Frugal Tuesday Tip--Freeze Bananas

I bake a lot of banana bread when I am baking for the farmers' market in the summer.  I do also bake it some when it is not farmers' market season, though my kids would say not enough.  I don't like to pay 50 cents a pound for bananas.  I also don't like my kitchen to smell like rotten bananas.  So I stalk my local grocery store.  Their policy is to discount bananas when there is no longer any green on the skin.  Once they are discounted, the customer can purchase a bag of bananas (usually about 2-3 big bunches) for a buck.

I discovered a few years ago how easy it is to freeze bananas.  I peel and freeze the bananas whole in the amounts I need for a recipe.  If you need 2-3 bananas for a loaf a bread, freeze 2-3 bananas together in a baggy.  Pull a baggy of bananas out of the freezer the night before you bake.  The bananas with thaw into a brown puddle of mush, but this is perfect for banana bread!  No need to mash the bananas ahead of time.

I am sharing this post with the frugal ladies hosting the Frugal Tuesday Blog Hop.  Head on over to Learning the Frugal Life to see other frugal tips.  Post your own frugal tip on Tuesday and join us!

ETA: I thought I would link up over at Learning the Frugal Life, but I"m having technical issues. So go over there and check out the other tips. Maybe I'll get there next week.

Frustration and Worry

I can really be such a worry-wart if I allow myself.  I try really hard to only worry about things that I can control or change.  I'm a little stuck right now worrying about something that is out of my control.  The what-if's run through my head and I need to get them out of my head so that I don't become paralyzed with worry and forget to enjoy the present.  So here I am letting loose my worry into the world so that I may go about the business of enjoying all the blessings I have in my life.

I am a preschool teacher.  I am employed by a public school in Iowa.  For those of you out-of-staters, Iowa began funding preschool for four-year-olds four years ago.  We have had a change in government and the continued funding of preschool is not looking so hot right now.  This means a big question mark for me for next year, both as a teacher and as a parent of a child who will turn four in a couple of months.

I enjoy my job.  I believe I make a difference in the lives of children and families.  I have wonderful co-workers and colleagues.  The pay is alright and there are decent benefits.  So I worry about all of this changing.  <sigh>

I am a good teacher.  I have many skills, knowledge, and experiences that will make me employable.  I have an early childhood special education endorsement now.  This is a shortage area in Iowa.  I have worked at two preschools that have been accredited by the National Association for the Education of Young Children.  I live in a supportive community and near many supportive friends and family, so I know that even if there is a time period that I am without work we'll be okay.  I just hate change.

I hate that the possibility of change is even there.  There is a wealth of research that shows the experiences a child has before he is five determine so much about his success in school and in life in general.  In a perfect world parents would be able to provide these experiences for their children, and many do.  But in the twelve years I have taught preschool, I have also seen so many families that for numerous reasons have been unable to provide a healthy, happy environment for their children, or just need a little assistance from someone with either a little more experience or training in the area of early childhood to guide them.

Basically what I foresee happening is that the very poor will have preschool due to Head Start, Shared Visions, and maybe vouchers from someone (government has been a little vague about this last piece).  The more well off will be able to afford to pay for preschool.  And those of us in the middle will either re-adjust the budgets and tighten the belt a bit tighter, or our children will enter kindergarten without the chance to learn the social skills and play skills that research shows are necessary as a foundation for academics.  The teacher quality will decrease.  I won't go back to work at Head Start, because I feel I am worth more than they can afford to pay me.  I would make more subbing.

I'm just frustrated that education, and especially early childhood education, gets the shaft once again.  Thanks for letting me get that out of my brain.  I imagine I'll have some comments on either side of the situation.  I welcome them.  And perhaps, when it is not the middle of the night, I will write another post that has a bit more meat to it.  Meanwhile I encourage you to visit some of my favorite preschool blogs listed to the right of the page to see some of the amazing things that happen in preschool.

Preschool blogs include:  Teacher Tom, Teach Preschool, Irresistible Ideas, let the children play, and Prekinders.  No Time for Flashcards is a great inspiration for me as well, but is written by a former teacher, current stay at home mom about working with her own children, so I guess it really doesn't count as a preschool blog.  Again thanks for listening.

Nella's ONEder Fund

Okay, so I'm a blog-hopper.  I enjoy stepping into other people's lives for a moment and reading what matters to them.  I found Nella and her family about 7-8 months ago through another blog and I have fallen in love with them.  Nella's mom is a professional photographer and her posts include tons of beautiful photos and they are so well-written.  I visit Nella, Lainey and their family's blog so often that Brody recognizes Nella on my computer.  He calls her Vanilla.  Nella's first birthday is coming up this weekend and her mom has put together a beautiful video here that celebrates Nella's life as a child with Down Syndrome.  Kelle (Nella's Mom) has set up a fundraiser in Nella's name, the proceeds will go to the National Down Syndrome Society.  I am urging you to go and view the video, snoop around the blog, and if you are able, please donate a bit to Nella's ONEder fund.

