Rainbow Fridge Biscuits

(Goblin is 28 months)

Goblin and I did some baking today. As usual we started with Goblin washing his hands - which gives me a fab excuse to show you a photo of the beautiful flowers Hublet bought me for our 7th wedding anniversary this week. 

I decided to try and make rainbow fridge biscuits. I got the idea from B Inspired Mama. But rather than using ready made cookie dough I thought it would be more fun for Goblin if we made the dough from scratch.

 If you want to make the dough from scratch you will need:

150g sugar

150g butter

225g plain flour

1 egg

vanilla essence (optional)

Biscuits are cooked for 15 minutes on 190C (375F or Gas Mark 5) 

I measured all the ingredients into little bowls and then laid them out on the floor and Goblin put them into the big mixing bowl and mixed them up (minus some of the butter which went straight into his mouth).

Then Goblin got bored of mixing and decided to climb onto my back and ride me like a pony while I carried on mixing the ingredients. When it was all mixed in I split the mixture into three bowls.

He dismounted when it was time to add the food colouring. We used Dr Oetker Gel Food Colouring. You need quite a bit to get a vibrant colour. It took some persuading to stop Goblin from adding all the colours to every bowl.

I put the finished dough in the fridge for half an hour so it hardened enough to roll without sticking to the rolling pin. At this point Goblin decided to go and watch Mr Tumble on TV - this was probably just as well because the next bit was a bit fiddley.

I rolled each of the colours out on greaseproof paper (baking parchment) and laid them on top of each other. Then I trimmed the edges off so it made a rectangle. I rolled the rectangle up and popped it back in the fridge for another half hour so it was solid enough to cut.

 Then I chopped the roll into half centimetre segments - I turned the roll after each cut to try and keep the biscuits as round as possible.

The recipe says cook the biscuits for 15 minutes. The trouble is when the biscuits came out of the oven they looked exactly the same as when they went in. Normally you can tell if you need to cook biscuits for longer by their colour but with these you just have to believe the recipe.

 I really love how they look.

 When I gave Goblin one he said "whats that?". I said "its a biscuit". He looked at me dubiously.

But the seem to have got the Goblin seal of approval. 

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On our Shelves

(Goblin is 28 months)

Today I took the day off work so I could go and observe Goblin at nursery. They only do half day 'viewings' so I had the rest of the day off. I had planned to watch some really bad TV and sleep, but instead I started obsessing over Goblin's shelves - I haven't rejuvenated them in a while because he's been so into his trucks, rainbow rice and painting that they haven't got a look in. 

 I was excited by Goblin asking for me to draw letters in the shaving foam at the weekend. So I thought I'd do a bit more letter work, but using things he is already interested in. So I laminated pictures of things beginning with B, D and T. I basically chose the letters that had the most amount of vehicles words associated with them.

 So B is Bus, Bin lorry (sorry US readers you won't be able to use that one), Boat and Bulldozer. D is Dumper truck, Digger, Dinosaur and Dog - I thought there were more vehicles beginning with a D but then I couldn't think of any. And T is for Tractor, Trailer, Tank and Train (although I also had Tanker and Truck which I may yet print out if this turns out to be a popular game). I have picked out B, D and T from the home made letter bean bags so Goblin can line up the vehicles under the correct letter. I expect this will be beyond him, but even if I have to tell him the right letter I can point out the matching opportunity with the first letter of each word.

 I also thought I'd try the salt tray mark making again - if I can stop kitty trying to use it as a litter tray. They had one at Goblin's nursery and the two year olds were encouraged just to play in it with tools. I think this is a great idea, but it won't hurt to show him that you can make a letter shape. I used sugar rather than salt this time, mainly because I don't want Goblin eating a bunch of salt (yeah I know eating a bunch of sugar isn't great either - I have odd logic sometimes).

 I've put the bottle top letter matching back out. Last time this was on the shelves Goblin just threw the bottle tops around the room and wasn't at all interested in matching. We'll see how it goes.

 He loves his Usborne Trucks and Diggers Snap and seeing as we are trying to match vehicles to letters I thought this would compliment it quite well. We play two games with these, one is simple matching and the other is the memory game where I lay out about 6 pairs upside down and he has to find the matching pairs. I was surprised how good he was at this last time we played.

We haven't had the Cutting Fruit out for a while. I'd like Goblin to learn to use a knife so he can do more in the kitchen, and this is nice safe practice which I don't need to keep a continuous eye on.

Goblin has NEVER played with the button snake I made him. I have had it out on the shelves so many times, I even rejuvenated it by cutting the squares of felt into animal shapes and he still ignored it. I'm going to try again - ever the optimist. Buttoning is actually really difficult. I hadn't thought about it until I tried to show Goblin, and then I realised you need both hands and quite a bit of coordination which may be why he shuns this toy.

Finally some simple number matching using some printables I laminated ages ago. I feel very guilty because I can't remember which blog I downloaded these from. I thought it was 1+1+1=1 but it doesn't have their watermark on it. If this printable is from your blog please let me know so I can link to it. 

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Spring Activities - Fun with Flowers

(Goblin is 28 months)

The weather is getting warmer and the flowers are starting to bloom. So this weekend Goblin and I played with plants.

I laid out some plants on a mat: some herbs, a bunch of flowers, some flower stems, a bowl, and a pestel and mortar. As I'd hoped Goblin used the pestel and mortar to pulverise the herbs. I got him to smell the mashed up herbs so he could see that they all had different scents. He is very funny when he tries purposefully to sniff, there is a lot of huffing and puffing involved. 

I've been wanting to do Montessori scent bottles with him but I think that might still be a bit beyond his reach, so this is a nice first step. He got very into smelling things and even sniffed the flower stems - but they didn't really have a scent.

After a while Goblin asked for some paper. So I brought over some paper, glue and paint. Here is a little photographic journey through his activity.

The final art work went a bit brown with all the paint being mixed together. And it got very soggy from excessive paint (Goblin really likes squeezing the paint out of the bottles) and his enthusiastic rubbing of the paper led to it disintegrating at one end. So this was very much a process piece rather than a finished work to put on the wall. But Goblin enjoyed it and obviously though brown paint was delicious.

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