Games for Reading, Writing, Maths...

In my last post I mentioned Peggy Kaye's Games For Reading and the dinosaur board game we made.
This game was so much fun to make, let alone play, that I thought it deserved a little more attention.

The concept in the book is very simple: draw a line of squares and colour them in with various colours.
Then write the names of those colours on some cards and shuffle them.
To play the game give each player a token, a coin, die or similar object, set these at one end of the line.
take it in turns to move along the line by drawing a card and moving to the next space of that colour.
The first person to reach the end of the line is the winner.
Obviously this game helps with reading skills, particularly instinctive reading of the trickier colour names, but with a little adjustment it can be a lot more.

This is the game we made.

At one side of the board is a compsognathus nest, at the other is a Tyrannosaurus nest.
Players take the part of hungry compsognathus scurrying round the board to collect eggs.
In its simplest form the game is just like the original version, except that the winner is the one to collect the most eggs* which makes this a slightly longer game.
 The first variant turns this into a slightly more strategic game: players must move round the board clockwise until they get to the tyrannosaurus nest, they can then choose which direction to take based on the cards that they draw.
In the second variant one player** becomes an angry tyrannosaurus intent on gobbling up the compsognathus that keeps stealing her eggs, this player also travels clockwise until they reach the compsognathus nest and can then travel in either direction, the winner is the player to collect the most eggs before the tyrannosaurus catches one of them.

The next variant involves the cards.
 Our cards have the colours of the rainbow and numbers from one to six in lower case and capital letters.
If you draw a number you move that many spaces, if you draw a colour you move to the next space of that colour.
This is lovely for basic reading practise but lovelier still is that you can update the cards as the players grow older.
Instead of a card reading "red" you can make one which says "move to the next red space" or "miss a turn", instead of "one" you can have "four minus three" or "3 + 4" or any other instructions.
You can even add forfeits or trivia questions: "Name three cities in Scotland to move to the next red space" or "Stand on one leg for one minute or miss a turn".
The possibilities are almost endless.
Best of all it's actually quite fun to play.

Since writing that last post I've also discovered Peggy Kaye's website, it's worth looking at if you're interested in this kind of thing and she even has a few of the games from her various books up there.
We tried her suggestion of writing a menu for a Monster Cafe but, of course, ours was a Dino Diner.
We wrote a menu****, we set up the restaurant, and we opened for business.

I don't think I'd want to eat there but Eleanor's dinosaurs certainly seem impressed.


*Or the first to two, three, or however many eggs you can stand to play for.
** If you're playing this with your kids you're probably best off being the tyrannosaur, if they're playing  alone and no-one wants to be it*** then they can draw cards for the tyrannosaurus separately and keep moving it clockwise until it catches them.
*** Or they all do.
****Making sure the herbivorous options were clearly labelled

Pie Day with Daddy ....god help them all

Right ho, I foolishly said I'd do pie day this week after watching the Hairy Bikers new show "Hairy Dieters". The pie looked fantastic and I wanted to try it. Before I start here is the BBC Food link to the Hairy Bikers actual recipe.

So it's a Mince beef and potatoe pie...or at least it's supposed to be. the first bit of the recipe is easy enough. I prepared all the veg for Ellie so cut the carrots, onion, and cellery, sorted out the spices, diced the potatoe and then got Ellie to help me with the measurements.

After that we dry fried it all, added stock and left it to simmer for half an hour. Ellie had much fun adding and stiring, while I quietly panic at a 3 year olds proximity to the stove.

 

Simple so far, going well, next was the pastry.

I should stop here and mention I've never made dough before in my life. I don't count the time I had the bread maker, that was just throwing ingredients in and like magic a loaf appears.

The recepie said get two sachets of pizza base mix, follow the instructions for making the dough. ...acutally I'm going to blame occado for their stupid mix, I didn't trust it from the start.

I'll leave it at some time passes, there may be colourful language (the kind where Amelia valiantly tries to cover it up and ask me what kind of Ship I was talking about) and a re-evaluation of dinner occurred.

Pies became pasties! I mean who doesn't love a pasty? Much better than pies, pies are stupid....step in Hue Fernly-Whittingstall (OK and Amelia ) to the rescue which his pasty recipe.

It was simple really, mix whatever flour we had left after my Pie debacle, add butter, and then fold, fold, fold again and refrigerate while the filling cools a little. Ellie folded with Amelia's help while my blood pressure subsided, and she did a marvellous job.

