FMP: Week 2

So, you're probably wondering why I've been doing all this "repping" for Fresh Meal Plan. The ilovekickboxing that I go to is offering a full 4 weeks of meals in exchange for reviewing the FMP meals this month. I didn't have to try it for 3 weeks, but I wanted too. I'm on my second week and will receive one more this week. 

So... here are more of my thoughts of some of the FMP meals.

So, I love Caesar salad. It was always something that I craved while I was pregnant, with all 3 of my kids. I was excited to try this. I did replace the romaine lettuce with fresher stuff I had just purchased because it was wet and glassy. I didn't want to eat slimy lettuce. I guess it didn't travel well. I'm all about a good Caesar dressing and sometimes it's hard to find. But, I really enjoyed the dressing in this meal.

These eggs were cooked like a hard-boiled egg and with the sauce, I really liked them. I was skeptical about it, but would like to eat it again.

The spinach got wet and wilted underneath the eggs and ham from the juice. I did try the cantaloupe and honeydew, but they aren't flavors that I like. Little Miss did eat the cantaloupe though.

These Strawberry Almond Pancakes were good. I normally don't like things in my pancakes, but the crunch of the almond was nice. I made sure not to heat the bacon too much. I think I'm a fan of turkey bacon. There wasn't much strawberry actually. I think it was supposed to a sauce on top of the cream cheese ball.

Chicken Parmesan in the morning.

Ok... so many of the breakfasts that I received this week were pancakes. Two of them were Paleo style pancakes with coconut or almond flour. I did not care for them. The texture was stiff and gritty. The flavor was interesting and bit different, something I can't really describe, but they definitely needed something sweet on top of them. I couldn't eat much of the Paleo pancakes actually. They were just too different for me. I couldn't get past the texture.

Anyway, some things that I love about FMP are the easiness of it. The meals come in handy when the kids are at school and I'm running around doing drop off, pick up and errands. It takes all the thinking out of healthy eating.
I also enjoy how it has made me feel. I have noticed that making better eating choices have been easier. Don't get me wrong, I still snack on junk... but I can snack minimally instead of all the time. My stomach hasn't been hurting as much.
Working out has been more beneficial. With the ilovekickboxing regime, the high-intensity workouts needs proper nutrition. While eating FMP, I can workout without getting overly tired during and after. I have the right energy to burn and still feel like I can do other things after I'm finished. Burning over 600 calories every workout is a lot of work and FMP provides a healthy, easy way to replenish my body.
I am learning what kinds of FMP meals I don't like, but overall, I have enjoyed most of them.

Discover the Desert with Boots

I've had a pretty rough past few weeks. It's been difficult to do anything besides sleep. One of the things that has suffered was our Mother Goose Time lessons. I was completely deterred a few weeks ago when we reached the protein day in our Food and Fitness unit. I could not stand the sight or thought of raw meats. I've been having trouble with any type of food... raging hormones and heightened senses will do crazy things to you. Anyway, we fell out of 'routine' and skipped this month all together. I was pretty bummed since I had so much extra stuff to add to our Mother Goose Time curriculum. But, I've been feeling a tad better the last few days and received our March curriculum from Mother Goose Time: Discover the Desert, so I decided to get a head start on that instead...

In my MGT blogging group we've been talking about Process vs Product based art. Its been a great conversation.What's the difference? Process based art has more to do with letting the child lead in the craft making, decide what to do and how to do it... the end result doesn't really matter. Product based art is when the 'teacher' expects the child to make the craft/project exactly how it was intended to be or the adult basically does all the work for the child so that it turns out 'perfectly'.

Mother Goose Time provides great opportunities for the children who are participating, to use the process based method quite often and usually encourages it. I'll admit, for awhile I was helping too much. I would do things for the boys because it 'wasn't right' or it was taking too long. I wanted the boys projects to look perfect.