I have a cousin with Down Syndrome.  Willa is my Dad's first cousin and he is also one of her caregivers and has been for nearly half of her life, since her parents died when I was young.  Willa lives in a group home in Carroll, Iowa.  She gets along pretty well, but I wonder if she would have had the opportunity to have been born into a society that was a bit more accepting than our society was in the 1950s how many more opportunities would Willa have had?

Both myself and my husband work directly with people with disabilities.  Kelle's cause and her video have touched my heart.  I hope you take a moment and view the links below.  Kelle has a song playing in the background of her blog, so you will need to scroll to the bottom and pause that so that you can hear her in the video.  It is well worth it.  Have some Kleenex handy!

Click here to go to the video 

Click here to donate

This is the beginning of Nella's story.  <---That was the first post I read on Kelle's blog and the one that sucked me in.

A bit of my personal baking history and a recipe to share...

I come from a family with lots of good cooks.  I am also fortunate that many of those good cooks are also good bakers (those two talents do not always go hand in hand).  I think I am an okay cook.  But I thoroughly enjoy baking.

My specialty has always been cookies.  I remember Grandma Lewis baking cookies with me.  I especially remember her allowing me to dirty many more dishes than my mom allowed me to dirty as I baked cookies.  The dirty dishes weren't a big deal because Grandma, first of all was my grandma, and secondly had a dishwasher.  I also remember baking cookies at home and getting compliments from many people, but Dad always had good comments (he is still one of my biggest fans).  I also remember Steve, our hired hand, commenting on my cookies.  This stuck with me, because he mainly treated me as a little sister, teasing or not really acknowledging me much.  Those compliments of my cookies meant a lot.

I remember having treat days in high school and getting good comments on my brownies (which were from a box).  I also did a speech about making monster cookies.  I think that is the only time I have ever made them--that is just a lot of ingredients!  In college I missed baking so much that I rented the little kitchen in our dorm building and bought the ingredients to bake chocolate chip cookies.  I had to buy all the ingredients as I didn't have any of that stuff on hand in the dorm room.  But they were so good and so worth it.

I think cookies are still my favorite thing to bake, but I mainly rotate through the same recipes.  My favorite is chocolate chip, but I have a few others I also make regularly.  For our local farmers' market I usually bake snickerdoodles.

I really never remember having snickerdoodles as a child.  I remember having them occasionally in college, care of Pfeifer Dining Hall.  The first year we did farmers' market I stumbled upon a snickerdoodle recipe.  This was a cookie that was not anyone else's specialty at the market and it seemed to be an easy recipe with ingredients I already have on hand.  I made them enough to build a following, and now they are one of my specialties.

Snickerdoodles

1 cup margarine or butter 

(in most of my recipes I lean toward using butter, but in this one sometimes using only butter makes the batter too runny--I usually do a stick of each)

1 1/2 c sugar

2 eggs

2 tsp vanilla

2 3/4 c flour

1 tsp baking soda

a couple shakes of salt

2 Tb sugar and 2 tsp cinnamon (approximately) to roll cookies in prior to baking

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.  Cream together wet ingredients.  Blend in dry ingredients.  Shape dough by rounded teaspoons into balls.  Combine the 2 Tb sugar and cinnamon.  Roll balls in mixture and place 2 inches apart on cookie sheet.  Bake 8-10 minutes.  Remove from baking sheet immediately.  Enjoy with a glass of milk.

Play Dough

Play dough is an essential item for kids of all ages, (when I have adults visiting in my classroom they tend to head to the play dough table too) but it has many benefits for preschoolers especially.  

Play dough builds the fine motor muscles in the fingers.  All that pinching, pounding, rolling, and manipulating is actually the best pre-writing practice.

It's a great sensory experience.  Play dough is something that can be experienced with all the senses. 

It builds self esteem.  Play dough is open-ended.  There are no right or wrong answers. 

It builds friendship skills.  Play dough gives lots of opportunities for sharing.

It builds creativity.  Play dough can become anything with a little imagination:  food, shapes, animals, bowls, snowmen, etc.

It's a great release for tension and anger.  All that pounding, pinching, squeezing, poking is acceptable when done with play dough.

It offers many opportunities to foster language development.  You can describe the texture of play dough, talk through what you are doing with it, enter into imaginative play.

It's fun!

