Mama's Spring Break Camp

Ninna has spring break (or winter break?) this week, and since we aren't going anywhere, I decided we'd have Mama's Spring Break Camp. It's sort of serving double-duty as a fun spring break activity and an experiment in what it would be like to home school, something we're unsure about at the moment.

I organized the week around the theme of winter (pretty clever, huh?), with a different focus each day:

• Monday: Baking
• Tuesday: Nature
• Wednesday: Art
• Thursday: Field Trip
• Friday: Music

Just to add to the novelty and the cuteness factor, I made each chick a set of badges to earn after the day's activities, kind of like you would do in Girl Scouts. Here are their badge sheets (with their real names blurred) after baking today. They aren't winning any design awards since I made them last night at midnight using clip art from a super old version of Word, but the chicks don't know the difference:
Each day they'll add another badge, and at the end of the week they'll be proud and claim they want to keep their sheets forever. Weeks will go by, I'll get tired of looking at them, and then one day I'll sneak them into the recycling bin when the chicks are at their dad's, and they'll be forgotten forever. Sounds mean, but if I kept every piece of paper the chicks decide they need, there would be no room for furniture in our house.

So today was baking, only loosely connected to winter in that it's a warming activity, and warm it did. The oven was on for about four hours straight this morning, and I think our house was the warmest it's been all winter. We baked bread, two different kinds of crackers, and oatmeal raisin cookies. I'm happy to report that we tried a more whole-grain cracker than last time, and they came out quite well. We used 50/50 whole wheat flour and white flour. I'll try upping the whole wheat flour even more next time.

I gave each chick a little blob of cracker dough. Ninna rolled hers almost as thin as paper and then meticulously scored the dough into what ultimately become the tiniest crackers known to man.

Bojey compulsively ate her dough, not stopping to even pretend to roll it for a second. I guess we don't need a photo of that.

We also read a story and a poem following our theme. I didn't make it to the library and had to look on our bookshelves for baking-related kids' lit. I came up with almost nothing, but we do have this crazy book called Something Absolutely Enormous, an out-of-print thrift store find that you can get used on Amazon for the low, low price of $154.97. It's about a little girl who's obsessed with knitting and knits nonstop until she creates a massive knitted object. At the end, she tires of knitting and takes up baking. It's only tangentially related to the theme, but my chicks like it, and it's all we had. I also found a cute poem called "Fairy Bread" in A Child's Garden of Verses, which was accompanied by a very sweet image drawn by the lovely Tasha Tudor.

So that was baking day. Success! And now we have baked treats to eat the rest of the week. I'm really looking forward to "nature" tomorrow. In the meantime, here's one more photo of the chicks. I can't get enough of these munchkins: