Even when it’s hot, kids love to help out in the kitchen.
These snacks are great for teaching children kitchen skills and kitchen independence. They require no cooking, and they are easy enough for a 2-year-old or 3-year-old to help and 5-year-olds to manage most of the steps with assistance. Responsible older children can make them easily by themselves.
Toddlers need assistance, but it’s essential to let them help and learn when they want to do it. If you keep shooing them away while working in the kitchen, they absorb “Go Away” messages. And that often makes them resist learning to help when they are older. A 2-year-old or 3-year-old can learn safe-cutting skills if you teach them to cut something easy, like slicing banana rounds with a dinner knife.
That said, in these recipes, cutting with sharp knives and using an electric mixer are jobs only for adults and older children who have had a lot of practice under supervision and have proven themselves to be responsible.
Graham Cracker Faces:Spread graham crackers with peanut butter and make funny faces on the crackers with raisins, chocolate chips, carrot curls, coconut, etc.
Apple or Banana Slice Delight: Spread apple and/or banana slices with softened cream cheese or peanut butter.
Ants on a Log:Cut celery in short lengths, spread the cupped side with peanut butter and add “ants” (raisins)
Fruit kabobs: Gather and prepare an assortment of fruit and place each kind in a bowl – pineapple chunks (cut fresh or from a can, drained), cantaloupe or honeydew melon balls or chunks, sliced bananas, and washed grapes with the stems pulled off. Push one piece of each kind of fruit onto a bamboo skewer. Repeat your pattern until the skewer is full.
Toothpick treat: No bamboo skewers? Arrange the fruit on a plate and let kids eat it with toothpicks. Add chunks of cheese, pieces of cooked cold meat, or sandwiches cut up in one-inch squares to make this a whole, balanced meal. Toothpick meals are fun for kids to prepare and eat as a special treat. Somehow, spearing food with toothpicks makes ordinary food special.
Cereal balls:In a large bowl, thoroughly mix ½ cup peanut butter, 1/3 cup honey, ½ cup flaked coconut, ½ cup of your children’s favorite cereal, & any popular extras you have on hand, like raisins or banana chips. Pour another 1 ½ cups of your children’s favorite cereal into a second large bowl. Shape spoonfuls of the first mixture into balls and roll them in the cereal in the second bowl. Chill and eat.
Homemade popsicles:Pour fruit juice into paper cups. Place a clean plastic spoon into each cup for a popsicle holder. The spoon will freeze at an angle, but that just gives juice popsicles a little more character. Freeze. When the popsicle is frozen, tear off the paper, or if you want to recycle the cup, run it under warm water and gently pull it on the spoon.
Let your children experiment by combining juices—cranberry and orange are tasty combinations, for example. You can also try other things, such as chocolate milk-flavored yogurt. A great yogurt combination is 2 cups plain yogurt, a 6-oz. can of undiluted frozen orange juice, and 1 teaspoon vanilla.
Even plain water works in a pinch. It makes a true icicle and cools you off marvelously when the temperature soars.
Frozen yogurt pie: In a mixer, whip together two 8-oz. cartons of yogurt and one 8-oz. carton of Cool Whip.™ Pour into a prepared graham cracker crust and freeze until set. This is especially tasty when made with lemon or berry-flavored yogurt. You can spoon the yogurt and Cool Whip™ mixture into paper cups for lusciously rich popsicles instead of making this recipe into a pie.
Personalized trail mix:Visit a natural food store or the natural food department at a supermarket to buy your ingredients: nuts, dried fruit (raisins, apricots, dates, apples), granola or muesli, and carob or chocolate chips. Mix everything in a big bowl and spoon it into sandwich bags. Take it along on a hike or set it out for a snack. Somehow, trail mix that kids make themselves tastes better to them than what you buy for them already mixed in the store.
Frozen bananas:Slice bananas in half and insert ice cream sticks in the cut ends. Freeze on a cookie sheet or pan and store in ziplock bags. When you want to eat them, allow the bananas to thaw slightly, and dip them into different toppings, such as peanut butter, finely chopped nuts, flavored yogurt, coconut, or caramel ice cream topping.
Frozen banana drink:Peel a banana, wrap it in plastic, and freeze it. Blend the frozen banana with ½ cup half-and-half, 2 tablespoons honey, and 1 teaspoon vanilla in an electric blender until smooth.
Probably all fathers fail their children to some degree. Claude Powers failed his child, then backed up and tried to make up for it.
Claude started out as a good father. But when his own father and brother died a couple years apart in the late 1950s, he started drinking heavily.
Then the bottle took over.
And of course, that affected his son Dennis. Because Dennis, like all children, needed his father to weave three consistent messages of unconditional acceptance into the fabric of his life:
To me you are special.
No matter what, I love you.
You’re part of me; we belong together.
When Dennis was about 12,
his dad became a sneaky bottle-hider who told lies, wasted the family income in bars and dumped his farming responsibilities on his son.
