Raising helpful kids

Toby 'helping' build our new
kitchen after our washing
machine flooded

I'm a lucky lady.  My husband has parents who shared household jobs and taught their children to do the same.  Matt learned his Mum's flare for cooking and his Dad's fearlessness around irons.  In this modern age it is baffling to me how many men still regard anything indoors as women's work.  Recently my neighbour when poorly was 'kindly' told by her husband that she could have an early night - as soon as she'd cooked his tea that is!  It's an attitude that starts very young, with kids treating their parents like slaves and then expecting to be paid for every job they do themselves.  Looking after a home is something that you can make your family feel proud to help with, and in turn you will have more quality time to spend together.  On top of the practical skills they will pick up, and the attitude that family units work together as a team, helping around the house is an almost Montessori style learning experience, where children master the skills to look after themselves quickly because they are allowed to play with real items, not just plastic toys.  When the battery ran down on the drill for example, Toby got a chance to safely act out putting together a new kitchen in a way that stimulated him far more than his little Bob the Builder drill ever did.  I was amazed that my 20 month old could even pick the heavy drill up, but allowing and encouraging children to help and act out helping is always full of surprises.

Before tidy away time

One of the simplest ways to get kids involved in helping around the house is in letting them know right from day one (or maybe month 8) that it's up to them to help put away the things they have been playing with.  I never use the word 'chore'.  We just shout 'tidy away time, who's going to be the quickest!' and dive in.  'You've pulled all the cushions off the sofa and emptied out every toy to make a boat?  That's fine, but you have to help put it all back when the game is over'.  When Ollie went through a phase of complaining and asking why he had to tidy away with me -  'you could just do it mummy' - I asked him if he liked the room messy all the time, or tidy so he could find the car he was looking for.  He admitted he liked it tidy, so off we went in our dive around the room to see who could pile the most stuff back into the toy box the quickest. When Toby empties the bookcases, it is Ollie who does the re-shelving.

Both boys enjoy helping out with all sorts of jobs, and apart from tidying up I leave it to them to decide if they want to help or not.  They both like to help load and unload the washing machine, fold clothes (I secretly refold afterwards, but never when they can see me undoing their efforts), help with cooking.  A couple of buckets accidentally tipped over by Ollie means floor washing is one I insist on doing by myself, as is anything dangerous such as ironing (or even better, ask Matt to do it).  Pretty much anything else is fair game.  The boys always want to help wash the car - Matt blames Ollie for the missed patches, but they are always strangely at Matt height, not Ollie height.  They like to wash the patio door window, occasionally with actual water, mainly with pilfered greasy baby wipes. Both help to put their clean clothes away, although Toby detours sometimes from putting socks in his sock drawer to putting them down the toilet.  When I hurt my back recently they were awesome in taking over weeding the patio and watering the flowers, working as a team to fill up the watering can at the tap and tip it up over the plant pots, and themselves, and each other.  Today they enjoyed helping strip the leaves from corn on the cob for dinner, with some of the leaves and stringy bits even making it into the compost caddy and not just onto the floor.  Preparing food is always popular with them as they get to stuff their faces.  They are also a bit OCD when it comes to things that are in the wrong place in shops, regularly moving misplaced items and putting away things that have fallen on the floor.  The helpfulness even extended to them insisting on helping our Viking friends to carry wooden poles for a sail tent at the show we did on Sunday - watching a baby dressed as a Viking nonchalantly carrying one end of a pole across a field made a few people smile.

One of the absolute favourites of both boys is the vacuum cleaner.  It wasn't always like this - our old upright was so piercingly noisy it sounded like a jet taking off and blew hot air over the ankles of anyone using it.  Ollie used to wrap the oven gloves over his ears and scream crying every time I got it out (a couple of times a day given our mixture of mucky pup kids and show-every-crumb laminate floors).  The solution came in the form of an incredibly generous gift from my parents of a new cylinder vacuum - blissfully quiet, light enough for even the smallest hands to push around, and also according to Toby it makes a great horsey.  The boys love playing house and cleaning with it so much I have to mediate so that we all get a turn (I try to whizz round quickly to get the worst of the dirt and then turn it down to the lowest setting to let them take their turns).  The bags are however expensive to replace, so I think that should we ever need to replace it I would consider a Dyson such as the Multifloor Cylinder vacuum cleaner that we saw on the easy to use John Lewis website.

