Deirdre, Author at JDaniel4s Mom

Deirdre Smith writes/owns JDaniel4’s Mom. After twenty years as a elementary school and technology resource teacher in Northern Virginia, she became a stay at home mom in upstate South Carolina. Her blog features ways she and her 5 year old are exploring learning, crafting, creating healthy meals and living life to its fullest. Deirdre can also be found on twitter as @jdaniel4smom and on her blog's FB page. You can also check her out on Google+.

7 Really Fun Pranks for April Fools

March 21, 2013 By Deirdre

I have searched high and low to find kid-friendly pranks for April Fools. This list of ideas are funny and not designed to scare or make children fearful or feel embarrassed. I found some of those and quickly dismissed them.
Pulling pranks is lots of fun, but not all children will think the same things are funny. I tested the pranks below on JDaniel. He thought they were really funny, but I totally understand that not all children or parents think they are.

Here are the April Fools Day Pranks I Really Liked

Teeny Tiny Meal

JDaniel wakes up hungry every morning. After taking a few moments to snuggle with me, he bounds to the kitchen to see what he wants for breakfast. I decided to have breakfast waiting for him. It was served on a plate from a tea set that I borrowed from my friend Bridget’s little girl.He loves doughnuts, fruit, and yogurt for breakfast. After this breakfast, I think he will be asking for seconds.

Tricky Flavored Water

It is not unusual for me to add a dash of something to the water we keep in the refrigerator. Sometimes it is a squirt of fresh orange, lemon or lime. JDaniel’s water cup of upstairs on his nightstand is usually filled with tap water. While he was busy playing, I added a squirt of lime juice to it. He noticed the change right away.

Caution Tape Over the Toilet Lid

I bought a small roll of hazard tape and taped it to the lid of his toilet. As you can imagination, it might need it if I haven’t been into check in a few hours.

Turning Milk Green

JDaniel loves to pour milk for himself. He is really good at not spilling it if the jug is less than half full. I decided to surprise him by adding a little green food coloring to milk.

Frozen Milk in Cereal and Jello Juice

This is so easy to put together. You simply prepare the milk and cereal ahead of time and store it in the freezer.

I think fun preparing jello in a clear plastic cup and serving it with a meal as a drink was really fun.

A Raisin in the Toothpaste

I simply slid a raisin into his toothpaste. I usually put the toothpaste on his toothbrush for him but, this time I let him do it. He was really surprised. What pranks do you and your children play on April Fool’s Day? Deirdre is a stay at home mom. Prior to staying home, she worked as an elementary school teacher and technology integration specialist for over twenty years. She holds an Early Childhood degree and a Masters in Developmental Reading. She is the blogger behind JDaniel4’s Mom, a site focused on sharing ways to learn and grow beside your children.

Easter Idea- Easter Story Cookies

March 20, 2013 By Deirdre

Mrs. Hatten (my mentor mom at church) shared this wonder Easter idea with me for resurrection cookies. I am thrilled to be able to share it with you. Each step in making these cookie a scripture verse to go with it. This is a fantastic way to share the Easter story with children the evening before Easter.

Easter Story Cookies

Ingredients:

1 cup of whole pecans ( You can use chocolate chips instead)

1 tsp. of vinegar

3 egg whites

pinch of salt

1 cup of sugar

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 300 degrees. (Don’t wait and do it until the recipe is done.)

Place the pecans or chocolate chips into a baggie and let children beat them with a wooden spoon to break into small pieces. Explain that after Jesus was arrested He was beaten by Roman soldiers Read John 19:1-3.

Let each child smell the vinegar. Put 1 tsp of vinegar into a mixing bowl. Explain that when Jesus was thirty on the cross. He was given vinegar to drink. Read. John 19: 28-30.

Add egg whites to the vinegar. Eggs represent life. Explain that Jesus gave His life to give life to us. Read John 10:10-11.