But, then one day, I had an Aha moment and decided that if I was doing the craft for them, they were not learning anything. The only thing that it showed the boys was that what they wanted to do and could do was not good enough. So, we began talking about creative freedom more often and I kept my hands out of their projects. By doing that, I've learned that Mr A has his own vision... sometimes he wants it to look like the example on the instruction sheet and other times he wants to do his own thing. If Mr Z actually wants to participate in the project, he likes to slop things together and is done rather quickly.

Anyway, here is how our first craft of the new unit went...

While the boys painted, we talked about Boots. Why you need to wear boots sometimes, who wears boots, what kinds of boots there are and why cowboys would be wearing boots in the desert.

It was decided that cowboy boots are sturdy and protect the person wearing them from snake bites, cactus needles, mud or poop.

Mr A said that he wished he could put all of our paper boots together somehow to make a boot he could actually wear.

The boys painted their boots for quite awhile. They prefer paint brushes to the porcupine balls that come with craft materials in the daily pack. I tried to explain that it provided a different texture of paint on the paper. They both tried the little balls for a minute, but went straight back to the brushes. I think because they are a little awkward to hold.

Mr Z wanted to help put more unnecessary paint into the bin. I think he got almost the entire container in there.

We use the front door as our art display. It's the only large magnetic space we have and it works out great. Its pretty empty now with just their finished boots, but by the end of the month, it will be filled with their various MGT crafts.

At the end of the month though, what do you do with all of your kid's projects? How do you document what the kids have done or accomplished throughout their lessons?
I keep most of them. I know I shouldn't because it takes up so much space. But, I got in trouble for recycling the boys gecko headbands from our rainforest unit in November of 2014. Mr A still talks about that headband.
Now, most everything makes it into the box. I just have a bankers/file box for now to keep their crafts in. If I was smart enough and thought of it sooner, I would have labeled the back of each one with the child's name, the unit it was from, month and year and a few skills or conversations. But, I did not think of that earlier. I could go back and do it now... I think I only have the name of the kid on the back. That seems like a lot of work though. I'm not great at documenting. It would be funny in several years to have written evidence of what was learned or said. There's always to time to start that with the next project.

Fruit with Food and Fitness

Fruit is my favorite food group! I love the sweet, citrus flavors. Luckily, I usually always have a ton of fruit in the fridge. We cut some open to look at the their insides and seeds. Mr A noticed that most of the ones we looked at had super tiny seeds. The fruit he found the most different though was the strawberry, because the seeds are on the outside of it. When, the boys were done looking at the fruit, we shoved a bunch into the blender to make a smoothie for breakfast.

While they were tossing fruits in, I asked Mr A if he knew the difference between a fruit and vegetable. He said no and couldn't think of a guess so I explained...
Vegetables are part of the part: the root, stem/stalk, leaf, or flower. Carrots are the root. Lettuce is a leaf. Broccoli is the flower. Celery is the stalk.
Fruits are the ovary of the plant and that it holds the seeds to make more plants. All fruits have seeds. Which also means that pumpkin, cucumber, tomatoes, bell peppers are actually fruits... but because of their flavor, people prefer to call them vegetables. Vegetables are usually savory, not sweet like fruits.
Some of that discussion, Mr A got, most he didn't really care about. Meanwhile, Mr Z was tossing in all sorts of fruits that we had out on the counter.

 We found some of the small seeds in the smoothie before we drank them. It was delicious.

In the daily packet we got some foam hearts and fruit baskets. Mr Z worked on making strawberries with his 2 colors of hearts. Mr A used his to make the letter "j" and Mr Z copied a few minutes later. While making some more heart strawberries I asked Mr A if strawberries are always red while growing on the plant. He said, No, they're green and white too. Then turn red when they are ripe.
Most of these questions that I ask while we are doing activities are prompted by the Teacher Guide. While the lesson is pretty much written out for you, there are questions to ask to help with focus and discussion. It certainly does help me. While 'teaching' I keep these questions in mind and ask as they fit into what we are doing. Sometimes the questions lead to completely off topic discussions that loop back around to the lesson. Sometimes they are straight forward. By that I mean, the questions are a great guide to lead the lesson. But, sometimes the answers I receive are random and I have to navigate back to the original question somehow. Other times, Mr A's answers are spot on. Anyway, it just makes it so much easier to have a guide that is already written out to help lead the activity... but where it goes from there is an adventure sometimes.