So instead of sending his son a father’s reassuring messages of faithful love and acceptance, Claude sent Dennis the message of the alcoholic:
“Alcohol is more important than you are. You will always be relatively unimportant.”
Dennis stifled the pain, avoided his dad, and proved to his small community that he was important after all. He did exceptionally well in school, collecting enough high school credits to leave for the university one year early.
In college he kept in touch with his parents and made sure the family relationship appeared fine to relatives and neighbors. In reality, he buried his anger and walled himself off emotionally from his dad.
But God heals broken hearts. Fathers and sons can reconcile.
A dozen years after Claude’s alcoholism took serious hold, Dennis’s parents discovered Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon, and Claude started sobering up through AA’s 12-Step Program.
At about that same time Dennis began attending church and hearing about forgiveness.
Since the relationship was not damaged overnight, healing did not occur overnight.
Claude worked on his end of the problem by giving up alcohol and making amends as best as he could.
Dennis worked out his part by accepting his father’s efforts and struggling through the process of forgiveness.
But in the end, the really deep healing occurred nearly twenty years later.
And curiously, the only part Claude played in that final act of the drama was to grow old and lose his mind.
Claude became a victim of Alzheimer’s disease. At first, he merely grew forgetful. Then, as his brain cells died in patches, he lost his smile, his charm, his good judgment, and his table manners.
He forgot how to dress, how to shave, how to bathe.
About the time he forgot how to talk, he lost control of his body and had to wear diapers.
Then, every night, Dennis would walk over to his parents' mobile home, lead his 80-year-old father into the bathroom, and peel off his diaper.
Then he toileted him, undressed him, and bathed him.
In this process, somehow, Dennis found his healing.
When the father became like a child, the child became his own father’s father.
For Dennis, forgiveness became complete through the work of his own hands as he lived out the messages of blessing he had needed so much as a teen to receive from his father:
To me you are special.
No matter what, I love you.
You’re part of me; we belong together.
A prayer for today
Dear Heavenly Father, I need your blessing, too. As I read the Bible, father me. Help me hear your message of love, acceptance and grace for me. Amen.
I used to babysit five-year-old Jacob when his mom was at work. One day, when we were popping popcorn, he asked, “Wouldn’t it be funny if you made a pie out of popcorn?”
I agreed. That would certainly be funny.
“Wouldn’t it be funny if people ate the kernels that don’t pop and threw away the ones that pop?” I asked.
Jacob laughed. Yep. He thought that would be funny.
And so we took off on a game of “Wouldn’t It Be Funny If...?”
I had introduced the game to Jacob a couple weeks before when we were waiting in line for a long time at a checkout counter. Waiting around for popcorn to pop must have triggered his memory to try that game again.
Life is full of waiting times for children:
Long waits in line or at the doctor’s office, monotonous plane trips, tedious rides through town in the car….
Anywhere Games are games you carry around in your head and use to amuse yourself with a friend during a tedious wait. (Without resorting to screens.)
If you play them around the house first, you learn them by heart.
That way, you can remember them when you’re stuck somewhere with nothing to do.
Here are a few tried and true Anywhere Games:
“Wouldn’t it be funny if...?” is an imagination stretcher that 4- and 5-year-olds especially enjoy. You take turns dreaming up outrageous possibilities like, “Wouldn’t it be funny if people barked and dogs talked?”
“What would happen if...?” is a natural follow-up game. “If people barked and dogs talked, then dogs would take their people for walks on a leash.”
“What’s missing?” is a simple game for toddlers that uses some of the contents in your purse or pockets.
Spread out a few objects, such as a comb, a compact, a pencil, and a penny, on a flat surface like your lap or a chair.
Help the toddler name each item. If she wants, she can touch and handle them, too.
Then, tell her to close her eyes while you remove one item. After she opens her eyes, ask her to tell you what’s missing. Make the game easier by using fewer items. Make it harder by adding more.
“Grab Bag” is another simple game for amusing a toddler.
You play it the same way you play “What’s Missing?” except that instead of telling toddlers to close their eyes, you let them handle the objects they name and place them into your coat pocket or a small bag.
You jiggle the contents, and then they reach into the bag to feel the item, guess what it is, and pull it out to see if they guessed right.
“This is My Nose” is for older kids.
It looks confusing, but the rules are simple.
Each player points to the body part the other player mentioned and calls it something else. The one who gets confused and makes the first mistake loses that round.
Thus: “This is my nose,” he says, pointing to his elbow.
“This is my chin,” she replies, pointing to her nose.
So he points to his chin. “This is my belly button,” he answers.
When both players get good, they can speed up the game with a counting rule. Each player must point to the right place and give it the wrong name before the other player counts to ten.
“Make-a-Story” can be played with two or ten.
Players take turns, each supplying one word to make up a short story. The more colorful and unusual the words, the better the story.
“Once upon a frog, there crouched a giggly purple flea...”
“Twenty Questions” builds the family’s logic and reasoning skills.
First, the players agree on the general category for a mystery subject. The category can be a Famous Person, Something in Our House, An Animal in the Bible, or whatever the players decide.