Sprinkle a little salt into each child’s hand. Let them taste it and brush the rest into the bowl. Explain that this represents the salty tears shed by Jesus’ followers and the bitterness or our own sin. Read Luke 23:27.

So far the ingredients are not very tasty. Add 1 cup of sugar to the mixture while beating. Explain that the sweetest part of the story is that Jesus died because He loves us. He wants us to know that and belong to Him. Read. Ps. 34:8 and John 3:16.

Beat the mixture with a mixer until it forms stiff peaks. Explain that the color white stands for purity in God’s eyes. When he looks at us, he sees that our sins have been cleansed by Jesus. Read. Is. 1:18 and John 3:1-3
Fold in nuts or chocolate chips. Then drop by teaspoonfuls onto a cookie tray covered with wax paper. Explain that each mound represents the rocky tomb where Jesus’ body was laid. Read Matt. 27:57-60.
Put the cookie sheet in the oven and turn the oven off. Give each child a piece of tape and seal the oven door. Explain that the tomb was sealed. Read Matt. 27:65-66.

This Easter Idea walks children through the Easter story while creating a treat.

Go to bed! Explain that they may feel sad leaving the cookies in the oven overnight. Jesus’ followers were very sad when tomb was sealed.
On Easter morning, open the oven and give everyone a cookie. Notice that they have a cracked surface. When you take a bite, the cookie is hollow. Explain that on the first Easter Jesus’ followers were amazed to find the tomb open and empty.

We baked our cookies early so I could share them with you. I think we will do it early again next year. Easter morning is very hectic and I really want to have the time to talk about what happened to the cookies with JDaniel without feeling rushed.

This post is linked to Mrs. Matlock’s Alphabe Thursday.

Bold Moms Break Rules with Whites

March 19, 2013 By Deirdre

I rarely ever have JDaniel wearing white. He can be a messy eater, crafter, and player. At the end of the day I can usually point to his shirt and know what he has had to eat and what he did during the day. There is usually a few magic marker spots, paints splotches, dirt streaks , grass stains, milk drips marks and food stains all over it. That is why I think bold moms break rules with whites. The rule with most boy mom’s I know it avoid white.

White clothing can just make the stains in his clothes stand out more. Seriously his clothes at least look better as he goes through the day if they have pattern or designs on them. At least I am not tempted to change them as often.

Last Thursday I decided to try to put the bottle of Tide Bright +White that I had been sent to the test. I dug through JDaniel’s shirts to find the one white t-shirt that he owns. It took a little bit of looking to find it. The shirt was at the very bottom of a pile of t-shirts. JDaniel was happy to wear it. He loves the dinosaur on the front of it.Once he was dressed, we started the test.

Bold Moms Spot Collecting Test Number One

This test was done while cleaning out the shed in our backyard. JDaniel loves to help sort through things and he jumped into this task with both feet. When we finished cleaning out shed , his shirt was spotless. I don’t know how he kept it clean. Well, it may be have protected a little by the hooded sweatshirt he had on. It was cold in the shed. I did unzip it so the shirt was at least partially exposed. Even that area stayed clean.

Bold Moms Spot Collecting Test Number Two

This test was done in the garage. We have several junk boxes on shelves in the garage. My husband strongly believes many of these items can be used later on , but some really just needed to be place in the giant garbage can in the garage. Our hands got really dusty and dirty doing this test. Usually JDaniel will wipe his hands on his shirt, but he didn’t this time. The shirt still remained clean.

Bold Moms Spot Collecting Test Number Three

Coloring with markers is a guaranteed way to add spots to a shirt. The markers didn’t let me down. Some how JDaniel got blue marker spots at the bottom of his shirt. I didn’t catch if he had swung his arms while holding marker or how they got there.

Bold Moms Spot Collecting Test Number Four

Jelly has always seemed to drop from the bread JDaniel is eating right onto his clothes. Apparently the grape jelly leapt from JDaniel’s bagel right onto the left side of his shirt this time. Once he noticed it there, he tried to wipe it off with his hand. That gave us spot number two.