I know the concept of kids pulling their weight around the house is not a new one, but it still causes a surprising amount of debate on the parenting forums.  Some folks find paying per job works for them, and argue that it instils a work ethos and the idea that if you work hard then you will be paid and can save up to buy things you want.  I suspect this may be better left to big jobs for older kids, such as the teenager sent up a ladder to clean out the gutters.  Other folk feel that paying for things that need to be done in order for the home to run smoothly is imprinting in children's minds that these things are menial and you should be paying a subordinate to do them.  Gender equality is another issue that raises it's head.  I can remember having boy jobs and girl jobs as a kid - my brother did lawn mowing and I did polishing for example (although since I had horrible hay fever this may have been more about my health than my gender).  Having defined gender roles in household jobs is pretty much impractical in the modern world where relationship and work dynamics are usually light years away from the 1950s stereotypes.  Having fun as a family cleaning together and showing your children that Mum can use power tools and Dad can do the laundry just as well as each other is something that will be as valuable a lesson to them as any amount of educational hothousing.  So whether you have a nuclear family with 2.4 kids or any of the variety of households that are likely to outnumber the old family structure in the near future, your kids will grow up to be adults who don't feel helpless in the face of a pile of laundry, a room that needs painting or dinner guests to feed, unlike my unfortunate former housemate 'Toast Boy' who was unable to cook anything apart from beans on toast.  By getting your children helping now, you are empowering them to be independent later on.

This blog post was sponsored, but the opinions, anecdotes and tool wielding offspring are all my own.

Little linguists - introducing different languages and dialects

Ollie reading his new Rastamouse
book 

In England we lag well behind our European neighbours in our foreign language skills, with many adults too shy or lacking the skills to try even basic pleasantries such as please and thank you while abroad. One of the greatest gifts we can give to our kids is the opportunity to communicate effectively where ever they are, and the first stage of this is exposing your child to the idea at as early an age as possible that different people speak in a different way to your own family.  If you already live in a bilingual home,  this could mean playing  songs from a third language for example.  For the majority of us not blessed with diversity in our home languages, any other language is fair game for familiarising your children to other speech sounds.

It has been shown through simple observational experiments that even very tiny babies will preferentially turn their head towards people speaking in the language of their parents.  It has been hypothesised that this is because as infants in the womb we hear our parents pattern of language and learn to recognise it.  I also found from my own observations that when Ollie was just learning to say a few words that he would focus more interestedly on children's shows in English than the ones in German which my friend kindly sent to me.  It got me thinking that since language recognition and preference is present so early on, it was important to give children access to hearing other languages as early on in order to help them 'get their ear in' for any language learning they had available later on.

I went to a private school for a couple of years from when I was seven and for this brief time I was fortunate enough to start to learn French.  After returning to regular middle school, I then didn't learn any French until I went to secondary school at twelve.  Even now, the French that I recall with greatest ease is that which I learnt at aged seven.  Trying to learn it later on was so much harder that, although I got a B in my GCSE, I really lost a lot of confidence in the whole concept that I could be a fluent speaker of another language.  I learned to pass an exam, not to be able to communicate with other human beings.  I would love my kids to pick up languages as naturally as they do everything else, before they start to think that there are things that they can't do.



What Toby was doing while Ollie
was reading Rastamouse

The general advice for parents is that, unless you are properly bilingual yourself, don't try to teach your kids languages.  I can see the sense in this as a way of protecting children from pushy parents armed with flashcards and horrible pronunciation, but there must be a happy medium between inflicting cruel and unusual linguistic punishment and simply not trying at all.

