Tea House with Australian Money

There was a time when my Toads loved to play grocery store.  I have checked out many a little boy with a basket of fruits & veggies.  I have tried to move it towards playing tea shop instead.  I need the fortification of a cup to get through the activity and everyone appreciates the biscuits.  Our menu yesterday included Turkish delight.  Grandma took pity on us after our Turkish delight failure which I posted about here.

Younger Toad just loves to play and older Toad is getting a little better about change.  He can count out his money to pay for things great, but when the coins don't add up even, he struggles with figuring out what he's due in change.  With tea shop, I write out a little bill, and he has to figure it all out like at a restaurant.  He does better figuring the sums when it's written down.

Of course the novelty of this is different money - it comes in colors, and there's animals, and one dollar coins instead of bills.  We had a talk about currency and the differences among countries.


You can find images of the reverse side of the Australian coins at the Royal Australian Mint website.  The front side is an image of the Queen.  Wikipedia has images of all the bills.  I formatted them up and glued them together after printing them on card stock.
  Australian Coins and Bills

I've shared this post:
ABC and 123
Earning My Cape 
Gricefully Homeschooling 
Happy Whimsical Hearts
Juggling With Kids
Kitchen Fun With My 3 Sons 
Learn with Play at home 
Love2learn2day 
Print a palooza

World Food Day

World Food Day was this week.  It's an initiative of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.  You can go to the official website here.

We shared What the World Eats in celebration of the Day. My kids thankfully don't know what it is to go hungry.  Nor do they have a very good appreciation for the diversity of different foods that people all over the world eat.   I think this is a great book to use as a starting point for those conversations as well as just a lot of fun.

I thought it also might be a good time to start a small service project for Older Toad.  I gave him the money to fund two loans through Kiva.

www.kiva.org

Kiva is a microfinance non-profit that connects lenders with borrowers in developing countries.  I gave him the caveat that he had to fund two loans that were to be used by someone in food production.  Since World Food Day is focused on reducing hunger, I wanted him to learn about the needs of agricultural small business owners.  Kiva will send updates via email which we can read and I hope he learns something about small businesses, food production in other countries, and community service (at least digitally).  I'm hoping he's interested enough we will roll over the funds into another project.

When the toads are older it'd be great to volunteer at the local food bank.  If you've done any community service focused on food with your kids, please share.

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A Pinch of Joy

Kitchen Fun With My 3 Sons
No Time for Flashcards
Train Up a Child 
True Aim Education

Tropical Edibles - 3 Part Montessori Cards

This is part of a cultural exchange packet we signed up for. The posts are out of order, but I'll do the full packet tomorrow. Hope they make you hungry! Tropical Edibles

Pink Oyster Mushrooms

No, it's not our newest favorite band.

One of the activities we rounded out the year with was growing pink oyster mushrooms.  We chose the pink oysters because they were considered easy with high humidity and heat tolerance which you need for FL in the early summer.  They were super yummy, fairly productive for being cared for by a 5 year old and hopefully will give us more next season.

We inoculated a box of wood chips and grass hay with the kit leftovers.

If you're interested in starting your own magic mushroom patch, visit Fungi Perfecti's website here.

Visual Literacy and Design in Food Marketing

 
I'm gearing up for a week of teaching art summer camp and one of our projects is to design fruit and vegetable crate packaging.  Florida is a big agricultural state and the museum I'm teaching at highlights that in their collection.  The project has a lot of opportunities to build visual literacy and conscious consuming in the kids as well as general design skills of course.

Here are links to two websites I've used in the past and like for teaching kids these skills:
Artful Truth is a non-smoking curriculum designed by the Wolfsonian in Miami.  The Wolfsonian is a design museum so the curriculum emphasizes the art aspects of advertising.

Commercial Free Childhood  is an organization with lots of resources.



I'm also reading Banana this week because I'm of course going to show the old Chiquita banana commercial from youtube.