Bold Moms Unplanned Spot Collecting

JDaniel had a bloody nose in the afternoon and tried to stop it with his hand. Rather than wipe his hand on a towel, napkin or tissue he rubbed a small amount of it on his shirt while I ran for the tissue he didn’t think he wanted or needed.

Spot Collecting Test Number Five

When I dug JDaniel’s shirt out in the morning, I noticed a few orange streaks on it. They look to have been left from an earlier spaghetti dinner. I decided to serve JDaniel spaghetti and see if he would create new tomato sauce stains on the t-shirt.He did just that. He ended up with a number of new stains on his shirt. JDaniel would have had more, but he decided to use a napkin to wipe his face instead of his shirt. That may have been due to the fact that his shirt has short sleeves. If it had long sleeves, he might have added stains to the sleeves.

Here is what the shirt looked like by the end of the day. It isn’t badly stained, but blood, marker and jelly stains can be tricky.

Bold Moms Stain Removal Test

Later that night I washed his now stained shirt with Tide Bright+White to see how it would do. It did a really good job. All the new stains were removed and the previous tomato sauce streaks had faded a little. The shirt actually looked a little brighter too.

I am not sure how often JDaniel will be wearing white clothes this spring, but I am thankful that I have a wonderful detergent to clean them with when he does.

Tide Vivid White + Bright keeps whites brighter longer allowing you to break the rules of white.
This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of Tide. The opinions and text are all mine.

Healthy Lunch Ideas – Bounding Bunnies Bento

March 18, 2013 By Deirdre

I really try to give JDaniel healthy lunches. Sometimes I am more successful than others. Lately he has gotten in a rut as to what he wants to be served or make for his lunch. ( He is big on making his lunch all by himself right now.) American cheese sandwiches are what he has decided he likes. I won’t mind much, but he also wants American cheese on a flour tortilla for breakfast. I needed to do something to shake this up a bit. I needed to come up with some healthy lunch ideas!

Wait! I know what you are thinking. This lunch has cheese sandwiches in it. Yes, it does. It has two colors of American cheese in fact. What you can’t see is that under the bunnies are several pieces of pepperoni. Pepperoni isn’t my favorite source of protein, but it is one that he will eat in his lunch. Having some type of protein in the lunch was one of my healthy lunch ideas.

Cheese crackers are another popular lunch item for him to request. I did include a couple cheese crackers in a carrot shaped Easter egg in this lunch, but not many.

What he got more of were carrots and red grapes. He says he doesn’t like raw carrots, but I put them in anyway. JDaniel ended up eating half of them along with all the grapes. When he got home, he had just the two carrots in his bento box. Later when he asked for a snack I required he eat the two remain carrots. Having carrots on the menu was another of my healthy lunch ideas.
He made face while he at the carrots but, he did eat them. In fact he said they weren’t that bad.I keep telling him that healthy bounding bunnies who eat carrots have wonderful eye sight. My husband isn’t big on carrots and he has worn glasses for years. I am hoping JDaniel will make that connection between the need to eat carrots or decide he would like to see the world the way a bouncing bunny can.

Here are some more fun lunches and snacks filled with healthy lunch ideas:

Apple Chicken Salad Bento

Butterflies in a Bento

Christmas Tree Themed Bento

Disclaimer: If carrots really made him sick, I won’t keep trying to get him to eat them.

St. Patrick’s Day Activity Round Up

March 16, 2013 By Deirdre

Whether you are looking for a St. Patrick’s Day craft, game or learning activity, I think you will find a wide variety to choose from in this post. There are 15 different activities that come from nine different blog posts displayed in the collage. We had a wonderful time creating, learning and experimenting to create this posts. I hope you will too.

St. Patrick’s Day Activity Collection

The counting objects in books activity, hair gel letter practice bag and the paper plate emotions spinner. ( He is the third activity in the third row) All came from a post called St. Patrick’s Day Activities: Part One.

