This week was a little harder to put together the books. It seems like a no-brainer, right? Of course there should be plenty of books about breakfast. We found them, and recipes to go with them obviously, but it was a struggle at first.
There were a couple of books that we looked at for pancakes, including Eric Carle's Pancakes, Pancakes, but we went with Pancakes for Supper by Anne Isaacs (illustrated by Mark Teague, who we have already established that I love). I remember my grandmother reading me the story Little Black Sambo, and this is a retelling of that set in tall-tale fashion with Western pioneers. I love Anne Isaacs Swamp Angel books, and this one is just as good. (Almost - I really like Swamp Angel). We made chocolate pancakes from scratch with the children. Really easy. All they have to do is measure and dump. If you're feeling brave they can help pour and flip the pancakes too. We just topped them with a little powdered sugar, but honestly? They really didn't need anything.
The most obvious choice (to me) for this program was to make green eggs and read Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss. (Totally unrelated and random side note: as I was reading back through this, I realized how big of a nerd I am because I originally typed Doctor Seuss instead of Dr. Seuss. Whovians will understand me.) I'll admit, we didn't do any ham, but I don't think that really bothered anyone. With this one I had a set of twins help me with this dish. They have been coming to my programs for quite awhile now, and man are they a handful. I let them tag team, so one cracked all one dozen eggs and beat them for me (and no shells ended up in them! :D). Then the other came up and I had her use scissors to cut the herbs up into the eggs (chives and parsley) and add a couple drops of blue food coloring. That's right, blue! Remember your color theory, people! I think I let her start to scramble them, but she wasn't too keen on that part, so I finished that up. The kids were not as keen on this one - mainly because they were a little freaked out at watching the girl cut up "grass" into their eggs. The ones that tried it enjoyed it though. This is one that we had to make right there in front of everyone. Most other recipes we do the "magic of TV" trick and have stuff premade so they can sample it.
Finally, we rounded out with making strawberry shortcake overnight oatmeal, and telling Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Or rather, we did another one of our interactive retellings where we had the kids help us tell the story. It should be a familiar one to most kids, and it's a good test of comprehension and retention skills. Since I needed strawberries chopped up, I had an older child help me with that part, while I had a younger one help me mix the rest of the ingredients. As with most other recipes, we premade this so it would be ready in time. I had the stuff made in the program for breakfast the next day. Unfortunately, the girl spilled a *bit* too much salt into the batch, and you could really taste it. :/
We were really lucky this summer in that our local newspaper was super enthusiastic about covering our programs. A reporter was here that day, and we had a nice front page, full-color spread about the program. Here's a couple of the photos:
As my friend Lacey texted to me the morning this came out, I was "hardcore reading that book". Lol.
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