We love making fruit salads here at preschool. There are so many wonderful colours to explore, a lot of fruit is soft enough to make it wonderful cutting practice, and it’s of course packed with sweet goodness for our children’s bodies and brains.

Let’s make a rainbow fruit salad this week. Talk about all the colours you see together and give your child a blunt knife so they can cut the fruit for themselves.

Suggestions:

Bananas
Strawberries
Apples
Kiwi fruit
Grapes
Pears
Oranges

Did you know….Hippopotamuses are herbivores and mainly eat grass? They spend four or five hours a day grazing.

Let’s make our own hippo themed “Green Grass” smoothie this week. It’s very simple, tastes great and is a wonderful way to get some greens into our little one.

Blend together:
1 Banana
A handful of chopped up strawberries or mango
A cup of milk (or more depending on the thickness you would like)
A handful of baby spinach

You can’t have a bird themed week without making something full of yummy fruit and seeds…so for this week we are making Homemade Crunchy Granola (– We have loved doing this with some of your little ones in the past, as it’s a favourite!)

Ingredients:

½ cup honey
½ cup natural maple syrup
4 cups rolled oats
½ roughly chopped almonds
½ cup sunflower seeds
1 cup dried fruit such as apricots, raisins, apples
1 tsp dried cinnamon

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees
Warm honey and syrup on stove
Combine all of the dry ingredients in a large bowl
Add the warmed honey and maple syrup and mix
Spread the mixture onto a lined baking tray and bake for about 15mins, stirring occasionally to make sure nothing burns

Today we are making something green that’s also packed with vitamin C!
Getting our children to eat a wide array of vegetables is not always an easy task, but these crispy courgettes may just do the trick!

When children help to prepare and cook food themselves, they are also much more likely to taste the food too.

Ingredients:
3 Large Courgettes
1 cup flour
2 beaten eggs mixed with ¼ cup milk
2 cups of fine dry breadcrumbs mixed with 50g of grated cheese such as parmesan
½ cup of olive oil

Directions:
Slice the courgette in to thick diagonal slices
Toss in the flour
Dip in the egg mixture
Coat in the breadcrumbs, cheese mix
Fry in the olive oil (this is the grown-up part)

Watering Whole @Home Curriculum Week 6

Did you know that elephants can spend 12 to 18 hours a day eating. Wild elephants will eat as many as 200 plant species during the course of a year, but their preferred staple food is grass, lianas, wild palms, wild bananas, various shrubs, the leaves and bark of certain trees. Adult elephants can eat between 90 to 300kgs of food a day!   Let’s make something with bananas this week. This is a very simple and fun recipe to do with your little ones. Cutting bananas is always a huge hit, because they are nice and soft to cut and you can use a blunt knife to do it. This is wonderful for fine motor development and hand-eye co-ordination. Invite your child to peal and slice about 6 or 7 bananas, placing them on a baking tray so they don’t all freeze in one large clump. Freeze for about 30min and then blend together with a couple of table spoons of cocoa powder. We also added come coconut milk to ours….and voila…vegan chocolate ice-cream!

Watering Whole @Home Curriculum Week 5

This particular recipe is one we do each year with the children of the Watering Whole and it is always a firm favourite! Fish is also high in omega-3 which is particularly important for our children’s growing brains! Ingredients: 500g of firm white fish cut into cubes ½ cup plain flour 2 beaten eggs with a little milk 1 cup of fine breadcrumbs (seasoned) ¾ cup olive oil   Place fish cubes into a large ziplock plastic bag with the flour and gently shake to coat each piece of fishDip fish into egg mixtureThen dip fish into the combined breadcrumbs and seasoningFry the crumbed fish pieces in olive oil on a medium heat for 4mins until golden, turning a couple of times.

Watering Whole @Home Curriculum Week 4

In our story this week Clever Cat makes a delicious carrot cake!
This particular Carrot Cake recipe is always a huge hit in our house! And we have been asked to share our secret family recipe with many a guest in our home 🙂 …so here it is for all our Watering Whole families.

Beat together:

2 cups sugar
4 eggs
1 1/2 cups sunflower oil

Sift and add:

2 cups flour
2 tsp cinnamon
2 tsp soda
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder

Add:

3 cups grated carrot
3/4 cup coconut
1 cup or more chopped nuts
1 cup seedless raisins

Bake in greased pan at 180 degrees for 1 hour or until done.

Icing:

1 x 250g cream cheese (use 3/4)
100g margarine
3/4 packet icing sugar
1 tsp vanilla

Cream until fluffy.