The three sensory activities at the end of the first row all came from a post called St. Patrick’s day: Part Two. We had the best time digging for shamrocks and stone potatoes in the the third activity in that row. Then we made a thatched roof house out of play dough and straws. Finally we transferred sticks using chopsticks.

The first three activities in the second row come from a post called Science for Kids- Experiments with Green. We painted with a magnet and a paperclip, painted with homemade chalk paint and made a borax shamrock.

The fourth activity in the second row is a watercolor rainbow my son painted to go along with a St. Patrick’s Day story I wrote. The post was called. Walking on Watery Way Toward Treasure.

The last activity in the second row is one my son and I did at the grocery store. I called the post Seeing Green at the Grocery Store. We had the best time looking for green foods that match the paint chip we brought with us.

We dyed carnations green and orange to match the colors of the Irish Flag in a post called St. Patrick’s Day- Read.Explore.Learn. You will see the fun vases we used in the first picture in the third row.

The goat puppet was made for a post called {An Irish Tale} King Puck- Read.Explore.Learn. King Puck is a festival in Ireland. During the festival a goat is selected to be the king for the year.

Creating a trap for the leprechaun was a blast. My son loved creating pulley and decorating an old clementine box.

Painting with ice cubes was an adventure that I shared in a post called Coloring for Kids: Ice Cube Rainbow Painting.

If you are looking for a special St. Patrick’s Day snack or lunch, I shared a post called 8 St. Patrick’s Day Snack and Lunches. I hope you will check them out.

An Irish Tale – King Puck Learning Activities

March 15, 2013 By Deirdre

King Puck I had never heard of the King Puck Festival in Killorglin before. JDaniel and I learned about it together when we read the book King Puck. The festival takes place every year in August. One of the highlights of the festival is picking a local goat to be King Puck for the year. In this Irish tale a lonely farmer has no one to talk to but his goat. He not only talks to his goat, but he reads to it as well. He reads the same books over and over again. He soon tires of the tale as do the fairies that gather to listen to him read at night.The fairies decide to do something to help the farmer and they cast a spell on the goat. The spell allows the goat to talk. The farmer is so happy to have someone to talk to.

Later he finds a flier about the King Puck Festival and decides to enter his goat in the contest. You will have to read the book to find out who wins and what the winner selects. I will give you a clue. The winner picks something that will help him read, explore, and learn.

What did we do to explore King Puck?

Sock Puppet

An Irish Tale - King Puck Learning Activities

Puppets are a great retelling tool. I decided to make JDaniel a King Puck sock puppet much like the Fox in Socks puppet I made for him last year. We used it for retelling and acting out the story.Number Sequencing

The goats line up to be judged in the King Puck contest. We lined up goats in number order. I am not sure that there were eighteen goats in the contest. We decided we need to have eighteen goats lines up on our kitchen table.

If JDaniel were older or had a better grasp on numbers, here are some other ways we could have explored number concepts with the goats.

Sorted by even and odd numbers.
Used the goats to make number sentences.
Place the correct numbers before and after the number placed on the table
Created word problems based on the goats

If you like this King Puck activity, here are some more book inspired learning activities:

How to Teach a Slug to Read

Sparky the Fire Dog Book Activities

Quest to Trap the Leprechaun in a Homemade Trap

March 13, 2013 By Deirdre

how to make a leprechaun trap with trap ideas

We have been talking about leprechaun at our house for years, but we have never tried to trap the leprechaun that keeps coming up in the stories I tell JDaniel. That is until this year. This year we created a leprechaun trap to see if there might really be one in our town.

Steps We Took to Build Our Leprechaun Trap

Quest to Trap the Leprechaun in a Homemade Trap

We dug through our recycling bin to find the perfect box to use for the trap and came upon an old clementine orange crate. It was just the perfect size for the trap and it had holes in the bottom that we could use to create a trap for the leprechaun.

We covered the top and sides of the box with green, brown, and tan shamrocks. I thought it would be fun to give the box a camouflage look. After all we were trying to camouflage the trap from the leprechaun.