For us, we walk that line by attempting to pass on the bits we know, such as counting down the stairs in different languages - I do French and German, Matt does Spanish, we both count in English (usually in the voice of The Count from Sesame Street 'Von step, Ha Ha Ha...').  We have borrowed bilingual French/English books from our library, and have a few French and German books of our own (including Ollie's favourite book on Castles which we bought when my parents took us on holiday to France when Ollie was just 5 months old).  Another of his favourites is 'Zilli, Billi unt Willi' a three little pigs story in German.

When we were preparing to visit Ben, Michelle and Isaac in France earlier this year (see the post 'We built a polytunnel in France') we got Ollie and Isaac each a bilingual 'The Cat in the Hat'.  I have been astonished at how patiently Ollie listens to first the French and then the English version of each paragraph.  Before we went I got out a couple of bilingual books from the library, and Ollie loved one 'Depeche-toi Molly' by Lone Morton and Gill Scriven so much that he insisted we renewed it for months.  I would introduce a few things he could say when we got to France, and Ollie would reply 'not now mummy, I'll talk French when we're at France' (he was three years and four months old at the time).  He wasn't kidding.  Playing with French kids in play parks on the journey, and talking to locals in shops, sure enough he rolled out his couple of French phrases 'hello', 'goodbye', 'please', 'thank you' and 'sweeties please' which got him lots of amused smiles (I won't insult you with my French spelling of these).  Funniest of all was when he was chatting away in a nonsense language out of the window of our friend's house, and when asked what he was doing he said 'talking French to the cars on the road'.  So although we may not be gifted linguists ourselves, I'm happy that the kids will at least grow up confident that they can be.

So what has this all got to do with Rastamouse?  We were sent this fantastically bright and fun book to review by Macmillan Children's Books this week, and as I was at first stumbling over and then having fun with the Jamaican dialect it is written in, it struck me that learning to understand dialect is just as important in Britain as learning any other language.  We have an incredibly rich heritage of spoken dialects in Britain, with strong accents and even different use of words across the country,  from the heavily Gaelic and Norse influenced dialects of the North to the lilt of Wales and the burr of the West country.  We also have greater population mobility than ever before, leading to the high likelihood that we will hear accents and dialects of English from not just a few counties away, but from whole different continents.  My favourite doctor at my GP surgery is an Indian from Birmingham, with a broad brummy accent that I find very comforting since I spent some of my teenage years down the road from Birmingham in Malvern.


Having taught students who complained to me that they couldn't understand the accent of another teacher who was Indian, but who I found to be perfectly comprehensible, I started to realise that even in multicultural Britain many of our kids are surprisingly limited in their ability to understand accents.  This is solely through lack of contact - anyone from the South of England talking to a Glaswegian with a strong accent for example will rapidly begin to understand more and more as they go on.  Just as we can expose our children to foreign languages, we can also make sure they start getting familiar with foreign accents and dialects.  Books and TV shows such as Rastamouse are a really useful tool in this broadening of children's horizons, as well as providing representation in the media to children who come from backgrounds that use this dialect at home and who may otherwise feel left out.

In the Rastamouse book we were sent 'Rastamouse and da Micespace mystery', by Michael De Sousa and Genevieve Webster http://www.panmacmillan.com/book/genevievewebster/rastamouseandthemicespacemystery?format=978144721765701
the authors also introduce other interesting concepts which small children are perhaps increasingly exposed to, such as the importance of internet security.  We didn't even have the internet when I was Ollie's age, so it tickles me to be explaining the concept of internet banking theft to my three year old.  Some of the dialect needed explaining- one of the mice said 'check out my bad boy moves' referring to his tricks with his skateboard, but this left Ollie searching for where the 'bad boy' was and worried what the 'bad boy' was going to do (he has a strange thing at the moment for checking I've locked the door when we go out in case a 'bad boy comes and steals our fruit' !?).  Both kids like this book though - the artwork is so eye catching that they have regularly picked it out in the couple of days that we've had it.  I think Ollie will increasingly start to follow the story as he gets used to the language and the new concepts.  It's interesting trialling resources based on TV shows with the boys since they are less exposed to TV, films and computers than most kids their age.  It means you can see if a book works as a stand alone product, or only appeals because it is about a beloved TV character.  We have a Bob the Builder book for example from when Ollie was younger which is thoroughly worn from being read so many times, despite the fact that he had never seen the TV show.  I think that the way the authors of Rastamouse have presented this story as rhyming couplets rather than just a TV script bodes well for it's surviving the initial interest in anything new, and it becoming a regular favourite in our house.

