Earth Day Activities and Crafts

Are you planning to do anything special with your children or students for Earth Day? A really fun and easy craft for kids is to let them make a junk collage. Provide a variety of "junk items" and let them use their imagination creating. Check out my Earth Day post for more ideas.

This is also a great day to get some seeds planted. It's not warm enough here in the north to start the garden yet but I bought some flower and vegetable seeds for my kids to plant in little pots inside. The dollar area at Target has some cute tin pots. When it's warm enough (usually mid to late May) we will transfer our plants to the garden outside.

Fun Easter Crafts, Activities and Ideas (Christian and Traditional)

We were healthy all winter but Spring brought us a round of sickness. Tonsillitis and ear infections for the kids and a cold that turned into a sinus infection for me. The kids are now better and I will be on the mend soon as I finally went to the doctor and started my antibiotics yesterday. I've been sick for almost two weeks and the sinus infection is pretty bad. I was looking at some old blog posts and crazy enough, this time last year we were just getting over being sick too. You can find some True Meaning of Easter Ideas by checking my Easter blog post from last year.

The weather here has been gorgeous. We enjoyed an outdoor Easter Egg hunt last weekend and today we are decorating Easter eggs. I also filled a large basket full of plastic Easter eggs and the kids are having a blast hiding them around the house today and filling them will little toys. I filled our themed book basket with some of my favorite Easter books for the kids to look at and read. About the book basket: I keep a large basket in the living room that I fill with special themed books. These are books that don't stay out all of the time but I bring them out for a week or two and then swap them out for the next theme.

If I can gather enough energy (this sinus infection is the pits!) I am also going to cut out a couple of large Ovals from construction paper (for eggs) and let the kids paint them and tear little pieces of tissue paper to stick onto the painted eggs. An easy but fun last minute art project.

I hope that you all have a wonderful Easter!

St. Patrick's Day Fun

I want to make sure that find this St. Patrick's Day post of mine about Magic Leprechaun Powder. It's fun, yummy and of course "magical" for the kids.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Irish Soda Bread

Tomorrow is St. Patrick's Day and I found a quick and easy recipe for Irish Soda Bread to share with you. Check out this Irish Soda Bread from Family Fun. This would be a good recipe for the kids to help make. You can find more great St. Patrick's Day recipes by visiting this link to Family Fun.

Fun and Educational Fieldtrips

The snow is still on the ground here in my neck of the woods but spring is on the way. Field trips and outings are wonderful year round but with the arrival of spring, many parents and teachers start getting the itch to take their children on more fun and educational field trips. Lots of people are looking for some inspiration and ideas. I have an entire page of fun field trip ideas for you to check out on the field trips page of my Lesson Plans Plus website. The field trips listed would work well for preschool and elementary aged children alike. Truth be told, field trips are fun for adults too. I'm not sure who enjoys fun field trips more, me or my kids! Check it out: Fun and Educational Field trip Ideas.



If you know of a good field trip that I haven't listed, please share it with us by leaving a comment here on the blog or emailing me at trips@lessonplansplus.com. I'm always looking to add more great ideas to my website.

Winter Fun with Homemade Snow Ice Cream!

I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream! Okay, well maybe I don't actually scream but my kids did start bouncing up and down shouting for joy when I told them we were going to make snow ice cream.

We had a lot of new snow and I knew that my kids would enjoy making and eating snow ice cream. It's really fun and easy to make. All that you need is clean snow, milk, vanilla extract and sugar. You can adjust the amounts to your liking. We made a lot because we wanted to test out some different flavors and we also wanted left-over ice cream. We put about 10 cups of clean snow into a big bowl (it melts fast when you bring it inside) and mixed in 1 tsp of vanilla extract, 1 cup of milk and about a 1/2 cup of sugar. We just mixed it all together with a spoon. You can adjust the amount of milk and snow until you get the consistency that you like and adjust the amount of sugar to your desired sweetness. We enjoyed the vanilla ice cream first and then we experimented with adding a little baking cocoa for chocolate ice cream. We placed our left over vanilla ice cream in the freezer.

Later in the day, my kids wanted to surprise daddy with our yummy after dinner dessert of snow ice cream. Our left-over ice cream still tasted great and we sprinkled "malted milk" on top for some extra goodness. If you haven't tried snow ice cream before, give it a try. It's easy and fun for the kids to make and even more fun to eat!

Cooking healthy and yummy foods with kids!

I enjoy cooking and especially making healthy meals that my kids enjoy. Tonight one of my children requested that I make extra baked potatoes because she loves them so much. My other daughter wanted asparagus. I was happy to cater to their dinner desires tonight.

I want to share with you a new food blog that my friend Kendra has started. She also loves to cook healthy meals for her family. She is a home school mom and enjoys including her children in the cooking process. In addition to her healthy meals recipes, I think you will also enjoy her kitchen school posts where her kids get involved. Check out Kendra's yummy blog. The Queen of Brussels Sprouts.