Cinco de Mayo Archives - JDaniel4s Mom

Homemade Salsa Your Kids Will Love to Make and Eat

May 1, 2016 By Deirdre

Homemade Salsa is such fun to make with your kids. Some kids like spicy salsa and others like them to have a little bit of a sweet side. When they help you make homemade salsa, they can do taste tests as it is created. They can try adding a little bit of some of the ingredients and if they like it they can add a little more of them.

This homemade salsa is not spicy at all. It can be made spicier with a dash or two of additional ingredients that are shared at the end of the ingredients list. Just because it isn’t spicy doesn’t mean that it isn’t yummy. We have all enjoyed having it with slightly salty chips. I have had to fill the salsa bowl more than once some days.

Homemade Salsa Recipe

Ingredients

2 cans of stewed tomatoes with spices added

1 small can of tomato paste

1 medium red onion chopped finely

1/3 of each of these colored peppers (red, yellow, and orange)

Tabasco sauce, if you want it spicy

salt and pepper, to taste

sugar, to taste

olive oil

Directions

You will need to decide which of these steps your children are old enough to do on their own. Some of them can be done with your children. Some can be done ahead of time so you children can help put the salsa together.

Cut the peppers and onion into small pieces with a knife. (My son is 8 and he can do this!) Younger children could use a food chopper to create tiny pieces of peppers and onions once you have slice them.
Saute the peppers and onion in sauce pan with a tiny bit of olive oil. (You can decide if you feel comfortable with your children using the stove supervised or not.)
Add stewed tomatoes and the tomato paste to the pan. Stir until the tomato paste has melted into the mixture.
Add salt, pepper, Tabasco sauce, and sugar just a little at a time. (You will need to taste test it to see if it is tastes they way you like it.)
If the mixture looks thick,you can add a can of water.
Let it simmer for 20 minutes in the sauce pan.
Serve warm with chips or refrigerate for 30 minutes and serve it cold.

If you really wanted it spicy, you can look for cans of tomatoes that have spices and other ingredients in them that will give your salsa some zing.

Here are some more wonderful recipes to try with your kids:

Brown Cow Floats

Muffin Recipes with Yogurt and Fruit

Healthy Recipes and Frozen Pops

Cinco de Mayo for Kids – Addition Mats

April 28, 2016 By Deirdre

Whether you plan to use these Cinco De Mayo For Kids – Addition Mats with a unit on Cinco de Mayo or as part of a unit on Mexico I think you children will enjoy them. Each one displays an item that represents an object I think of when I think of Mexico.

Each of these was drawn on the computer by me. They have primitive look to them that I hope your children will enjoy. When I made them, I made rather small number circles. I would recommend using very objects to over the numbers.

Here are some small items that you may want to use:

- - tiny pom poms
  - buttons
  - red beans
  - pinto beans
  - magic markers (If you don’t plan to reuse the mats.)

The links below are affiliate links.

Some children may have trouble working with small objects. If your children so you can have them move the objects with learning tweezers or children’s chopsticks.

How to use these Cinco de Mayo For Kids- Addition Mats

We traditionally have just followed the directions on the mats. They ask children to roll two dice. Then find the sum of the two numbers. Finally, they are to cover the sum with a small object.

You could use other tools to select your numbers if you prefer or if dice aren’t easy for your children to use. You could use the following:

Spinners
You pick a number and your child picks a number
Stack on number cards from 1-9. Have your children pick two cards to add.

We have shared a number of roll and cover addition mats. Here are a few of our favorites:

Roll and Cover Indian Corn

Ladybug Roll and Cover 2 and 3 Digit Addition Mats

Cat in the Hat Roll and Cover 2 and 3 Digit Addition Mats
You will find a number of other math activities here on JDaniel4’s Mom and on my Early Learning Math board on Pinterest.

Cinco de Mayo for Kids- Paper Bag Chicken Puppet

April 25, 2016 By Deirdre

This post contains an affiliate link.

I recently went searching for wonderful book to share for Cinco de Mayo. I came across are number of Cinco de Mayo for kids books. Many of them were non-fiction. One of the fiction books that came of over and over again in my search was Chicks and Salsa. It is fun book about farm animals who are looking for something more exciting to eat than the feed the farm gives them. A rooster comes up with the idea of making salsa. He has seen it made on the farmer’s wife’s television.