Our thanks to Macmillan Children's books for this book to review.  The opinions, musing and pictures of cheeky boys are all my own.

Bit quiet on the blog front

My apologies for being a bit quiet on the blog front this month.  Littlest has been having a lot of sleep disturbance from teething and a worsening of his apnoea due to inflamed tonsils.  Since a dose of steroids from the hospital has given us a couple of days of untroubled sleep I've been feverishly catching up on my Open University study.

One of the reasons I like doing sponsored posts and reviews is that it gives me a boot up the rump to write even when everything else seems to be conspiring against it, and since I really love writing that's a real win - the last post was written despite a broken toe and slipped disc for example and gave me a real sense of achievement that helped to make sure I didn't start to feel sorry for myself.

Finally, thank you folks, I appreciate all the views.  Here's a random cute picture of Toby last year that always makes me smile xxx

Beyond traditional narrative storytelling

 As mentioned in an earlier post, we were fortunate enough to be sent some great books to review last week.  The previous post dealt with the books for Toby's age range (although both boys are thoroughly enjoying them).  This post focuses on Ollie's books - 'Wake Up Do, Lydia Lou' by Julia Donaldson and Karen George, and 'Little Mouse's Big Book of Beasts' by Emily Gravett.

Ollie, as with most small folk, is a creature of habit. He likes a straight forward A to B narrative, with lots of cosy rhyming and bright, easy to interpret imagery. I suspect this is why children in his age range all adore modern classics such as the series of books by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler, including 'The Gruffalo' and 'The Smartest Giant in Town'.

 Knowing how much Ollie has enjoyed these in the past, I was really interested to receive another Julia Donaldson book, the result of a different collaboration, this time with talented new illustrator Karen George (winner of Waterstone's Picture This Competition).  Wake Up Do Lydia Lou has all of the rhyming charm and build up of characters and noises familiar to readers of Donaldson's previous works, but this time paired with George's clean lines and dream-like pastel palette of colours.  The sweetest-looking ghost since Casper wants to wake up Lydia Lou to give her a scare, but even with the help of a series of noisy assistants he can't manage to make her.  Ollie thoroughly enjoyed this one and has picked it out a few times already to read at bedtime, and to his little brother, picking out the words such as 'boo' which he can read himself.


The repetition and rhyme of this type of book (familiar also to fans of Dr Zeuss) appeals to the natural way that children learn, giving them a sense of achievement because they can predict the direction the story is going in and start to join in with the repeated elements, but with the added gentle stimulation of each newly introduced element.  Have you noticed that your little people will choose the same book or the same film over and over - this is why.  Repetition is a hugely important facet of the way children learn and as such they are 'programmed' to seek it out.  They can also become overwhelmed by sensory overload because their senses are so much more active than our own and their brains far more receptive to external stimulation.  Demanding you play a game you are thoroughly bored with, or insisting on the same lunch every day for a fortnight is part of the way small children (and older children and adults with Autistic Spectrum Disorder) cope with all this sensory input.


