the girls did a great job.
We read The Little Red Hen and made our own butter and bread for dinner. I asked the girls "who will help me bake the bread?" And unlike the animals in the story, they were all too eager to help (and eat!). Homemade bread is my weakness. I don't even follow a recipe anymore; we just wing it with water, yeast, and flour. Easy. Tasty. While our dough rose, we walked around shaking jars of cream until it turned into butter. The girls needed "mommy breaks" where I would take over the shaking for a while... eventually our butter turned out great! And we even saved the buttermilk for pancakes the next morning.
While on the topic of farms, we made our own "Alphabet Farm," using letters to make the different things we might see on a farm (T is for tractor and tree... S for sun, lots of tiny C's for corn). Ellie got pretty creative.
Here's a little collage of some of the fun with food we had during the week... happy sandwiches, snail cinnamon rolls, and snowman pancakes.
Then we went to a real farm to pick berries.
We picked blackberries and blueberries and encountered all sorts of animals.
Anthony LOVED brushing the goats, in particular a white one (pictured below next to Katie) because it was named Olaf (and it was shorter than Anthony).
We had a great time at
Blessington Farms wrangling cattle, petting goats, and thinking about turkey dinners.
There was also a big sand pile complete with tractors... little boy heaven.
I turned the fruits of our labor into a yummy
blackberry cobbler. I think I ended up eating 95% of it. The kids ate the blueberries straight from the bucket.
One animal we didn't see at the farm was one of or favorites to eat: bacon... I mean, pig! So we made some piggy crafts: muddy painted pigs and egg carton pig noses. Ellie read "Wake Up, Sun" to the little ones... it's an old favorite.
Then we transitioned to talking about something pigs (and people) like to eat: corn. We did a
fun little science experiment with corn. We also did a few experiments out of a
tasty science kit that one of the girls got for Christmas.
Time for making something else: lollipops with melted Jolly Rancher candies. I made the girls chef hats, and they got to work on their lollipops. They even bagged them so they could set up a lollipop stand to sell them.
Anthony was one of their customers. They sold all of them, even recruited some neighbors to help, and one little boy who bought a lollipop said he had never seen a lollipop stand before... just a lemonade stand, and that he thought it was really cool!
My little entrepreneurs were so happy.
On our last day (sorry the other days just blended together), we painted on bread with milk and food coloring, then toasted our paintings and ate them.
Ellie and Katie drew foods from different food groups on one of those MyPlate coloring pages. Ellie helped Katie categorize the different kinds of foods.
Then they used some homemade
Jell-O Play dough I whipped up for them on these super cute
printed play dough mats.
A lot of the activities we do are during Anthony's nap time, so he misses out on some things (this is when I do more complex things that he would have trouble doing anyway), but I still try to do some of the activities with him, like instead of having him draw food on the plate, I helped him categorize these silly food stickers. And he used do-a-dotters to decorate his "messy pig" (pictured above).
Ellie had her own creative fun with the silly food stickers.
Lastly, we made
Kool-aid lip gloss, and I either did a terrible job of measuring, or the recipe needed serious tweaking because the kool-aid made the lip gloss so sour that we had to throw out our first batch and remake it with the tiniest bit of kool-aid (and adding more sugar than I cared to use).
My little lip gloss addicts were really excited about this project.
The week ended with our make-up for Memorial Day barbecue, which was rainier than actual Memorial Day (d'oh!), but the kids were so excited that they made decorative signs, and we had a good turn out once the sun decided to show up.
It was a fun week... the "lessons" didn't flow very naturally into each other, but I liked the more casual approach because sometimes the kids just want to swim or play with neighbors, and I don't want MY plans to keep them from enjoying their summer. Theater camp just ended, and VBS is coming up, so we will be theme-free for a while. Feel free to use any of these ideas/activities if you want to have some food-related fun with your kiddos!
