Playing with Spices

Cooking is one of the most valuable skills you can pass on to your children. Introducing kids to a variety of different foods and helping them to understand how to use them from a young age will help to ensure that children grow up with a healthy relationship with food.
As an important part of my children's food education I want them to grow up knowing how to use spices and to be confident with experimenting with them in their cooking. Spices add so much to food, not only do they make food delicious and exciting, they also add a valuable set of nutrients that have long been proven to have wonderful nutritive and healing potential.
Cold rainy days provide the perfect opportunity to get into some creative play in the kitchen so we pulled a bunch of spices out and got our noses, eyes and fingers into some fun play.

Lots of different shapes and sizes.

Busy work.

Pouring and exploring.

A few of our spices.

And sometimes spices don't smell nice! (Though on second smell she thought the fenugreek was ok)

India and Mio both enjoyed our kitchen play and when we packed up India left the kitchen yelling "that was fun" as she ran off to play with something else.

School Holiday Explorations

I love school holidays! I love having both the girls around all day and just hanging out together. I also love that we have more time to explore fun learning activities. Being the winter school holidays at the moment it's cold and often wet outside meaning we spend at lot more time indoors and we have to get creative with our play. Learning about the human body is something that has not yet been explored at school for India so I've been wanting to delve into that with her for awhile so today we got stuck into some fun learning.

We started by just getting India to lie down on some paper so I could draw around her. We are lucky enough to live close to a paper distributor and we can get some great end rolls of paper from printing machines for quite cheap, so we always have really big sheets of paper to get creative with. Today we just looked at the organs but I'd love to explore other body systems with India as well.