Along with the comfort zone activities, it is however important to introduce novel ideas and experiences to prevent them falling into lifelong ruts.  The last book we were sent is certainly in a prime position to do this.  Emily Gravett is the author/illustrator of one of both my boys favourite's 'Orange Pear Apple Bear', so I thought we knew what to expect.  It could not have been more different.  'Little Mouse's Big Book of Beasts' is like an artist's scrapbook, with torn-out, repasted and drawn over pages adapting what would have been a straightforward rhyming bestiary.  Ollie was definitely outside his comfort zone and thought another child had 'ruined' the book.  Over time he has come to be fascinated by the clever way the 'mouse' has changed the bestiary to it's liking, with it's funny commentary and interactive lift-the-flaps.  I cannot remember another book where a newspaper is supplied on the page about wasps with which to splat one (Ollie's response - 'poor wasp, we do not hurt insects, that is not kind...').  His face in the picture at the top of the page says a great deal about his reaction - and that is the whole point of this clever book - he is reacting to it.  He's challenged, he's uncomfortable, but he's discovering that stories can be more than a narrative and art can be all about surprise.  I think we will be seeing a whole raft of new concepts coming into his own crafting and drawing as a result of this innovative book.

Thinking outside the (cardboard) box

The main theme of today's post will come as no surprise many parent, but may provide some useful insight for newbie parents and anyone who's feeling as if they're drowning in expensive toys that never get played with.

How many times have you heard parents complaining that they gave their beloved child the best, brightest, trendiest toy that money could buy, but to the parent's disappointment the child was more interested in the wrapping paper and the box?  How many of us learn from that experience - not many because, myself included, we get sucked into the idea that we are being cheap and somehow under-demonstrating the depths of our love if we fail to buy expensive gifts.  Older children may genuinely feel hard done by if they don't receive the same branded goods as their peers, but little ones really don't buy in to that and it's worth making the most of those years.  If you have small ones who do pester excessively for particular branded toys it might be worth looking at how much advertising they are being exposed to - we're TV limiters anyway, but completely avoid commercial kids TV because of the saturation of adverts on it.  I remember well my own childhood angst at not having the shoes I saw on the telly that came with 'free' plastic jewellery, or deep upset at returning from a trip to the toy store without my own Boglin (a weird rubber gremlin puppet thing if you don't remember them). I was very well provided for in the toy department, but the adverts are extremely clever at making products seem essential.  Think how well they work on adults, with our years of hardening against their wiles, and then consider that children are inherently impressionable and have no way of tuning out from the adverts.

Once you fork out for the apparently desperately needed toy, watch just how many times they play with it.  Also make a mental note of how they are interacting with it - are they just re-running an episode of the show it was based on?  Now give them an empty box and watch them again - one day you'll have a spaceship, another day a boat, or a racing car, or a fire engine, or a castle.  The difference is that they will be using their imaginations to a much greater extent, and have a much greater opportunity to develop the toy themselves - help them to paint it, cut it, stick things to it.  Part of the reason that boxes and other non-plastic toys appeal so much to children is that they use their senses in different ways to adults.  Adults are programmed for the most part to experience the world in a very audio-visual way and will see a plastic toy that flashes and sings as highly interactive.  For young children however this is lacking the more important cues of texture, smell, taste and mouth feel.  Plastic toys all taste the same and smell the same.

Manipulating a box into an imagined artifact or vehicle is much more stimulating, and will be even ,ore so if there are other children or a parent to share in the game.  Often they will need help in creating what their minds can see, especially when they're very young.  Ollie decided one morning last week that he wanted to make a giraffe, and a dig through the craft cupboard provided an empty teabag box (for the body), a nearly used-up roll of aluminium foil (the foil was scrunched up for the head and the cardboard tube provided a neck) and a small stack of yellow napkins.  Mixing half and half PVA glue and water provided paste for him to stick his torn up napkins on to the basic giraffe shape I had put together for him.  After it was dry he drew circles in a felt-tip pen for the pattern and added googly eyes, pompom ears and a wool tail.

The top image was a 'save the day' toy after he got upset that his friend had a toy aeroplane and he didn't (he's going through a phase of comparing what he has with his friends - why is so-and-so's garden bigger, why do we have a blue car and they have a grey car etc...).  Driving home from his friend in the pouring rain on a Sunday evening meant buying a toy plane was out of the question, so when we got home we just made one.  He went from sobbing his heart out to smiling in the space of five minutes of cutting up an old nappy box and gluing bits on to the basic shape.  I did buy him a real one later in the week.  No prizes for guessing which one is still being played with while the other sits neglected in the toy box.