The best thing is that play dough is easy to come back and so simple and cheap to make.  My favorite recipe for play dough is:

1 c flour

1/2 c salt

2 tsp cream of tartar

1 Tb vegetable oil

1 c water

food coloring

Mix together flour, salt, and cream of tartar.  Color the water and add it along with the oil to the dry ingredients.  Cook, stirring, for 1-3 minutes or until thick.  Place the dough onto a floured surface and knead as soon as it is cool enough to do so.  Keep in an airtight container in refrigerator.

Today I made Kool-Aid Play Dough

2 1/2 c flour

1/2 c salt

2 (4g) pkg unsweetened Kool-Aid mix

2 c boiling water

3 Tb oil

Mix dry ingredients.  Add wet ingredients.  Mix with spoon until cool enough to knead.  I had to knead in quite a bit of flour today.  But it was really fun to see the color appear as we added the water.  And it is a cool hot pink color and smells wonderful!  I used tropical punch kool aid.

I had my three year old son help stir as we made the play dough.  I have also made play dough as a cooking experience in preschool.  There are some basic states of matter lessons to be learned (yes, that's chemistry in preschool!).

I prefer homemade play dough in my classroom since I know exactly what is in it.  We discourage eating the play dough, but in case there is any ingested, I know it is safe.

Play dough is fun without accessories.  In fact I try to offer it without accessories often, but the kids know where to find the play dough toys and they prefer to have them.  I have also added items like popsicle sticks (this was more fun than I expected), beads, small animals, Mr. Potato Head pieces.  Cutting practice is fun with play dough snakes.  Play dough snakes can be made into letters, shapes, etc. Play dough balls can be used for counting practice.  

I have found a few more fun play dough recipes I want to try especially chocolate play dough and gingerbread play dough.  What are your favorite play experiences?

Ice Play for Preschoolers

This week in preschool we studied winter.  I wanted to include some inquiry science activities at the math/science table and remembered seeing some ice-play activities on a PBS Kids show, I think Curious George.

So prior to Monday's class I froze water in various containers (pie tin, divided tray, rubber glove, two sizes of cups) and with various objects inside the ice (pennies, small plastic toys, glitter, grapes).

I brought out the ice during our free play time and removed the ice from the containers with the help of the kids.  They especially liked the ice in the shape of the glove initially, but the fingers fell off fairly quickly.  Some children were very interested in the objects inside the ice.  Slamming the ice onto the table to watch the cube shatter.  Others were laughing as they tried to pick up the slippery melting ice.  And others were sliding the ice around on the layer of water like hockey pucks.

We found that paint shirts were needed as we got pretty wet.  I left it up to the kids to decide if they wanted to wear gloves to protect their hands from the cold, most did not.

I remained close by to observe the children's play and encourage discussions.  I noticed that Brogan was making a concentrated effort in removing the pennies from the ice.  He saw them as a treasure that he got to keep.  At one point he asked me how the pennies got into the ice.  I answered him by not really answering him.  "I put them there."  He, of course, wanted more of an explanation than that.  I left him to think about it while I talked with other children.

Emma was also at the table and could tell me that ice melted into water and that water turned into ice.  I asked what I would need to do to get the water from our sink to turn to ice.  After much thought she said I could put it outside.  I agreed I could, since it was very cold outside.

After a few minutes I posed the question, "How else could we get the water from the faucet to turn to ice?"  I didn't want to give them the answer, as I knew it would mean more to them if they made the connection on their own.  I also knew that with time, Brogan would be able to piece together the facts to figure out how those pennies got inside the ice cube.  No one could give me an answer.  But they were so focused on the ice play that I didn't want to push the question and answer time.

So I used the rest of free play to gather some props for lesson time.

I did scrap the planned lesson on feelings for another day so that we could talk more about our discoveries at the ice table.  At the large group discussion Emma was able to tell what she knew about ice forming outside.  I posed the question, "What about in summer?  Do you ever have ice in your drinks in the summer?  Where does it come from?"  When I wasn't getting the firm answers I expected, I brought out the ice cube tray prop from the dramatic play center.  I asked if they had seen one of these before.  Aaaahhhh.... connections were being made, facial expressions turned from confusion to recognition.  Now they were able to tell me that they had ice cube trays at home and they went in the freezer.  I helped them to state that the freezer and our outside temperatures were both cold enough to turn water into ice.

I brought out the tray with a cup of water for each child I had prepared.  Each cup had a child's name on it.  I called them one by one and they got to pick one small toy to insert into their water cup.  I then labeled the tray 'Preschool Science' and they went to the window to watch me place it in the snow where we could observe it from inside our classroom.  Within an hour the children were able to notice a layer of ice beginning to develop in the cups.

