Advent: Christmas ginger biscuits

There's something about the warming smell of spices that seem to surround winter and especially Christmas.  While we can bake ginger biscuits at any time of the year, the gingerbread people and gingerbread houses seem to be the trendy thing to do during Christmas time.

We have a set of Christmas-themed cookie cutters which Tiger used to cut the basic gingerbread dough.

Unlike last year when Tiger made more elaborated decorations to his homemade cookies, this year Tiger has made a whole load of humble ginger biscuits instead, which are very tasty without any of the artificial colourings.

Some of these are packed as gifts to friends in the neighbourhood:

Even though we did not make the traditional gingerbread people this year, they still feature prominently in our household in the form of a garland.  I chanced upon a set of pre-cut gingerbread men shapes to be strung together.  The stringing-together bit is very similar to the paper chains that Tiger made last week.

Now the garland sits nicely where we get to see it every day.  It curves like a smile and indeed puts a smile on our faces each time we walk past it.

This post is linked up to:
1) Hip Homeschool Hop - 12/18/12
2) Kids in the Kitchen - Link up 45
3) Look What We Did: December Link-Up
4) All Year Round Blog Carnival: Winter
5) Homeschool Hobbies and Handicrafts - Dec 21 

Advent: Pinecone bird feeder

As we make preparations for the cold weather, we also notice that our birdie friends can do with some help in terms of food so one of the activities that we have done is to make pinecone bird feeders.

The supplies:

• bird food
• lard or suet
• string or yarn
• pine cones

There is no hard and fast rule to do this, but we have found that tying the yarn to the pine cone first makes things a lot easier later.  Be sure to leave enough string to hang the pine cone later.

Next, cut the lard up into small pieces and push them into the grooves of the pine cone.

Roll the pine cone in the tray of bird food such that the food is pressed onto the lard.

When it's all done, hang the feeders outside in a safe area for the birds.  It may take a few days for the birds to discover their new treats, but the food is there whenever they find it.  Normally the birds will just pick the seeds out, leaving the lard behind.  When that happens, you can always take the pine cones in and top them up again with fresh new seeds and/or small pieces of dried fruit.

This post is linked up to:
1) Enchanted Thursdays Blog Hop #41
2) Homeschool Mother's Journal: December 14, 2012
3) Collage Friday - How did We do All of That?
4) TGIF Linky Party #58
5) It's a Wrap
6) Weekly Wrap-Up: No Words
7) Look What We Did: December Link-Up 
8) Share It Saturday
9) Sunday Showcase - Making the Most of Today with Our Children
10) All Year Round Blog Carnival: Winter
11) Science Sunday: Kangaroo Pouch
12) Christmas Science

It is also featured in the Winter Carnival Highlights - January 6th.

Creatures of the Night

Longer nights these days mean plenty of opportunity to learn about nocturnal animals.

To have a first-hand experience of it, Tiger and I went for a dusk walk in the woods nearby to find out what we could see and hear.

It was very quiet and we did not see any moving animals.  The sun set very soon so it became very dark and cold very quickly.

We decided that it was a better idea to head home and read about the night animals instead.

Although we didn't see any live animals on our night walk, we were able to get hold of a few skulls of noctural creatures to examine and identify: muntjac deer, roe deer, badger, fox.

We then decided to focus on one specific animal to study: the owl.

Even within the owl family, there are so many species that we had to zoom in on the one that we are most familiar with: the barn owl.  In the spring summer nights, we often hear the barn owl calling from the nearby woods.

Obviously, just watching videos or reading about the owl would not be enough so I bought some barn owl pellets to embark on the classic owl pellets dissection project:

The preparation process was quite involved and slightly gross.  First you have to let the pellets soak in water in order to loosen them up.

After about an hour of soaking, you then have to separate the pellets out carefully to pick the bones and remains out with gloves and tweezers.

Then you have to rinse the bones out several more times and lay the pieces out to dry completely.  Only then will you have clean bones to work with.  Tiger was keen to sort and classify the different types of bones.

Once the bones have been placed into different piles, we used an identification sheet to help us identify them.  We found bones from voles, rats, shrews, frogs, mice, and weasels.