 

After we got the pastry out of the fridge we had to cut the pasty shapes and add the filling. (For future advice, Thor plates are the perfect pasty size.) then paint them with egg, and throw it back in the oven for another 35 minutes.

As you can see perfect looking pasties...though through the process one of them became a spiderman pasty and another a Wolverine pasty. Wolverine was for dinner, spiderman is for tomorrows lunch.

I have to say, it was a most excellent pasty, and almost low fat. We're all looking forward to lunch tomorrow...except perhaps spiderman.

The Writing's on the Wall

We're trying lots of different ways to encourage Eleanor's reading and writing.

The most obvious of these is just reading: we read to her and she reads to us.

Unfortunately for the latter endeavour Eleanor has an astonishingly good memory.

This is obviously an excellent thing in many ways: it helped her to learn the alphabet for example, but it makes learning to read from books awfully expensive.

The problem is that once she has read a book once she remembers it so well that any future attempts at reading are more in the nature of a recitation.

We are lucky, of course, in that we have a library just down the road from our house, so books are rarely in short supply, however we have found it necessary to find other ways to help her to read.

Looking For Directions

This is an easy one: when we're out and about we ask Eleanor to help us find our way around.

She looks for signs to tell us where we are, and signs that tell us how to get to where we want to be.

It's cheap, straightforward and compensates wonderfully for my complete lack of anything that could be described as a sense of direction.

Besides which her simple joy at being the first to find the way to the Pond Dipping Platform, or to spot the sign for Pontefract is beautiful to behold.

Decorative Words

Eleanor chooses a word and helps me to spell it.

I write the word out in big bubble writing and fill the inside of the letters with glue.

Next we choose lots of decorative bits and pieces, we try to find things that suit the words: glittery reds for the word Fire, tattered bits and pieces for Scarecrow.

Once we have these Eleanor decorates the word.

Lastly I stick the word on the wall.

It sounds simple but this helps her to spell and to learn to read by instinct, looking not just at the letters that make up each word we choose, but at the shapes of those words as well.

The words stay on the walls, where she can admire -and read- them as much as she likes until the wall fills up and we have to start again.

Blackboard

She has a blackboard, she writes, she rubs it out, she writes some more.

The nice thing about this one is that it's done entirely on Eleanor's own whim: I don't tell her what or when to write, she simply picks up the chalk whenever she feels the urge.

Lately most of her words have been related to the film Brave, but that's a whole different blog-post.

Games

There are some great games out there to get children reading.

The obvious one of course is Scrabble*, and then there are all manner of educational games, like Eleanor's favourite: Shopping List by Orchard Games, or the various children's versions of Cranium, but almost any game is good: there are instructions to read, headings on cards, spaces labelled Miss A Turn or Go To Jail, all of which encourage reading without over-emphasising the work involved.

 We've even made our own board game, inspired by a suggestion in "Games For Reading" by Peggy Kaye, a book full of, well, games.

For reading.

Games are good.

Reading To Phoebe

Ok, this is just Eleanor reading out loud in a different guise, but Phoebe loves it, Eleanor feels ridiculously grown up and pleased with herself, and it's encouraging two children to love books.

What more could we want?**

Bath Tub Words

This one started because we noticed that Eleanor tends not to read as well when she's tired.

We thought it would be a good idea to give her a little practice doing just that so, at bedtime, I started writing a word on the bathroom wall using her plastic letters.

She read the words, she played with the letters, sometimes she made new words.

It worked so well that now I have to write whole sentences just to keep it interesting.

Everything Else.

The world is full of words, we talk about them***, we look at them, we trace their shapes and feel the tastes of them in our mouths.

Whatever we're doing words are bound to creep in, whether we're cooking from a recipe, sending a quick message to Daddy, fetching the post, running to the bus stop, singing a song.

The words are there, all we have to do is use them.

Do you have any ideas for fun with words?

Let me know in the comments below.

*We have this and Junior Scrabble.

It might be obvious but it's still fun.

**Answer: better books.

Seriously, babies these days have no discrimination.

***And, obviously, with them.

Interrupted Pieday

We made a lemon meringue pie.
Well, actually we made a tarte au citron, we had a power cut before the meringue could go on so that part remains to be done.
However if you will take the meringue-making on trust* then here is our recipe

Lemon Meringue Pie

Ingredients

Pastry (I'm not going to include a recipe here, use whichever you like best, the one we used for the Bakewell tart is ok but it's better if you add about a tablespoon of caster sugar)
Three tablespoons of cornflour
225g of caster sugar
40g of butter
two lemons
three eggs
275ml of water

Put the pastry into a tart tin and prick the base, bake it blind if you want to but you don't absolutely have to**.