Then we created a trap using a pulley with an applesauce cup attached to it. The pulley was made of a piece of yarn wrapped attached to an old spool. The other end of the string was placed through one of the holes in the back of the crate. The old spool was slipped onto a straw that had a pipe cleaner wrapped around it. The straw with pipe cleaner was placed through holes in the back of the crate. The ends of the pipe cleaner were used to secure the straw in place by spreading them out.

The end of the string behind the crate was pulled up slowly to raise the cup and then the end of the string was tucked underneath the crate. JDaniel put in some items he thinks are treasures to test it out.After a few attempts at raising the string, we added pipe cleaner segments to the ends of the spool to keep the string from coming off the spool and tangling on the straw.

Then we painted the box. We should have painted the box before we did the pulley tests, but we did it afterwards. We did remove the pulley system before we painted the inside of the box. The box was painted completely green on the inside. I thought it would be pretty.

The only real problem with the leprechaun trap is that there won’t be someone around to pull the leprechaun up in the middle of the night. Well, there might be. Dad may be up to have his midnight snack. JDaniel drew him an illustration of how the trap works. You will notice the leprechaun approaching the trap at the bottom of the page. I am to write out directions on how the trap work so my husband will know what to do.

The leprechaun trap won’t be tested out until St. Patrick’s Day. I have heard that is when leprechauns are most active. We will just have to wait and see. If we do catch one or temporarily trap one, I sure hope he leaves JDaniel a treat.

I promise to post how our leprechaun trap works out on our Facebook page on Sunday. I hope I will have little man to share with you.

Here are some of the stories we have told about leprechaun. JDaniel told me a few years ago that I ran over one in my car. I shared that adventure in a post called I Did Not Kill a Leprechaun. To this day I stand by my innocence. The thud JDaniel heard under my care was not a leprechaun.This post is linked to Mrs. Matlock’s Alphabe Thursday.

What is a Golden Birthday? – Robot Party and Cake

March 12, 2013 By Deirdre

JDaniel celebrate his birthday several days last week. I guess if it is your Golden Birthday it tends to be celebrated many times due to the fact that it comes only once in your lifetime. What is a Golden Birthday? Well, JDaniel celebrates his birthday on the 5th of March and he did turn five on that day. I shared with you last week his Golden Birthday breakfast. Along with sharing the food creations from that breakfast, I wanted to share the cakes I made for his class and his Chuck E. Cheese party.

Robot Birthday Cake

I looked forward to putting together his golden robot birthday cake all week. I found a robot cake on the Betty Crocker website and tried to create one like it. It was so easy to put together, but took me a little longer than I thought it would.The cake is a simple yellow cake. The icing is caramel and was created stir in flavor packet and canned frosting. Before frosting the cake I cut 2/3 off the top and used it for the body. I also cut a narrow sliver off the body to use for his feet. Everything but his cupcake hands came from a cake made in a 9×12 pan. His hands are made from two cupcakes. Oh! and his ears or head bolts are made of a cupcake cut in half.

Once the cake was frosted, licorice to connect this hands and feet to his body. Extra licorice Skiddles, Life Savers in gummy form, and golden Oreo like cookies to create his buttons and facial features. I had a blast creating them.

Robot Cupcakes

JDaniel took these cupcakes to school on Wednesday for snack. He doesn’t go to school on Tuesday so, we had to wait a day to celebrate his birthday with his class. I asked, “What is a golden birthday?” They hadn’t heard of it before and they thought is was cool.I used the same cake mix and frosting combination to make his his cupcakes that I later used to make his cake. The robots also had the same licorice mouths. These mouths were a lot more serious than the one on the cake. A food maker was used to draw eyeballs on the Skittles. Marshmallow were cut in half to make the robot’s head bolts or ears.