Then, the first player thinks of a specific item or person in that category. The other players try to guess the object or person correctly by using 20 questions or less.
Their questions must have a yes or no answer. By asking good questions, they can narrow down the possibilities until it is time to make a good guess: “Is it Susie’s engagement ring?”
It’s a good idea to track how many questions have been asked on a scrap of paper to cut down on disagreements.
Even when it’s hot, kids love to help out in the kitchen.
These snacks are great for teaching children kitchen skills and kitchen independence. They require no cooking, and they are easy enough for a 2-year-old or 3-year-old to help and 5-year-olds to manage most of the steps with assistance. Responsible older children can make them easily by themselves.
Toddlers need assistance, but it’s essential to let them help and learn when they want to do it. If you keep shooing them away while working in the kitchen, they absorb “Go Away” messages. And that often makes them resist learning to help when they are older. A 2-year-old or 3-year-old can learn safe-cutting skills if you teach them to cut something easy, like slicing banana rounds with a dinner knife.
That said, in these recipes, cutting with sharp knives and using an electric mixer are jobs only for adults and older children who have had a lot of practice under supervision and have proven themselves to be responsible.
Graham Cracker Faces: Spread graham crackers with peanut butter and make funny faces on the crackers with raisins, chocolate chips, carrot curls, coconut, etc.
Apple or Banana Slice Delight: Spread apple and/or banana slices with softened cream cheese or peanut butter.
Ants on a Log: Cut celery in short lengths, spread the cupped side with peanut butter and add “ants” (raisins)
Fruit kabobs: Gather and prepare an assortment of fruit and place each kind in a bowl – pineapple chunks (cut fresh or from a can, drained), cantaloupe or honeydew melon balls or chunks, sliced bananas, and washed grapes with the stems pulled off. Push one piece of each kind of fruit onto a bamboo skewer. Repeat your pattern until the skewer is full.
Toothpick treat: No bamboo skewers? Arrange the fruit on a plate and let kids eat it with toothpicks. Add chunks of cheese, pieces of cooked cold meat, or sandwiches cut up in one-inch squares to make this a whole, balanced meal. Toothpick meals are fun for kids to prepare and eat as a special treat. Somehow, spearing food with toothpicks makes ordinary food special.
Cereal balls: In a large bowl, thoroughly mix ½ cup peanut butter, 1/3 cup honey, ½ cup flaked coconut, ½ cup of your children’s favorite cereal, & any popular extras you have on hand, like raisins or banana chips. Pour another 1 ½ cups of your children’s favorite cereal into a second large bowl. Shape spoonfuls of the first mixture into balls and roll them in the cereal in the second bowl. Chill and eat.
Homemade popsicles: Pour fruit juice into paper cups. Place a clean plastic spoon into each cup for a popsicle holder. The spoon will freeze at an angle, but that just gives juice popsicles a little more character. Freeze. When the popsicle is frozen, tear off the paper, or if you want to recycle the cup, run it under warm water and gently pull it on the spoon.
Let your children experiment by combining juices—cranberry and orange are tasty combinations, for example. You can also try other things, such as chocolate milk-flavored yogurt. A great yogurt combination is 2 cups plain yogurt, a 6-oz. can of undiluted frozen orange juice, and 1 teaspoon vanilla.
Even plain water works in a pinch. It makes a true icicle and cools you off marvelously when the temperature soars.
Frozen yogurt pie: In a mixer, whip together two 8-oz. cartons of yogurt and one 8-oz. carton of Cool Whip.™ Pour into a prepared graham cracker crust and freeze until set. This is especially tasty when made with lemon or berry-flavored yogurt. You can spoon the yogurt and Cool Whip™ mixture into paper cups for lusciously rich popsicles instead of making this recipe into a pie.
Personalized trail mix: Visit a natural food store or the natural food department at a supermarket to buy your ingredients: nuts, dried fruit (raisins, apricots, dates, apples), granola or muesli, and carob or chocolate chips. Mix everything in a big bowl and spoon it into sandwich bags. Take it along on a hike or set it out for a snack. Somehow, trail mix that kids make themselves tastes better to them than what you buy for them already mixed in the store.
Frozen bananas: Slice bananas in half and insert ice cream sticks in the cut ends. Freeze on a cookie sheet or pan and store in ziplock bags. When you want to eat them, allow the bananas to thaw slightly, and dip them into different toppings, such as peanut butter, finely chopped nuts, flavored yogurt, coconut, or caramel ice cream topping.
Frozen banana drink: Peel a banana, wrap it in plastic, and freeze it. Blend the frozen banana with ½ cup half-and-half, 2 tablespoons honey, and 1 teaspoon vanilla in an electric blender until smooth.
© Becky Cerling Powers 2024 Reprint with attribution only https://beckypowers.com/
For more insights from Becky Cerling Powers see her book Sticky Fingers, Sticky Minds: quick reads for helping kids thrive in the Bookstore