Dump the cornflour and fifty grams of thesugar into a bowl, stir them and add just enough of the water to bring it all together in a sticky, slimy, shiny mass.

Grate the zest from the lemons and squeeze them into a bowl.
Separate the eggs.

Put the rest of the water into a pan with the lemon zest, put it on the stove and bring it to the boil.

Stir the boiling water into the cornflour paste*** then return the mixture to the pan, bring it back to the boil and stir it for a while as it thickens.

Take it off the heat and add the lemon juice, the egg yolks and the butter, stirring it all well.

Pour this lemon curd into your pastry case.
Now is a very good time not to have a power cut.

Assuming you have avoided any power cuts it is now time to make the meringue.
Beat the egg whites till they form peaks****, if you are doing this with a small child they will get fed up long before the egg whites become meringue, it is absolutely not cheating to take over the whisking at this point as it teaches a valuable lesson about things being easier if you share the work and other stuff like that.

Once the egg whites are looking peaky begin to beat in the sugar a little at a time and continue until it's all combined.

Dollop the meringue on top of the pie and spread it out till the whole thing is covered.
You can do decorative squiggles at this point if you want.

Stick it all into the oven at your low pie setting (about 190 in our oven) for forty five minutes.

Take it out, be impressed by how like a real lemon meringue pie it looks and leave it for a little while before slicing and eating.




*We'll finish it today I promise
** I suppose it depends on your pastry recipe really, it does help when there's a sudden power cut and you have to leave the pie unfinished though.
***This is not a step for children, in other news the Earth goes around the Sun.
****Peaks! Not vaguely solid mounds, peaks!

Pieday with Phoebe

Do not blame me for this one.
Blame Nicky: she was over the other day when I remarked that I wouldn't be able to post anything for Pieday this week since Eleanor is away at her Musical Theatre School and won't, therefore, be making pies.
Nicky suggested that I should get Phoebe to make some mud pies, I demurred, pointing out that I have almost no time between dropping Eleanor off on the bus in the morning and getting onto the bus again to go and pick her up.
I was going, said I, to write a blog about making pie when you suddenly need a pie, it would be called improPiesation Day and it would fill in nicely until Eleanor was available for pie-making.
But my mind had started working and, despite all the very good reasons not to I find myself compelled to make the attempt.
 We will not be making mud pies though, oh no, we will be cooking.
Sort of.

Recipe for Chaos ( and apricot tartlets)*.

Ingredients

One baby
Some pre-made pastry, rolled out
A tin of apricot halves, drained.

You will need

A cutter somewhat bigger than an apricot half
An oven
An oven tray, lined with baking parchment or greased
Something to cover the floor and any other surfaces.



First wash the baby thoroughly.
Since they don't make aprons in baby sizes it is probably wise to remove any clothes** you don't want to get sticky.

Cover the floor and any other surfaces that need covering, this is less to protect the floor than it is to save the flying ingredients.

Put down the rolled out pastry and show the baby how to cut out shapes with the cutter.
Give the baby the cutter and let them attempt to press it down on the pastry and cut some pieces out.

Try to keep the cutter, and any pieces of pastry, out of the baby's mouth.

Retrieve pastry cutouts from floor and arrange on baking tray.

Show the baby how to place an apricot half on a pastry cutout.
Let the baby try to place apricot halves on pastry for a while.
Try to keep the apricots out of the baby's mouth and off the floor.

Wish you had taken me seriously about that whole "cover the floor" thing.

Balance the last bits of apricot on whatever pastry is available and stick the whole lot into the oven for twenty minutes or so.

Remove from oven, allow to cool, serve to unwitting inlaws with the information that their darling grandchild made it for them.






*They're pies!
Even these ones.

**From the baby, not you.

Absence makes the heart grow blasé.

We went to Center Parcs* this year.
While we were there Eleanor went to a Pirate Princess Party**, which was mostly a great success.
Unfortunately somewhere along the line she started to miss us and, when we failed to materialise became very upset.
 When we picked her up Richard remarked that she was probably upset because she wasn't used to being away from us "because she's home-schooled".
 Everybody there seemed to think this a perfectly reasonable explanation for her distress, I on the other hand was more than a little annoyed.
 Eleanor, at the time of the party, was three years old: six months younger than the minimum age for starting pre-school.
As such her home-schooled status could not possibly have had anything to do with the matter.
If he had said "Because we don't take her to a nursery" it would have been quite reasonable: nursery children have to get used to being away from their parents much sooner than those with a parent at home, so a nursery child might have done much better at the party than our three-year-old with her stay-at-home Mother.
 This didn't even occur to Richard at the time.
This might seem like a bit of a rant directed at poor Richard so here's the point: he supports home education, he's actively involved in home education, yet, like so many people he subconsciously assumed that a home-educated child must be less socially secure than a schooled one, to the extent that when our three year old became upset he thought not "she's three" but "she's home-schooled".
If home educators can think this way it's no wonder the rest of the world seems to agree.

