Sometimes kids are antsy at mealtimes.  They're ready to leave the table and return to their toys.  While we admire their passion for playing, we also need everybody to eat some food!  Therefore, we've discovered that cooking up an interesting topic at mealtimes helps little rear ends remain in their seats.

Here's what you do.  It's simple and entertaining:

While the kids are starting their meals, parade out various serving dishes.  Put them on the table for your kids to see, and together discuss what each is used for.  (For obvious reasons, please don't use precious heirlooms, such as great-grandmother's fragile collectible china gravy boat.  Such items could meet disastrous ends due to overly enthusiastic toddlers.)

Get a bunch of different dishes out.  Talk about sugar bowls, platters, tureens, creamers — you name it.

What is the difference between a mug and a teacup?  Or a tea pot and a tea kettle?  What is a gravy boat?  (And why is a boat anyway, do you think?)  Do your kids know what a saucer is?  And what exactly is the point of a saucer?  (We think a saucer is used out of tradition, maybe to look nice, and possibly to catch little spills.) 

The goal here is to learn new words and to start a discussion . . . and to keep those kids at the table!

You should award yourself some points for variety.  How many different serving vessels can you find tucked away in your kitchen cabinets?

Have some fun with this one.  And look, you're finally getting some use out of all that stuff tucked away in your kitchen cabinets. 

–S

Photo of Portuguese dishes courtesy of pedrosimoes7.  And the single corningware shot is from studiosmith.

This one’s quick and easy. I’ve found it also helps get a kid’s attention back when they’re getting bored and possibly mischievous.

All you need to do is say: “I’m thinking of an animal. See if you can guess what it is. Here’s a hint: schmippopotamus.”

If your kid is old enough (three and above, certainly), they’ll get the joke, and correctly figure out the animal.

Keep naming animals, but with the “schm–” sound at the beginning instead of the actual consonant sound. So, make them figure out the true identity of a schmiraffe, a schmea lion, a schmuirrel, a schmelephant, and so on.

This is fun, but it’s probably better for younger kids. I haven’t tested this out personally, but you might not want to try it on any teenagers.

In our house, food is endlessly fascinating. Buying food, cooking it, eating it, and yes, even talking about it provide hours of enjoyment. Anything with so much variety is inherently interesting, right?

And here’s more fun with food: Taste Tests!

Are you old enough to remember the Pepsi Challenge? In that test, blindfolded people sipped both Coke and Pepsi, and then announced which they liked better. (Big surprise: Pepsi won, and was the favorite of most of the participants.)

Why not have a taste test tonight at your house? All you need is a blindfold and some similar foods.

Your blindfolded kids can do two things: (1) try to guess which food is which (this can be tricky!), and (2) announce which food is their preference.

Here are some similar foods for them to compare, side by side:

Oranges vs. Tangerines
Apples vs. Pears
Crunch peanut butter vs. creamy
Different kinds of sliced cheese (cheddar vs. Swiss)
Hot dogs vs. sausages
BBQ Sauce vs. Ketchup
Different flavors of yogurt (strawberry vs. rasberry)
Whole wheat bread vs. white bread
Ice cream vs. frozen yogurt
M & M’s vs. Skittles

Have fun with this one. Please use the comment section below to let us know about your results with your kids. With all the fun and tricky tasting, everyone will pass the taste test! (Oh, and one more thing: try not to get any food on the blindfold!)

–S

“Simon Says” eat your heart out! This idea is pure “Today Is Fun:” it’s simple, fun, and free. (Well, it pretty much should be free.)

Here’s what you need to do:

Find some objects that clearly represent all the colors of the rainbow. Colored paper, such as construction paper, works the best. Ideally, you can find some scraps of paper that are red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple. You could add more colors — black, white, brown and gray — but to start off, keep it simple with fewer colors.

(If you don’t have any colored paper on hand, you could have your kids make some paper for you to use. Take some white scraps of paper, and have the kids color one red, another orange, another yellow, and so on.)

(You could also have the kids write “red” on a card. That would work well and make for a good “second round.”)

Next, with your kids’ input, assign some meanings to each color.

Red could be “sing a little song” or “spell out a word.”

Blue could be “Stand up, sit down, then stand up.”[more]

Orange could be “go munch on a carrot stick.”

You get the idea.

The trick for the kids is to remember what each color means. This can be tricky — but it’s not impossible.

Then you hold up the colors for the kids. Don’t use any words or talking, and see whether they can remember each color’s activity.

(Thank you to szeretlek_ma for the colorful photo above.)

I’ve started doing something with my kindergartner that is turning out to be a nice introduction to fractions, I think. He just thinks it’s funny and interesting.

At breakfast time, we cut his piece of toast in half. Then we leave one of the pieces alone and cut the other one in half again.

We repeat this process: we leave one of the new pieces intact and cut the other one in half. (This gives us two pieces that are now one quarter the size of the original piece of toast.)

