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31 Days of Themed Cakes

Friday, September 30th, 2016

31-days-of-themed-cakes

Here are 31 days of themed cakes to enhance your history, science, geography, and Bible lessons! Talk about having your cake and eating it, too! The history cakes include iconic symbols from specific time periods, like a jukebox for the 1950’s and a gramophone for the 1920’s. Geography cakes feature maps, and Bible cakes bring to life stories and concepts from the Bible. The science cakes help to teach the anatomy of an amoeba, a skin model, or the solar system.

During the month of October, I will be posting each of the remaining cakes on this fun list, categorizing the cakes into the different academic subjects.

Cakes can be a great way to culminate a unit study, celebrating the completion of a topic in science or history. You can even go all out and have a themed party with decorations and invitations, all centered around the topic of study!

31 Days of Themed Cakes

History Cakes

Geography Cakes

Science Cakes

Language Arts Cakes

Math Cakes

Bible Cakes

Fun Cakes

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Posted in Cooking and Baking | 24 Comments »

If You Give a Mouse a Cookie (film & parody!)

Tuesday, September 13th, 2016

if-you-give-a-mouse-a-cookie

My daughter and I filmed If Your Give a Mouse a Cookie. It was my daughter’s idea; she wanted to film each scene in the same rooms as the book. To get ready, we collected the book and a mouse finger puppet.These are the activities we did to have fun with this classic children’s book:

Bake some chocolate chip cookies.

While reading the story, treat yourself to some milk and cookies.

cookies

Draw and color the mouse family.

While the chocolate chip cookies are baking, you can draw the picture that the mouse draws in the book, because you will need it for the scene where the mouse tapes the drawing to the refrigerator.

drawing-if-you-give-your-mouse-a-cookie

Film your version of the book.

If your kids want to film their own version of the book, you can film a “response” to our 2-minute YouTube video:

Here are some scenes we photographed. The first is the mouse drinking the milk with a bendy straw.

mouse-drinks-milk

Here is a photo of the mouse and the “box” with a blanket and pillow. My daughter reads him a bedtime story.

mouse-a-cookie

If You Give a Mouse a Cookie Parody for Older Kids

If you have older kids (junior high and high school), you can do a parody of a classic work of literature, using the basic story structure of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. For example, here is a parody we wrote using Romeo and Juliet:

If You Give Romeo Juliet

If you give Romeo Juliet,
hes’ going to freak out when he realizes she’s a Capulet.
When he freaks out,
he will be too hormonal to care, so he’ll ask her to marry him.
When he asks her to marry him,
she will go to a friar who will give her a fake poison to drink.
When Juliet drinks the friar’s fake poison,
Romeo will think she is dead, so he will stab himself.
Shortly after Romeo stabs himself,
Juliet will wake up from her fake death.
When she wakes up and realizes that Romeo is dead,
she will fall on her sword.
When both families hear of their deaths,
they will decide to reconcile.
So… when a future Romeo loves a Juliet,
he will not have to freak out when she’s a Capulet!

If you would like a great deal on Early Childhood workshops, take a look at this Early Childhood Mega Pack.

If your kids are older, you will love the Romeo and Juliet Unit Study!

 

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Posted in Early Childhood | 4 Comments »

Back-to-School Pencil Cake

Wednesday, August 31st, 2016

back-to-school-pencil-cake

Why not make this fun back-to-school pencil cake? It’s super easy to make, and eating cake will make the beginning of the school year all the sweeter.

First you will want to bake a rectangular cake. We made ours chocolate, and we used a boxed cake mix. You will want three vanilla icing containers. (We used two, but it would have been easier with three.)

Dump two icing containers into a larger bowl and stir yellow food coloring into it until you get the right color of yellow. You might want to grab a pencil and place it next to your icing so you can compare the shade of yellow to the real pencil.

Divide the third icing container into three bowls: one will be pink, one tan, and one gray. You can buy black food coloring in a cake aisle of a craft store. Create the gray color by adding black food coloring to white frosting. The pink can be created with red food coloring. What I did for the tan was to place some chocolate icing into the white icing, since I had left-over chocolate frosting from a different project. If you don’t, you can use any food coloring until you get the right shade of tan.

pencil-eraser-cake

We cut the rectangle cake in half, and those halves in half. If the cake is horizontal, make your cuts vertical. (You are cutting short pieces, not the long way.)

Lay your pieces of cake on some cardboard lined with foil. (I used packing tape to connect two pieces of cardboard on the back.) Make a point on one end of your pencil cake by making one end look like a triangle.

sharpened-pencil-cake

Now you are ready to frost the cake. I stared with the back of the pencil. I frosted the eraser pink. Then I frosted the metal part of the pencil gray. The remainder of the pencil is yellow, except for the tip, which is tan. I used a Hershey’s chocolate kiss for the point of the pencil.

back-to-school-cake

Your pencil cake is complete! Have fun celebrating at a back-to-school party!

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Posted in Cooking and Baking | 13 Comments »

Fashion Show Birthday Party

Friday, July 1st, 2016

Fashion-show-birthday-party

My daughter recently celebrated a fashion show birthday party. She had so much fun! The party included a runway with dress-up clothes, a doll fashion show, and a dress cake!

Our table centerpiece for the party was a miniature runway, with mannequins the size of Barbie dolls. (The kit we used was called Fashion Time Fashion Show, but you can create your own fashion show with actual dolls.) My daughter could decide what colors of cloth go together to make great outfits, and then she shoved the cloth into a vertical groove at the back of each mannequin.

fashion-show-dolls

You can embellish your fashion outfits with ribbons or lace. As you can see, the table runway looked great! I used hot pink confetti for the runway on top of a white tablecloth with lace.

After opening presents, my daughter did another fashion show with her American Girl doll, placing new doll outfits on her that she had received as gifts from her friends.

fashion-dolls-for-kids

Next we made a dress cake. We baked a rectangular cake and let it cool in the refrigerator. Then we cut out the shape of a dress and placed it on a piece of cardboard lined with foil. We iced the cake with cherry icing, and we used chocolate chips for the buttons. I also created a pleated skirt effect by scoring downwards with a knife on the lower half of the cake.

dress-cake

I took out lots of dress up clothes from previous activities we’ve done: the poodle skirts from our 1950’s party, medieval dresses from our Medieval Unit Study, hippie clothing from our 1970’s party, cowboy outfits, ruffled skirts, boas, and an assortment of hats.

dress-up-fashion-for-kids

We made a red carpet runway down our living room by placing our hallway rugs end to end, and putting a wider red rug at the far end. The girls would turn around when they got to the end of the runway, to show off their fashions. The girls were having such a great time that the fashion show lasted a full hour! Who knew that a fashion show for kids would be so much fun?

fashion-show-for-kids

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Posted in Birthday Parties | 4 Comments »

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