Fortunately for all of us home education doesn't seem to have scarred her too badly and at the age of three and a half Eleanor's a much more confident little girl.
Somewhat to my chagrin in fact.
This week she is attending a Musical Theatre Summer School which runs from nine in the morning to half past three every day from Monday to Friday just like a standard school.
She has been looking forward to this with great anticipation, I, on the other hand have been terrified.
 Most schooled children start pre-school at around three and a half to four years of age.
They'll probably have gone in with a parent for a day or two to get used to the place and the people but when the time finally comes for them to be left alone there are, inevitably, tears.
So when the time came to leave Eleanor on Monday I naturally expected her to be a little concerned.
She knew the teachers*** but the girls were all strangers, all bigger, and mostly a lot older than her.
I thought there would be some trepidation, some hesitation, a little reluctance to see me go.
Not a bit of it: she barely paid attention to my leaving, so engrossed was she in what those bigger girls were doing.
Coming to pick her up I was afraid there might have been some tears in the interim: it was a long time to be without a parent after all, most preschool classes are only half days at first and children still have trouble with those.
At the very least, I thought, she'll be glad to see me.
Nope.
I was met with perfect equanimity but with utter disinterest: a glance, a shrug that said "Oh. It's you. Hello you." and she went back to fastening her shoes.
 It's not that I wanted her to be upset but would it have been so hard to look just a little happy to see me?
Alas, we seem to be raising a confident, outgoing little girl who's comfortable in any society and who has no desire to cling to her parents whatsoever.
Oh well.
Maybe it's because she's home-schooled.





*You don't know what it cost me to spell it like that.
**Apparently pirate princesses say "Ooh la la arrrr".
***One teaches her ballet class, one taught her as a toddler, and one ran the baby class.

Someone or other's Pieday

We made a shepherdless pie.*
It took a while to convince Eleanor that this counted as a pie, and admittedly it doesn't fulfil my stated pie criteria, but it must be a pie: the word is right there in the name.
Besides, what kind of idiot has pie criteria?

This is a bit of an anything goes recipe as it's a using-up-the-leftovers kind of meal, feel free to deviate in any way possible.

Cottage/shepherd's/woolton/shepherdless/garden Pie

Ingredients

Some sort of mince, or some lentils (soaked and prepared), or a lot of chopped vegetables.
One onion
A carrot or so
Celery if you really must
Potatoes, or potatoes and parsnips, or potatoes and swede, enough to cover your dish when mashed.
Butter and milk, or creme fraiche
Worcester sauce or Henderson's relish
A mug of vegetable stock, or some other stock, or stock and red wine.
Cooking oil

Optional things

Mushrooms roughly halved
A tin of kidney beans** drained and rinsed
Pretty much any green vegetable
Cheese to sprinkle on top
Herbs to cook the pie filling with

Peel whatever needs peeling

Put the potatoes/potatoes and other stuff into a pan of boiling water and boil for about twenty minutes.
Stick the onion, carrot, and celery if you're some sort of celery loving weirdo into another pan with a little oil and cook until soft

Add the mince/lentils/pile of vegetables to the onion mixture and cook the mince till it's browned, if you don't have any mince just keep going.

Pour in the stock, add any optional bits you want.
Throw in a dash of worcester sauce or Henderson's relish.
Cook it till it looks done.

Drain the potatoes dollop on the creme fraiche or milk and butter*** and mash the heck out of them (adult bystanders may wish to don a macintosh for this step).

Pour the filling into an oven dish, dump the potatoes on top, add cheese if you think it needs it.

Put it into the oven at some reasonably hot temperature, give it about twenty minutes and take it out again.

Eat.
Try not to burn your tongue.


*Ok, shepherd's pie is lamb, cottage pie is beef, if you only have vegetables it's woolton pie****, fake-meat pie is either shepherdless or garden pie but since I reserve garden pie for the lentil version this was a shepherdless  pie.

**This strikes me as peculiar but Richard likes it.

***You can't dollop milk.
Hopefully.
But you know what I mean.

****We'll save that one for the inevitable World War Two project.