We got a bit of a winter storm and did not have school on Tuesday.  As children came in on Wednesday, they asked about their ice.  Kendrick went immediately to the window and wanted to know where the ice was.  He couldn't see it due to the snowfall.  I told him and the others that I thought it was probably buried under the snow, but wanted to wait for them to be there before I went to look.  Once everyone had arrived I bundled up and took out a small shovel to see if our science experiment had been disturbed.  It was there!  It was buried in a drift of about six inches of snow.  And the children cheered when I dug down far enough to find it.

I brought the ice inside.  Each child got to examine their cube.  Kendrick's water froze with a bit of a bubble in it and he was able to break it easily in two, with the toy stuck in one half of the ice cube.  He was so thrilled with that and showed it to everyone.  Some children slammed their cube down on the table to shatter it and remove their 'treasure'.  Others just messed around with the ice cubes until they melted enough to remove their toy.  No matter how they removed their treasure, they were so proud and excited about it.

We all really enjoyed the simple play.  I feel that some connections were made that the children would refer to later.  What a fun and easy experience for all involved!

This post has been shared at No Time for Flashcards.

Frugal Laundry

About a year ago our family doctor, Dr. Jenkins, posted a homemade laundry soap recipe that she uses on Facebook.  I made my first batch in May.  It lasted me six months.  I love it.  It's easy.  It's cheap.  I'm sharing the recipe here.

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RECIPE FOR HOMEMADE LAUNDRY SOAP

TIPS: We use Fels-Naptha bar soap in the homemade soap recipes, but you can use Ivory, Sunlight, Kirk's Hardwater Castile or Zote bars. Don't use heavily perfumed soaps. We buy Fels-Naptha by the case from our local grocer or online. Washing Soda and Borax can normally be found on the laundry or cleaning aisle. Recipe cost approx. $2.

Homemade Liquid Laundry Soap- Front or top load machine- best value

4 Cups hot tap water
1 Fels-Naptha soap bar
1 Cup Washing Soda
½ Cup Borax

- Grate bar of soap and add to saucepan with water. Stir continually over medium-low heat until soap dissolves and is melted.

-Fill a 5 gallon bucket half full of hot tap water. Add melted soap, washing soda and Borax. Stir well until all powder is dissolved. Fill bucket to top with more hot water. Stir, cover and let sit overnight to thicken.

-Stir and fill a used, clean, laundry soap dispenser half full with soap and then fill rest of way with water. Shake before each use. (will gel)

-Optional: You can add 10-15 drops of essential oil per 2 gallons. Add once soap has cooled. Ideas: lavender, rosemary, tea tree oil.

-Yield: Liquid soap recipe makes 10 gallons.

-Top Load Machine- 5/8 Cup per load (Approx. 180 loads)

-Front Load Machines- ¼ Cup per load (Approx. 640 loads)



Powdered Laundry Detergent- Top load machine

1 Fels-Naptha soap bar
1 Cup Washing Soda
½ Cup Borax

-Grate soap or break into pieces and process in a food processor until powdered. Mix all ingredients. For light load, use 1 Tablespoon. For heavy or heavily soiled load, use 2 Tablespoons. Yields: 3 Cups detergent. (Approx. 40 loads)
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All the ingredients can be found at Fareway.  I had a to look a bit, since I had never heard of laundry soda or Fels Naptha, but they are both in the laundry aisle.  The Borax and laundry soda come in a box that will last for several recipes.  

Also Dr. Jenkins' suggestion for frugal fabric softener is to dump some liquid fabric softener in a bucket, add the same amount of water, and a sponge.  Squeeze out the sponge and place in the dryer as you would a softener sheet.  I have also been watering down the fabric softener I use in my washer.  

In the summer I hang over half of my clothes on the clothesline.  (I don't like the way my jeans or socks feel after drying on the line and I try to keep our undies inside since we have people come and go sometimes.)  Actually I hang outside if the temp is above 40 degrees.  In the winter I have a small clothesline I use in my basement and I also will hang our shirts on hangers on door frames around the house.  They make the house smell good, help keep the house a bit more humid in the dry winter, and I run the dryer less, thus lowering the electric bill.

Several of the blogs I follow and some friends (Hi Kim) are cutting back on processed foods and store-bought cleaners.  I have not done as much as I would like to, but laundry is one way I am going more natural.  I hope to try out a homemade all purpose cleaner recipe soon, but my husband keeps buying cleaners when he thinks we are low.  So the frugal side of me can't just throw them out.  

How are you frugal with your cleaning habits?  Do you have homemade recipes for things that you used to buy that you'd like to share?