Ireland for kids

Last year, I have to admit I didn’t do as good of a job as I wanted to with our cooking around the world, and I completely missed Austria……..  That recipe turned out not quite right, and would make for a great comic post………..  This year, I’m excited to announce all of the countries ahead of time, so you can join in more easily! We’re starting off with some time in Europe and heading over to France next.

For Ireland we made: Irish beef stew and beer bread.

Irish Beef Stew

based loosely on Irish Beef Pub Stew

Irish Beef Stew ingredients: 2-4 pounds of beef stew meat, 1 can tomato soup, 1 can of water, 1/4 cup of apple juice, 4 carrots cut up, 6 potatoes cut up, onion powder (forgot to buy onions), pepper and salt to taste, garlic

1.  Heat a fry pan to high, then brown the meat for just a few minutes to seal in the juices.

 

2.  In the meantime send your kids over to peel carrots and potatoes (you can just clean the potatoes, but my family prefers no skin).

3.  Chop up the carrots into pieces about an inch or so long.  Then chop up the potatoes into bite size pieces as well.  Dump all of this into your slow cooker.

4.  Add everything into your slow cooker and stir it to mix it all up.  Now turn your slow cooker on low if you remembered to do this in the morning.  Or if you’re like me, and remembered to do it about 2:00 in the afternoon, turn it on high and hope it cooks really fast.

 

Irish Beer Bread

ingredients: 2.5 cups of self-rising flour, 1 warm beer, 2 tablespoons sugar

1.  Amuse the heck out of your husband because his teetotaler wife has asked him to get a bottle of “good beer.”

2.  Measure out the flour and sugar, and pour in the beer.

3.  Lightly mix it together, then put it in a greased loaf pan to cook.

4.  Cook at 375 for 45 minutes.  While it’s cooking pat yourself on the back for making homemade bread.

5.  Eat 2 of the mini-loaves yourself and don’t share them with anyone.  Oh wait, maybe that’s just what I did…………  Either way, we devoured most of it that night.

On to our learning adventures about Ireland:

We made paper dolls of the people with Making Friends Paper dolls.

Than we created a lapbook……….

We used the first two pages of the Ireland Passport Glittering Muffins made for us (I printed them onto 1 page, and made it into a booklet).  Then I printed out Enchanted Homeschooling Mom’s Ireland lapbook pages for facts about Ireland.  I also printed out the foods from Ireland from Homeschool Share’s Ireland lapbook.

 

We made Saint Patrick’s bell.  I loved that I could find a picture of the Saint Patrick’s bell in its case to show my kids.  We also read St. Patrick and the Three Brave Mice, which the kids have made us reread about 10 times since we first read it.  They’ve also been carrying it around rather obsessively. Super easy craft, directions are in the Ireland printable I created.

As they were busy painting, I started making a Saint Patrick peg doll, inspired by this little guy.

I can’t quite decide if I want to draw a face on him or not.  I still want to add some gold trim, but my gold paint pen had dried up…….  Poor Ticia

 

Then we designed leprechaun traps from the printable I made.  I loved the creativity my kids had.

 

Finally we listened to the Adventures in Odyssey episode about Saint Patrick and read about his explanation of the Trinity using the Shamrock (also in the Ireland printable).

 

All in all, quite a successful study.

Follow Ticia Adventures in Mommydom’s board Saint Patrick’s Day for kids on Pinterest.

I’ve got a few ideas for Saint Patrick’s Day on my pinterest board, but if you’ve got a great post, I’d love to add more (stick it in your comment, and I’ll pin it, or if your post is learning about Ireland add it to our Ireland linkie!

Adventures In Mommydom, Creative Family Fun, Domestic Goddesque, Enchanted Homeschooling Mom, Glittering Muffins, Here Come The Girls, Juggling with Kids, Kid World Citizen, Kitchen Counter Chronicles, Little Artists, Mermaids’ Makings, Montessori Tidbits, Mummymummymum and The Educators’ Spin On It have come together to help you on your food journey and will each cook a dish with our children and post about it – to help inspire you to have a go! Then go out there, cook, blog, and join in the linky fun!