Golden Breakfast

You may remember that JDaniel’s Golden Birthday Breakfast was filled with a variety of golden foods. He had golden apple parfaits made up of apple pie filling, yogurt, and Golden Grahams cereal layered in a cup. He also had doughnut holes served the shape of a five and apple juice. Golden Birthday Robot Treat Bags

Last week I shared a post called 23 Moms Share Treat Bags Ideas with you. I loved so many of their ideas that I tried to incorporate them into JDaniel’s treat bag.

I didn’t buy special bags for his treats instead I used plain zip lock bags. They were so easy to seal and parents didn’t have to deal with ribbons and party bag. They weren’t pretty, but they were functional.

Into the bags I placed a thank you card for coming to the party, a robot sticker book, robot stickers, fruit chews, and two fruit strips. I didn’t what to include candy or plastic trinkets The moms in the treat bag post had said they didn’t like to see them in the bag.

The parents seemed pleased with this and so were the kids.

I think this is my favorite party theme so far!Did celebrate your golden birthday?

8 St.Patrick’s Day Snacks and Lunches

March 11, 2013 By Deirdre

I thought I would share with you several of the St. Patrick’s Day snacks and lunches I have created. Half of them are from posts I wrote for this blog and the other half are from posts I wrote for other blogs. I hope you will take a moment and explore the posts that they were originally shared on.

Here are the St. Patrick’s Day Snack’s and Lunches

>The leprechaun face in vegetables is from a post I wrote for the Iowa Farmer’s Wife called Getting Children to Eat New Foods: St. Patrick Loves Veggies.

The colored pepper rainbow over homemade spinach hummus is from post I wrote for Kid’s Activities Blog called Crafting a Healthy St. Patrick’s Day Snack.

JDaniel recently had a special St. Patrick’s Day lunch with a spinach pizza served in a bento box. He loved it! I think you will too.

St. Patrick’s Day Cinnamon Rolls is a post I wrote for Kid’s Activities blog. It will featured tomorrow on their blog. They are simple to make and yummy to eat.

JDaniel loved this fruit and yogurt parfait. It was super easy to make and he said it was delicious.

Last year I shared how to make Simple Irish Soda Bread on No Time for Flashcards.

We had a St. Patrick’s muffin tin a couple of years ago that featured a leprechaun turkey burger. The post was called St. Patrick Needs Fruit.

JDaniel had an Irish Symbols Snack for Muffin Tin Monday. It featured the symbols from the Claddagh ring. They stand for love, loyalty and friendship.

You will find more St. Patrick’s Day lunches and snacks on my Food Creations board on Pinterest. Please take a moment to check them out.

What will you have having for lunch or a snack on St. Patrick’s Day?

Truck Party Learning Activities for Kids

March 8, 2013 By Deirdre

This week we looked at a book called Truck Party! since it was JDaniel’s birthday this week. Truck Party is a book about truck planning a surprise party for one of their friends. Each truck has a special job to do to get the party ready including the car carrier who bring some of the guests to the party. It is great to see the trucks all working towards a common goal.

Truck Party Learning Activities for Kids

This is a short board book, but JDaniel still loved to look at it. I think he really liked the pictures of the trucks in this book. They are very whimsical. I love reading board books at the end of a long day just before bedtime. They don’t take long to read and in the case of the book had enough content to talk about what was happening in the book.What did We Do to Explore the book Truck Party? Color Matching

JDaniel helped me gather together a wide variety of vehicles from his room for this activity. We then matched them sorted them by color onto work mats I had colored.

Despite much searching, we didn’t find very many blue vehicles as you can see in the picture. We found only a few more red vehicles and one of them came out on his bucket of tub toys. There were tons of yellow vehicles. JDaniel had a contruction site birthday party a few years ago and I think that is where most of these came from.

After matching the vehicles to the right color on the mat, we counted them. It took four times as long to count the yellow vehicles.

Vehicle Number Matching

After sorting the vehicles, we put numbers on the bottom of them. There were two of each of the numbers so we could play a number matching game with the vehicles. Once the numbers were on the bottoms of the vehicles, JDaniel had to try to match them.
I should have printed out smaller numbers. These were way too big for the vehicles.