With Heart From the Home

  Josh's birthday was yesterday and his dessert request changes each year. He isn't a big fan of anything super sweet and mostly likes desserts with fruit included. This year he chose strawberry shortcake. Easy enough! I planned to make the entire dessert store bought but I couldn't find any shortcake at Walmart. After searching simple recipes online I found this one by Bless This Mess Please . I had all ingredients so I thought it was worth a try. It was very easy and delicious! Josh said in the future this is what I should use as the shortcake when we have this dessert.  Ingredients: 1/2 Cup sugar 1/4 cup melted butter (I put in fridge for 5 min after melting to cool off) 1 large egg 1 tsp vanilla extract 1 1/2 cups all purpose flour 2 tsp baking powder 1/4 tsp salt 1/2 cup milk (I used oatmilk and it worked just fine) Recipe: Preheat oven to 350. Grease a 8x8 inch baking pan. In a medium bowl add sugar and melted butter and stir til combined. Add the egg and vanilla and

 I'm so behind on posting our tot school lessons! I plan to share our Christmas unit and also how we celebrated in today's post but I also want share where we're at currently with home learning. We had our Christmas unit for 2 weeks (Dec 13-24)  and it was so fun. The 3 weeks that followed Christmas was a 'break' to regroup and rest. I'm SO glad I put this in our schedule because we certainly needed a break after the holidays. Unfortunately I've gotten a bit off track and haven't been as focused on keeping up with our tot school schedule. It's really easy to let the 'extra' parts of our day fall by the wayside when you're just staying afloat in a season. We were all sick and took turns with a horrible cold, we are serving at church and trying to make spending time in fellowship a priority and we also just got out of our normal schedule groove. Our weekly outing rotation currently looks like:  Monday- Home/play catch up from weekend/cleani

 Baking Unit wasn't as hands on as I had hoped, but we have another week of Christmas festivities to make up for that! We did several worksheets to practice prewriting skills and also decorated a cupcake chef hat! A simple sensory bin was made from oats and some kitchen tools I had on hand. She scooped the oats into the cupcake tins and made 'cupcakes'. The most exciting part of baking week was making gingerbread houses with Grandma. She mostly taste tested but was quite excited about building them! We got started on Christmas books early so didn't check out specific baking books, although a forever favorite of ours is Who At All the Cookie Dough? By Karen Beaumont. We look forward to more baking activities while celebrating the holidays. With heart from our home,  Jordan

Playing catch up on blog posts! We covered Arctic week 3 weeks ago. I wasn't super expectant that it would be that special, but I was wrong! She thoroughly enjoyed it and was so interested in the topic. It helped that Wild Kratts released a few new episodes covering Arctic animals on PBS. The books we checked out were mostly covering specific arctic animals. There are many more, but these she showed a special interest in.  We did a few activities and worksheets. Her favorite was finding the height and width of each arctic animals and then using a measuring tape to draw how big that actually would be. We used white paper taped together to make it more realistic. We also did a very simple sensory bin of cotton balls and Arctic animal figurines she had on hand. Later on I found her collecting any and all arctic animals she owned and lining them up. She added a tiger to it and I asked her if he belonged there. She responded yes, he's a Siberian tiger. She taught me something new! T

 I had a few hours to myself today and decided to search for a good single serving chocolate chip cookie recipe. I found one by cookingclassy.com and thankfully it turned out so great! It was similar to the taste and size of Crumbl Cookies chocolate chip cookie (they are my favorite!) The dough is a very crumbly consistency so I recommend once you have your baking sheet lined with parchment paper to just dump it on top and form it into a large disc. I had a hard time trying to get the dough to come together so I opted to do this instead. See the recipe below! Ingredients: 2 TBSP butter (I used unsalted) 3 TBSP packed light-brown sugar. 1 pinch of salt. 1 TBSP whisked egg (crack egg in bowl and mix up well then scoop out 1 TBSP and add to your bowl.) 1/4 tsp vanilla. 1/3 cup all purpose flour. 1/8 tsp baking soda. 3-4 TBSP chocolate chips.  Recipe: Melt butter in microwave until only a little left is unmelted. mix together so that all is melted. Place butter in fridge to cool so it does

 We had so much fun learning about turkeys and doing Thanksgiving crafts this past week of tot school!  Our time was spent doing free printables, visiting the library, reading books about Thanksgiving and visiting a local bakery for a 'turkey' sugar cookie. She brought her kangaroo along for the treat. A quick activity was making these simple 'sun catchers' with contact paper and tissue paper. We also picked up a library craft packet and made this hat. She said 'GOBBLE GOBBLE' when she wore it. Another simple activity was drawing a turkey and having her use dot stickers to 'color' in the feathers.  She loves to use the library tablets and makes sure to clean up and push her chair in afterward without prompting from her mama.  Books that stood out this week included Bear Says Thanks by Karma Wilson, The Berenstain Bears Give Thanks and Thanks for Thanksgiving by Julie Markes. We worked on prewriting, gluing and placement of paper. She does so great with a