Butter Battle 2010
The Boy is 2 and 0 going up against the Kitchen Aid in the Butter Battle. For Week Two of the Harvest Unit our weekly activity was making fresh, homemade butter. We like to turn it into a contest… boy verses machine. Well the girls actually started the butter battle but just didn’t have the stamina for it. After rolling the mason jar filled with whipping cream across the kitchen floor for a few minutes they were done. Making the bread was more their speed. So they called in reinforcements. Bug was pulled away from his Legos and entrusted with the jar. And once again he achieved butter before the mixer. Ohhh so yummy on the fresh bread the girls made.
To make your own butter add a pint of heavy whipping cream and a couple teaspoons of salt to your mixing bowl (don’t add the salt until the end if you would like to save your butter milk). Mix on med-low speed until you past the point of stiff peaks. Keep going until you reach what looks almost like scrambled eggs in milk. You can use a strainer to drain away the butter milk.
You can also make butter by putting a smaller amount of cream in a mason jar, making sure the lid is on tight and then shaking away. If you have a group of children you can play a ‘Hot Potato’ game with the jar to keep it moving.
We also enjoyed our “Not Back to School Day” as our district started up again this past Tuesday with some friends at the farm. We took a sack lunch and met up with our great group of homeschooling friends after we finished our morning lessons. We got to see lots of goats… including some super sweet babies nursing. The kids also took a romp through the now ready corn maze and received an impromptu lesson on adobe building and maintenance as the staff at the farm was fixing an adobe building on site. They were quite happy to have children help and then told the kids they could pick as many green beans as they could find.
If you have been working on Tops and Bottoms and would like to share your adventures with us, remember to add you blog links in the comments below (if you have blogged about this week more than once you are welcome to add multiple links).
Harvest Time Week Two – Beatrice’s Goat
Sorry I was late getting this week’s post up… everything was off due to the holiday on Monday. I had originally planned to post an introduction post every Monday but am now thinking that it might be better to just do one post later in the week that included some of our photos.
This week we are working on Week Two of our Harvest Time unit. I will be posting a weekly update to give everyone a space to chat about the program. If you would like more information about the program you can learn more and download the free homeschooling curriculum on our Harvest Time page. All of the directions for the art projects, recipes and activities are included in the curriculum guide. If your family is participating in the Harvest Time curriculum either for homeschooling or after school enrichment we would love to hear about it! Please leave a comment in this post in regards to your experiences with Harvest Time’s Week Two activities. You are welcome, and highly encouraged to leave links to your Harvest Time’s Week Two blog posts or pictures in the comment section of this post.
Harvest Time Week Two
Primary Book: Beatrice’s Goat,
Enrichment Book: Milk:From Cow to Carton,
Activities: Butter Battle,
Field Trip Idea: Bakery,
Art: Siyavush Plays Polo,
Poem: Little Boy Blue,
Flower Fairies: Fushia & Coloring Page
Links from Our first time completing the Unit…
Butter Battle 2008
Hi everybody!I’m from south Italy and I have a 2 YO daughter very enthusiastic about Michelle preschool program! I adapted all Michelle’s suggestions to our country, our language and our culture, and especially to my daughter’s age: it’s a wonderful way to share my time with her! I have a job, so when I come back home I often have many things to do, but as I have to respect a program, I always find time to do it.I’ll skip Thanksgiving week, because we don’t celebrate it in Italy…but I always use to make a party for Halloween full of surprises for adults and children, so I think I’ll “stretch” my pumpkins for 2 weeks!!! thank you Michelle!!!!
Due to schedule conflicts with our local apple orchard we did apples this week. I think that most weeks we will have a different theme than everyone else. I thought I wouldn’t like being off, but now I see if has advantages! These are great pictures.
I have a feeling a lot of people will be mixing up the weeks… it is very flexible that way. I love hearing how everyone is interpreting it to work within their own families.
http://ourfamiliesconnect.blogspot.com/2013/09/harvest-time-preschool-week-two.html
Fun, Fun, Fun!
We will have to track down this book. We have a goat named Beatrice 😉
That is absolutely a perfect name for a goat 🙂 It is a lovely book, too 🙂
I did not know you could make butter out of heavy whipping cream. Everyone loved it so much that we have decided we will always make our butter this way. I have 3 using participating this year so instead of the mixer, we fought each other. We had so much fun and the butter was SOOO good!
In a lot of families, including ours, the Great Butter Race became an annual tradition that the wee ones always looked forward to doing even after they out grew Simple Seasons! Although we don’t make all of our butter that way, we do make it as a treat to go along sometimes with a fresh baked loaf of bread. It is so good! Glad your family had fun doing it. ~Kimara~