Reading:
How Do You Raise a Raisin? by Craig Brown
ISBN: 1-57091-397-8
The Sunmaid Raisins Play Book by Alison Weir
ISBN: 0-689-83230-7
Recipes:
Ants on a Log (celery, whipped cream cheese, raisins)
Tasty Sweet Potatoes (2 large sweet potatoes, 1-2 oranges, 1/2-3/4 c. raisins)
For lots more tasty raisin recipes check out the Sun Maid Raisin website where they are offering free downloads of cookbooks they have put out over the last 100 years. For children, I recommend the 1990 My Favorite Baking Book, 2001 book, Kids are Cookin', and 2002 Get Cookin' Together Kit. You can also find fun snack ideas for kids and a word scramble for older kids on the California Raisin Growers website.
We started out the say by sitting down together and reading How Do You Raise a Raisin? It was a really fun book for the kids that smoothly integrates fun rhyming poetry with lots of good facts about raisins, how they are grown and used etc. The information was good and teaches a lot about grape history, how grapes are grown, how raisins are harvested and dried, the packaging process and different uses of rains products. I even learned some things about raisins from reading the book, which is always a plus!
After reading the book we talked about what we had read. The kids were able to relate to where raisins are grown because we have driven through the San Juaqine Valley on trips to visit family in California. We also took a mini field trip to the back yard to visit our own Thompson's Seedless grape vine. We talked about when we planted ours and how old it is, and how much longer we would have to wait to have grapes on our vines. They were very excited when they realized per the book, that if grapes bear in the 3rd year, and we planted ours last year, that we might have grapes next year! You can have this conversation even if you don;t have your own grape vines, but I'm sure it contributes a lot to the enthusiasm. It was a great way to integrate math into things before even getting to the cooking part. One thing mentioned in the book is how many pounds of fresh grapes are required to produce 1 pound of raisins. We talked about the scientific process of evaporation and how that made the grapes weigh less.
While I was getting things ready for the kids to make Ants on a Log for part of their lunch, my oldest decided that she needed to do a raisin craft. She cut a giant raisin out of purple construction paper, then on a separate paper she drew a raisin box from memory, complete with the red bonneted Sun Maid girl, and next to it, a bunch of Thompson's Seedless grapes. Then she glued the raisin on and it was time to make some logs! I had looked for some printable activity pages to go along with this week's raisin theme, but didn't find any that were specifically grape or raisin oriented. So I was glad that the kids were so enthusiastic in coming up with their own activity to do.
Ants on a Log
What you'll need: Celery ribs, whipped cream cheese, raisins, sharp knife, butter knife, cutting board.
Wash celery ribs and trim. Using sharp knife, cut into manageable pieces (we like about 1/3s of a rib) and use butter knife to fill with cream cheese. (Raisin bread was identified as a use of raisins, so of course we had to add a raisin bread English muffin to the plate.)
Now comes the fun part of the kids getting to put their ants onto their logs. This is a great time to integrate some counting or basic addition into your project. Ask your child to put a certain number of ants on their logs. For counters you can say put 3 ants on the first log. Now put 5 ants on the second log. This covers both counting and ordering. For adders you can say put 3 plus 2 ants on your log. You can even do this with some basic multiplication to tie older children into the snack fun.
My somewhat OCD children insisted that there must be exactly 4 ants on each log.
Looks good! Time to eat!!
The kids later enjoyed a raisin snack while working with The Sun Maid Raisin Play Book. It's a fun interactive book and always popular with the kids. (We also have a couple of Cheerios ones that they enjoy immensely.) This book provides some good early reader material that you can read to your child, or if they are a beginning reader, you can help them to read on their own. The raisin interative play on each page provides a nice break for them from the reading if they are having to sound words out. IT provides a nice instant reward when they are done reading the page and allows them some recovery time before tackling the next one!
The interactive portion of the book is fabulous to copying patterns, counting and following directions. And eating the raisins after makes for a healthy and delicious snack!
We also made the Tasty Sweet Potato Recipe, but I'm going to post that part as a second blog post because this one is already so lengthy and with this all being so picture heavy it makes it easier to get through to break it up some. So look for that soon!