Kids will love seeing what wonderful Mexican foods the chicken can make using farm fresh ingredients. They will also love seeing what they do when the garden runs out of the ingredients they need to make delicious Mexican appetizers and main dishes.

Cinco de Mayo for Kids Craft

I thought it would be fun to make a paper bag version of the book’s main character. It could be used for retelling the story and for telling new tales based on the book. Paper bag puppets are super easy to make on your own or along with your children.

Rather than walk you step by step through how I made the puppet, I want to share the key steps. Along with the key steps I want to offer you some tips that will help you make one of your own.

Materials Needed

glue stick
scissors
brown paper bag
construction paper of various colors

Basic Construction Steps

Trace the outline of the bottom section of the paper bag onto white paper.
Trace the outline of the top area of the bag (from the top of the flap to the bottom of the flap) onto red construction paper.
Cut out the two outlines and glue them in place on the side of the paper bag with the flap.
Cut out two beaks out of orange paper. The second beak will go under the top one side the flap. That way a bottom beak can be seen when the chicken talks. The bottom beak should be smaller than the top beak.
Cut out the waddle out of red paper. Glue it in place before you glue in the bottom beak under flap.
Cut the various parts for the poncho, sombrero, wings, and eyes. You can try to make them look like the ones on the cover of the book if you like. Our chicken looks similar to the one of the book, but not just like him.
Then it is time to start gluing. We glued the parts of the sombrero and poncho together before gluing them to the chicken.
The wings were glued on before adding the poncho. The waddle was glued on top of the poncho.
The sombrero and eyes went on last.

Here is another Cinco De Mayo for kids activity:

Build a Cinco De May Taco with Free Printable Spinner

Cinco De Mayo Taco- Fun Activity for Kids

April 28, 2014 By Deirdre

Cinco de Mayo is a celebrated May the 5th in Mexico and many parts of the United States. When I think of Mexican food I think of tacos so, I created a textured taco learning activity for young learners to explore while celebrating Cinco de Mayo. It uses office and craft supplies. I know you will love how easy it is to make.

What materials did I use?

Small yellow mailing envelopes
Green construction paper
Red, orange, green and black felt
Dark blue or black buttons
Glue
Scissors

How did we put it together?

I drew an arc onto the yellow mailing envelope and JDaniel cut it out. Given that the envelope has two sides and a connected base it made it the perfect taco material. If you don’t have mailing envelopes available, you could cut the arc out of a folded piece of yellow or tan construction paper. The corners of the taco were folded in to allow the tacos to stay open.

Then we cut wiggly strips out of the construction paper, felt, and foam sheets. Some materials were easier to cut them others. The felt was a little tricky and needed to be cut a single layer at a time. We were able cut several layers of the foam sheets and construction paper at a time. The hope was that the wiggly strips would look like shredded taco ingredients for our Cinco de Mayo activity.

Out of the red felt we cut small half circles. Each half circle had two triangles cut of it. The circles were supposed to look like small pieces of tomato.

Finally we cut cloud like shapes out of the green construction paper. The shapes were larger that the strips we had cut out.

I put buttons out for us to use for the textured taco too. (We use buttons a lot for learning activities so, we have bunch of them.)

Wait! I told you what the red felt half circles were supposed to be, but I didn’t tell you what the other textured taco materials represented. Let me do that now:

Tomatoes- red felt semicircles and full circles

Olives- dark blue or black buttons

Lettuce- green construction paper clouds

Cheese- wiggly cut strips orange felt

Hamburger Meat- black felt clouds

Constructing the Taco

This is a picture of the original Cinco De Mayo Game with black felt meat strips.

I had made a spinner that displayed the five taco ingredients. We each took turns spinning the spinner to see what we could add to the taco. If the spinner landed on an ingredient we had already added to the taco, we lost our turn. We kept playing until we had added one of each of the ingredients to our taco.

You can download the Cinco De Mayo- Taco Building Activity Spinner

The idea of this activity was work on cutting skills, interact with various textures, and work on taking turns. I am sure there are a lot of other skills we covered while creating it.