The final image is of the 'robot' he wanted to make after seeing a man walking around at our local play in the park day dressed entirely in boxes.  A donation of a box and some paints from the kind activity organiser, a couple of minutes with the scissors on my part, and about 30 minutes of concentrated painting on it by Ollie and Toby and the robot was ready.  Since we got it home it has so far mainly been a space rocket.  Ollie even sat in it to have his lunch, insisting that I pass each item of food to him through the round window that had started off the afternoon being an arm hole.  It is currently as flat as a pancake, but is easily resurrected with the help of a roll of parcel tape.

So next time you're getting nagged for a new toy, why not consider a big box filled with balloons instead.  I'm certainly going to try to follow my own advice (not always successfully - who can resist die cast toy cars for 50p at the local supermarket?)

Baby bookworm

 We are a certified household of book lovers.  I spent a large portion of my childhood with my nose in a book, and have been fortunate enough to have been able to work as a library assistant at times during my very varied work history.  Matt (hubby) loves historic novels and is working his way through classic literature at the moment.  We both read to the boys during the day, and especially at bedtime, so I guess it's no surprise that the boys love books too.  Ollie went to sleep grumbling tonight because I only read him four books and he wanted me to read him 'ten books' - he picked what he wanted from his bookshelves and then staggered in to my room under a pile of actually about twenty books.

Toby (pictured) took to books almost as soon as he could focus his eyes.  If I can't find him it's because he's perched in the reading corner in Ollie's room or has tucked himself into my bed with a book.  His current favourite is Orange, Pear, Apple, Bear by Emily Gravett, published by Macmillan Children's Books, which is wonderfully simple and surreal (also the first book Ollie, who's three, has learned to read for himself)  http://www.panmacmillan.com/book/emilygravett/orangepearapplebear?format=978033051267101

We all love Macmillan's books, and so were hugely excited to receive some books from them to review this week.  There were two for Toby, and two for Ollie.  Look out for another post later on reviewing Ollie's books.  The first book out of the parcel was Dear Zoo Spin and Say and was met with a lot of enthusiasm from both boys.  It is an activity version of their much loved (and well worn) Dear Zoo book.  Instead of the narrative and lift-the-flaps of the version we already have, this one comes with spinners and a variety of new characters.  Toby loved spinning the pointer around and having myself or Ollie calling out what it had landed on.  He also liked roaring at any animal the spinner landed on that he thought might roar.  This board book was extremely well built and should survive as much attention as it's predecessor has.  It is also a lovely way to teach animal recognition skills, colours, numbers and counting, either as a first introduction in smaller children, or to increase and cement previous learning in slightly older pre-schoolers.  It is a fantastic addition to our home-story telling toolbox too.  Spin the pointer and pick an animal to begin your tale, then keep spinning to select other elements as you go along. 'I went to the zoo and I saw a ....spin....leopard, I tried to have lunch with it but it was...spin...too scary, I went next door and found a ....spin....blue...spin....kangaroo etc...  This kind of game mixes random elements with your gentle guidance in a direction you think the story will take, plus lots of not-so-gentle ideas from your little one.  Most of ours somehow end up involving poo.
http://www.panmacmillan.com/book/rodcampbell/dearzoospinandsay?format=978023077019501 If you follow the web link it will take you to information about the book, but also to supplementary activities such as a printable colouring sheet