These are such fun little posters that I had on hand to add to our Mother Goose Time curriculum. The boys love them: Farrah Fruit, Jane Grain and Reggie Veggie. There are a few more characters for the other food groups, but we haven't gotten there yet. These help them visualize and connect with the food group in a fun way. They are always coming back to these little guys to talk about them.

Several months ago, these were a manipulative provided by Mother Goose Time. I completely forgot which unit they were from though. These fruit beads were another perfect addition to our fruit day. We practiced stringing up the pattern of the month with different arrangements of the fruits: ABBC.

Grains: Food and Fitness

A new unit with Mother Goose Time is always exciting. February we are learning about Food and Fitness. Week 1 is all about the different food groups and we started off with Grains.

One of the things that I was able to add to our Mother Goose Time curriculum are these sight word readers. The boys each had their own books to color. I have a larger master copy that we read together. The focus words are I and like. After we read the story, Mr A colored his book and circled the word 'like' on each page. 

Another extra from the USDA that I received was this food groups poster. The boys found the grains section and named all the foods that they saw and liked in that area. Our Jane Grain poster is above the large poster.

Jane Grain is the character at the end of the sight word reader. She's made up of different grains. The boys named all of her different ingredients.
While Mr A was coloring his book we talked about where grains came from. His first answer was from the store. So, I had to be more specific in the question and ask before the grains get to the store, where do they come from. The grains come from a plant on a farm.
We talked about how the seeds from plants get ground to make a powder which makes bread, tortillas cereal or pasta. Just the other day, we went to a fair and Mr A ground some corn type seed to make a powder for tortillas. Using the mortar and pestle for smashing the grains was too much for him, so I had to help finish.

 Making new nametags.

 Craft of the day: Sandwich Art.

I got out blank pieces of paper so that the slices of bread could be glued on and we could hang the whole thing on the door. Mr Z glued one slice on then decided that the second piece needed to be glued on top... because that is how a sandwich is made. I thought it was pretty funny. Kids logic is so awesome.

Mr A finished his sandwich up and glued on all of his toppings... cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, and ham. He didn't want to put the oats on.

He didn't want to glue his to the paper either and glued his sandwich together also... so he could eat it.

 Mr A found the grains section on our theme poster and pointed to his favorite thing on the topic poster. He chose that weird looking roll because it looks like cereal to him.

 We made the Pillsbury rolls for a snack and ate all of them.

Prepping Next Month: My Routine

I'm not much for strict routines. I've never had a set schedule... well, I've never been able to stick to one. But, I have noticed that I do the same thing each month when we receive a new Mother Goose Time curriculum box.
Almost as soon as it's delivered, I open the box and look through the individual packaged bags and especially look for the manipulatives.
I make a huge mess and make a pile of the 20 daily packages. I open them carefully one by one and pull out anything I want to get laminated. Its usually a huge pile. I definitely get the circle time materials laminated like the calendar, shape/color, theme poster, letter flags and number leaves.

From what I pull out of the daily bags, I write the number of corresponding day in the corner so I know where to put it back.

Then I head to Lakeshore Learning Store to get my pile laminated. This time while I was there I was asked if I was just going to invest in a lamination machine for myself. It just saves me space not having my own.
When I get home I sit at the table and cut apart all the pages. It normally takes about an hour to get it all cut and then sorted back into the right daily bags.

February is all about Food and Fitness with Mother Goose Time. So, now that I have all the materials laminated, cut and sorted back into their bags, I look for additional resources and books. I gather what extra things I can find to enhance the curriculum and add it to the box to save for the day. This month I have plenty of extra things actually and I'm a little overwhelmed by it. I have a whole curriculum of My Plate from the USDA to work into the MGT curriculum. It includes books, sight word readers, posters, recipes and so much more. As overwhelming as it is, I'm excited. Hopefully the boys will enjoy this unit too.