This post is linked up to:
1) Enchanted Thursdays Blog Hop #41
2) Homeschool Mother's Journal: December 14, 2012
3) Collage Friday - How did We do All of That?
4) TGIF Linky Party #58
5) It's a Wrap
6) Weekly Wrap-Up: No Words
7) Look What We Did: December Link-Up
8) Share It Saturday
9) Sunday Showcase - Making the Most of Today with Our Children
10) Science Sunday: Kangaroo Pouch

Advent: Homemade mince meat

One of the traditional Christmas food items in England is the mince pie.  I had neither heard of it nor tasted it before I came to live in this country.  At first, the ultra-sweetness of the mince meat made me ill, but now I love it.  It has become part of our family's little tradition to make our own mince pies each Christmas, especially since Tiger loves it too.

At first I thought that mince meat is some kind of sweetened meat, because of its rather misleading name.  However, it turns out to be a mixture of dried fruit, nuts, and brandy.  Commercial mince meat is found on the shelves of supermarkets but we prefer to make our own so that we can decide on the types of mixture we like.  More importantly, our homemade mince meat is alcohol-and-sugar-free.

The ingredients in this year's mince meat are:

• 1 large apple - peeled, cored and grated
• 1 banana - peeled and finely chopped
• 60g (1/3 cup) sultanas
• 45g (1/4 cup) mixture of dried apricot, figs and dates - finely chopped
• 60g (1/3 cup) currants
• 60g (1/3 cup) hazelnuts - finely chopped
• 90g clear honey
• 1 teaspoon mixed spice
• 30g butter - melted
• 2 tablespoons apple juice

Preparation is super simple:
Step 1: Place all the ingredients in a bowl and mix well.

Step 2: Pour the mixture into a clean jar, cover and refrigerate for at least 24 hours before use.

We will be making mince pies at some point next week so our jar of mince meat would have ample time to 'mature' in the fridge.  At least that's the idea if you were using brandy instead of apple juice.


This post is linked up to:
1) Hip Homeschool Hop - 12/11/12
2) Kids in the Kitchen - Link up 44
3) All Year Round Blog Carnival: Winter

Advent: Paper chains

We are about one-third of our way through the advent and we have managed to keep up with the advent activities!  Wow, that's pretty good going.  I think we are succeeding so far because this year I am a little wiser and older, and therefore have learned to be sensible about allocating enough slacks among the days so that there are always low-involvement activities to break up high-involvement activities.  This way, we don't get overwhelmed by activities that are supposed to be good fun and lose sight of the importance of just enjoying each other's company.

 Making paper chains is one of those low-involvement activities that we did.  I even bought a pack of ready-made Christmas papers for that, although any paper will do:

With a glue stick in hand, Tiger got down to work.  Tiger wanted to use the stapler but I talked him out of that idea, purely for aesthetic reasons:

Making the paper chain is a somewhat repetitive process, so we spent the time chatting while listening to a playlist of medieval Christmas music (since we are still in the medieval period in our history study).  With the music playing in the background, it suddenly began to feel a little chrismassy here.  Tiger recognised many pieces from the playlist from the numerous re-enactments that we have been to.

It didn't take long to complete the activity.  The chain now sits nicely on the banister:

This post is linked up to:
1) Homeschool Mother's Journal: December 7, 2012
2) Collage Friday
3) It's a Wrap
4) TGIF Linky Party #57
5) Weekly Wrap-Up: The Busy One
6) Sunday Showcase
7) All Year Round Blog Carnival: Winter

SANTA maths

We took a slight detour to do some Christmas-related maths:

The above is written as "targeted for Year 5-6" (age 9-11).  It is a set of nine photocopiable task sheets that let the children complete tasks to work out certain clues leading to a solution to the final puzzle.  Each task is a mathematical question that seeks to incorporate a number of maths concepts disguised as puzzles.  It's a nice idea, and I wish I had used it with Tiger two years ago.  He completed all of it within half an hour, and was clearly underwhelmed, but he was happy to discuss what gifts he could claim using the piece of paper he 'achieved' at the end of the book:

I bought the book based on the user reviews of another book in the same series.  The users are school teachers who used the series with secondary school children, and who claimed that the children at that age "enjoyed the tasks".  Hmm.  When I asked Tiger whether he 'enjoyed the tasks' in this particular book, he said, "Yes, because they're so easy!"  I am slightly annoyed that I did not get more value out of the £17 I paid for the book.

With this book, I felt as though I have put Tiger in a toddler's paddling pool when my intention was to let him have a leisurely swim in the big pool.


This post is linked up to:
1) Homeschool Mother's Journal: December 7, 2012
2) Collage Friday
3) It's a Wrap
4) TGIF Linky Party #57
5) Weekly Wrap-Up: The Busy One