The next book for Toby was a really charming new book called 'This Royal Baby' by Zita Newcome, which is perfectly timed to tap into the baby fever surrounding the birth of Prince George here in Britain.  It is a pull-the-tab action book, with eleven different babies for your own baby to play with.  As with the spin and say book, this is a really sturdy board book, which came as a relief given how many lift-the-flap and pull-the-tab books I end up having to mend (or return sheepishly to the library for them to mend).  It's not that the boys are rough with books - they are oddly well behaved with them - it's just that lots of books seem to have 'gone cheap' and not been designed for babies to really get to grips with.  Toby struggled a bit to pull the tabs when they were brand new, but fortunately there are also circular tabs which rock from side to side and were easier for his slightly uncoordinated paws to manage.  The contents were sweet without being cloying, with babies wiggling ears, waving their arms and blowing bubbles.  Even very small babies love to look at pictures of baby faces, so this book would be a great choice for a gift to new parents.  It even had both by boys squealing with laughter at the cheeky baby poking it's tongue out, which was really unusual since they never normally laugh out loud at books.  The range of different faces is a lovely way to introduce children to talking about emotions - Ollie was fascinated by 'the tired baby wears a frown' and had lots of questions about why it was tired, why did it look sad and so on.  It also eased in the idea that babies are all the same, all have the same emotions and actions, whether they're wearing a crown or not.  I think this book will be a popular choice in our home for a long time to come. http://www.panmacmillan.com/book/zitanewcome/thisroyalbaby?format=978023077284701

Our thanks to Macmillan Children's Books for sending these to us to review.  The book images are from their website.  Toby reading in bed and the opinions expressed are genuine and all my own :)

Lammas and castles

 Just a short post today.  Yesterday (1st August) was Lammas - the Anglo-saxon festival of loaf-mass, which was an intriguing mixture of Pagan magic rite and Christian blessing (the Wikipedia entry on this is a good starting point to find out more about Lammas).  It wasn't something I had in the forefront of my thoughts until I saw that there was a Lammas festival event at Bodium Castle.  This had to be worth a trip.  We spent the morning on a visit to our local Police Station courtesy of an invite from an amazing Community Mums volunteer I met on a facepainting course, and then drove up to the Castle for the afternoon.

The National Trust yearly membership (and English Heritage too) are an expensive initial outlay, but worth ten times their value in free days out for the rest of the year.

At Bodium the NT had made a great effort to make children feel welcome, with traditional fairground attractions such as coconut shys, a hand-cranked merry-go-round (Toby's favourite thing that afternoon if you don't include rubbing ice-cream over himself), craft tent where you could make a kite or a corn dolly, a dress up tent, bird of prey to hold, a tractor ride and much more.

Ollie's favourite was the medieval bread making inside the Castle walls.  He was given the job of milling some corn using a traditional quern stone (with help from the demonstrator) and then rubbing the resultant crushed corn through a cloth to sieve out the flour from the bran.  That flour was then used for the children to make beer bread patties, which were cooked in a clay oven mock up and given back to them warm to eat.  We were there for over half an hour.  He loves making bread and this whole process really caught his attention.  It was a great simple way to make a bread treat quickly if you're in the mood for doing some baking with your kids, but they're little enough to want the finished product almost instantly.

Here's my take on what we did:
Put your oven on to 200 degrees C
Put two cups of wholemeal flour in a bowl, stir in a half teaspoon of baking power and a pinch of salt
Make a well in the middle and pour in a little strong ale (any beer will do, but strong ale best)
Stir it up, adding a little more beer until it starts to hold together and make a dough ball
Give it a quick roll around with your hands - if it's crumbly add more beer, if it's sticky add more flour.
Roll walnut-sized chunks of dough in your hands to make balls
Put your dough balls on a floured baking sheet, mark the top with a cross and put in the hot oven
When they smell good, take them out and check they're done by poking in a fork - if it comes out clean, with no dough sticking to it they're done.

Baking powder wasn't around in Medieval times, but it helps to lighten the finished product.  Because baking powder starts to work as soon as you add liquid, be as quick as you can after you add the beer.  All usual precautions and safety considerations apply when baking with kids - take care with hot ovens etc...

A Lammas treat you can make the whole year round - great with soup, or make a little hole and add a tiny dob of jam for mini healthier doughnuts.  Enjoy x

P.S. on the raw food front - 6lbs lost so far in 5 days, but had half a regular portion of fish and chips in a beachside cafe tonight as my one meal off a week so not holding out great expectations of another loss tomorrow ;)