Breadmaker Recipe - Italian Breadsticks

~ Posted on Wednesday, January 13, 2016 at 5:56 AM ~

It's been a long time since I shared any recipe that uses breadmaker. For this post, I am sharing another recipe I tried and tested, Italian Breadsticks.

Ingredients:
* 200ml room temp water
* 3 tbsp of olive oil (with extra for brushing later)
* 3 cups of bread flour
* 1.5 tsp of salt
* 1.5 tsp dried yeast
* optional for coating - poppy seed, chia seed, sea salt

Italian Breadsticks

Methods: 
* The key is to put in the liquid ingredients, followed by semi liquid and finally the dry ingredients. So add water follow by oil, flour, salt and finally yeast.
* Set the program to "Dough" function.
*  The bread maker will complete the task in 1.5 hours.
* Lightly oil 2 baking sheets and preheat oven to 200°C
* Once the dough is ready in 1.5 hours, take out the dough and place it on a lightly floured surface and punch down the dough. Roll into a rectangle and cut into long strips. Sizewise and lengthwise is really up to you to roll and flatten up.

Italian Breadsticks

* You may roll in the poppy seeds or chia seeds or sea salt if you like. Space well apart each sticks on the baking sheet. Lightly brush with olive oil and cover with clear film (plastic wrap) and leave in a wam place for 10-15 minutes.
* Bake for 10-15 minutes or until golden, turning each sticks once. Transfer to wire rack to cool.

Outcome:

Italian Breadsticks

Our kiddos love this! I actually think the breadsticks tasted like pizza dough, you know the crust part?

Awesome, I will try this again to make pizza base hehehe...

This recipe is definitely for keeps!

To view my other recipes, feel free to hop over to my Recipe Library page for more info!


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Using Calendar As A Teaching Tool

~ Posted on Thursday, January 7, 2016 at 7:15 AM ~

I like to make use of every opportunities and scenarios as a teaching and learning moments for myself and our kiddos. Whatever tools on hand that might serves the purpose to teach, I will not hesitate to use it. And so happened one fine day, I was looking at this piece of A4 paper with the 2015 calendar printed on it and my 6.5-year-old boy and I had a quick learning session using the calendar.

And this is why I am sharing with you guys today, how to use a calendar as a teaching tool for your kiddos. Of course, as a parent, you should know yourself whether your child is capable or mature enough to understand and learn this.

You don't need any fancy smancy calendars. In fact, I just opened up my Microsoft Word, choose the create new document and look for calendar template, choose the ones with nice and easy on the eye layout and printed one out.


Lesson #1 - Name of the Days & Month

Looking at the calendar, just pick one month and teach your child the name of days in a week. If they are old enough to write things, teach them to write the days down.

Using Calendar As A Teaching Tool

I also teach our 6.5-year-old boy that calendars we see usually have short name for the days such as M for Monday, T for Tuesday and so on. In addition to that, I also explained to him that some countries in the world treat Sunday as the first day of the week while there are countries that considers Monday as the first day of the week.

You can then proceed to get them to count how many months are there in a year and get them to write down the name of months in a year.

 

Lesson #2 - Concept of Rows and Columns

Based on the calendar, I proceeded to use a sample month (January 2016 for this example) and write out the days accordingly. I explained to our boy what is row and what is concept and how we make use of the rows and columns to figure out say, how many Mondays in a month, or how many days in a certain week of the month.

Using Calendar As A Teaching Tool

 

Lesson #3 - Concept of Dates, Days, Months in a year

Based on the calendar, I then slowly explained and asked our 6.5-year-old boy to circle dates such as birthdates, special occasions date, writing down the day of certain dates and more.

You can then teach your child to figure out what is the first day of the month, the last date of the month, what day is 15th of the month and so on by referring to the calendar template. Once I can see our boy gaining more confidence, I asked him to circle the months with more than 5 Sundays and so on.

Using Calendar As A Teaching Tool

 

Again, I'm just sharing one of the fun ways to teach your child using a calendar although I need to stress that it differs from child to child. Some of you might also think that a 6.5-year-old boy should not be learning this at this stage. There are children younger than mine who learns way more advance things than him (I just read in a parenting group that a mother shared her 3.5-year-old girl is reading book way faster than she can supply new ones for her, not that I'm pressured to get our boy to be like noooooo...). Again, no right or wrong. This is how we do it our way in our family. I hope my sharing is helpful to you guys!

 

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Sang Kancil Cari Cahaya

~ Posted on Tuesday, January 5, 2016 at 12:02 AM ~

I have previously seen this being promoted in one of the FB pages of an individual that I followed regularly (due to his charitable activities) and forgotten all about it until I saw it while shopping for Christmas presents few weeks back. I grabbed 2 (one to give to our 3 kiddos while the other to give to a close friend of ours)

Ever since I was a young child, I think not just me, but most of us around that age have heard or watched the Sang Kancil (mousedeer in English) cartoon series. Back then it was quite a big deal for locally made cartoons and what more in our national language. Wayang kulit or shadow puppet in English is one of our traditional play which I really wanted our kiddos to be exposed to as well. So you can imagine how excited I was to be able to get this!

Sang Kancil Cari Cahaya

It comes with a stack of hardcover boards for the puppet shadow scenes (tied to a side by a big rubber band), a torchlight and 2 Eveready batteries. I experienced a bit difficulties trying to put in the batteries, needed to rummage through my storeroom for a screwdriver in order to unscrew the tiny but very strongly secured screw at the upper portion of the torchlight. Also took a bit of tinkering to figure out which directions to put in the batteries and then screwing back the tiny screw in place.

Sang Kancil Cari Cahaya

There is also 2 separate hardcover boards where you can use one of them as a background and the other where you need to take out the Sang Kancil and giant characters and DIY your own shadow puppet story. But anyway, I decided to just follow the stories provided in this box. In each cardboard, there is a small image guiding you to point your torchlight there for better shadow effect.

It follows the story of Sang Kancil that wanted to go to this castle on a mountain and the experiences it endured along the way and how it got out from tricky situations. I like the creative storyline but am a bit disappointed with the ending as I feel it could be expanded more. But not bad for a shadow puppet story in this modern world! You can even play the sound effect as you tell the story from the book to your kiddos.

Sang Kancil Cari Cahaya

I am looking forward to more stories from hereon. I hope with this gift, our kiddos will continue to cherish and preserve the shadow puppetry and local childhood stories like what I've been growing up with. Malaysian parents, this is a must to get for your kiddos!

 

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