Yummy Monday

YOU SAY TOMATO: Finally, after months and months and months of waiting, we were able to carve into our one and only red and ripe homegrown tomato!

I let the kids have the honors and after the tomato was sliced, Christian and I were actually able to even get each kid to take a bite of the tomato (after reminding them they like ketchup, pizza sauce and spaghetti sauce, all of which have tomatoes as their number one ingredient).

CORNY JOURNEY: This morning, MPA took a virtual field trip to a candy corn manufacturing factory thanks to a great video from the Food Network.

We learned the first candy corn were made in the late 1800s. It was made in the shape of corn kernels in attempt to appeal to the large percentage of Americans involved in agricultural. It's traditional colors (white, orange and yellow) are inspired by the colors found in a kernel of corn, and the pieces are about the size of a kernel.

I asked CJ what he learned after we viewed the video. He said that he learned that vanilla is used as an ingredient and he spouted off some number about how many pounds of candy corn the factory makes each year. (FYI, the National Confectionary Association reports that 20 million pounds of candy corn are sold each year.

Annabelle said she learned that the factory's equipment "that looks like a cement mixer is called a 'pan.' "

We all learned that the factory we saw (Goelitz, in Chicago) uses trays filled with cornstarch as their molds for the candy corn.

After the video, I asked the kids if they knew what cornstarch is. They said 'no,' so I went to get a box to show them. While doing so, I remembered we had some candy corn, so I made a little tray of the corn starch and we used the candy corn to form molds. We talked about the cornstarch - how it was both very dense but very fine.

We didn't have the liquid sugar, corn syrup, vanilla, marshmallow and who knows what else to pour into the molds, so we just pretended, sticking the already solid candy corn down into the starch. (I also had the kids taste just a tiny bit of the cornstarch to see what it tasted like, which wasn't much.)
Next, I had CJ and Annabelle sift the candy corn from the cornstarch.
After they sifted the cornstarch away from the candy corn, we rinsed them and the kids took it upon themselves to do some quality control, and they ate them.

It was a fun, hands-on follow up to the interesting video.

HOT CROSSED BUNS: We spent some time on music homework this morning. Our first assignment was to sing "Hot Crossed Buns." We found several versions on YouTube, including very traditional ones, one with a bit of an Eastern European sound, a reeeeeally long one and a really creepy one one by some art/computer animation student.

The kids also had to sing "Mouse, Mousie," following each note with their fingers.
And then they transcribed it from the sheet music to staff paper.

WITCH CRAFT: Yesterday we started putting a few Halloween decorations up around the house. One of the ones I found was an old witch's face that Kennedy had made in probably first grade. I thought it would be fun for CJ and Annabelle to replicate it.

We studied Ken's prototype and figured we needed two squares - one big black one for her hat and then one smaller, colored one for her face.

I gave the kids two or three steps at a time because I want them to get better at following a series of directions. They did pretty well.

CJ had this to say about his yellow-faced witch: "She has glasses because she can't see very well without her glasses. She has bad plans. She is smiling because she got one plan - it's making something that destroys skulls."

Says Annabelle, "My witch is happy because she likes her black cat and I made little ears for her glasses to rest on.

"I gave my Witchypoo some bangs. Clever idea, huh?"

Here's the trio of witches - CJ's, Bee's and Kennedys, left to right.
OUR FRIEND ARNIE: CJ is quite enamored with Arnie the Doughnut, a character created by author Laurie Keller. He took the book to bed with him last night. I can't recall him doing that with any other book ever.

This morning, I noticed we had two cake doughnuts left over from a 99 cent day old six pack we bought a couple of days ago. Naturally, my thoughts turned to Arnie. ...

I realized that in addition to doughnuts, we have all kinds of sprinkles and even some ready made eyes. All we had to do was whip up some chocolate icing. Time to make some Arnies! :)

When it came time to decorate, I was impressed that CJ knew that Arnie was supposed to have exactly 135 sprinkles on him - a fact he'd gleaned from the book. (Our Arnies didn't have that many.)

After the decorating session, we visited a section of the book's Web site where children have suggested things they'd do with Arnie instead of eating him (PDF here). The kids got a kick out of that, and I think it was good for them to see that kids their age often spell phonetically (CJ especially gets hung up/worried that he can't always spell things correctly).

Tonight Christian read the book to the kids before bedtime. About 15 minutes later CJ was begging him to read it again - backwards (so Arnie would be returned to the bakery from whence he came).

OH, AND: We also continued our work with the Singapore Math book today. So far, so good.