We keep doing this: leaving one piece and cutting one piece.

In this way, we create:

half the piece of toast

a quarter of the piece of toast

an eighth

a sixteenth

a thirty-second

Sometimes we can even get down to a sixty-fourth!

As I said above, this toast trick is just an introduction to fractions. We’re not learning higher math here.

But my son is really learning the concepts.

He understands that there can only be two halves.

With the smaller pieces, he understands what information is communicated by the names. He has learned that if you need two halves to make one whole, you need eight eighths to make a whole.

I’ll ask him: if you have one sixteenth, how many more sixteenths do you need to get back to the whole piece of bread? I’m proud to say, my boy answers correctly.

At the same time, this kind of educational playing with our food is fun for him. He likes to see how many pieces we can cut from the piece of toast. He gets quite excited by the teeny, tiny pieces we cut. (He keeps encouraging me to make a one-hundred-and-twenty-eighth, now that I’ve mentioned that as a possibility of continued cutting.)

While he’s having his breakfast, I take a blank piece of paper and fold and rip it into quarters, eights, sixteenths, and so on. Together we move the pieces around to learn about fractions and their relationships. For instance, we’ll put four eighths together to make one half. Also, we’ll re-arrange the eighth-sized pieces of paper to show how half the size of a piece of paper can take on many different shapes — all of them are still half the paper!

We hope you enjoy the ideas presented here and that you go off to have some fractional fun in your house. We hope your kids like eating one-thirty-second-sized pieces of toast — and that you have a whole bunch of great family time together!

(We’d like to offer at least seven eights of a bunch of thanks to L. Marie for the small pieces of paper photo above. Okay, actually eight eighths.)

Before we get into today’s easy and fun activity for your family, I’d like you to please check out my wife’s new blog: cookingontheweekends.com. My lovely wife presents ideas for delicious foods that are perfect for families, for entertaining, and — well — for eating. My wife loves delicious food, and if you do, too, you won’t be disappointed!

And speaking of cooking, today’s activity is all about food. It doesn’t need to be done at dinnertime, though — it’s fun all the time! (And it will work quite nicely when you’re stuck in traffic or waiting at the dentist’s office.)

Kids are very familiar with food, of course. Kids also have strong preferences: favorite foods and least favorite foods.

Today we’re talking about combining foods.

First, have your child think up a food that could be described as “yummy.” Easy, right?

Now ask for another delicious food item. Again, this should be no problem for your youngster.

Finally, we want your children to mentally combine the two foods. When they put the two foods together, do they get something yummy or yucky?

For instance, my son came up with these two yummy foods: chocolate and ketchup. We all agreed that those two are delicious separately, but yucky when eaten together!

Another example: vanilla yogurt and peanut butter. I don’t think I’ve ever had those two together, but I’m willing to guess the combination would be pretty good. Certainly better than chocolate and ketchup!

Get your kids thinking about food. You guys may even want to try out some of the combinations and test if they’re actually good or not! Who doesn’t like creativity? And who doesn’t like delicious food?

Speaking of delicious food, please remember to check our cookingontheweekends.com. Have fun — and eat well!

This is a great one for young boys — boys who like to build up and knock down. (Girls who want to build and demolish are certainly invited, too.)

In addition to some builders and knock-downers, you’ll need some blocks for this activity. (Here are some of our favorite, recommended blocks, in case you’re interested. They’re sturdy and perfect for this kind of exercise.)

If you wouldn’t mind a brief interruption, here’s a quick story we’d like to share.

Once upon a time, there was a very pretty town. So pretty, in fact, that it got named “Pretty Town.” (The town really was quite pretty.)

Unfortunately, Pretty Town had a problem . . . a big problem. A giant problem. Every so often — and after all the townspeople had got their houses looking nice and pretty — some grumpy, stomping giants showed up in Pretty Town. As they stomped, the giants chanted “Fee Fie Fo Fum. I think I smell someone!” (That’s pretty much a standard giant chant, as you probably know.)

Sadly, once the giants were done stomping and chanting, and once the dust cleared, not a house in Pretty Town was left standing. Poor Pretty Town. Not so pretty any longer.

The townsfolk, plucky and optimistic, dusted themselves off and built up again. Pretty! But no sooner were the buildings looking spiffy again than . . . the sound of screeching wheels was heard as the giants’ RV rolled into town once again.

And so on and so forth. Repeat.

We hope you enjoyed that momentary detour into story time. And in case you haven’t already guessed, that tale is also today’s activity. First, have the kids get out the blocks and build a pretty town. (The buildings and houses should be simple — definitely not too painstakingly constructed.) When the kids are done, admire how pretty (and simple) the buildings are. Then cup your hand to your ear and announce that you hear some giants coming.

The kids should switch from pretty-building-builders into grumpy, stompy giants. Tell the grumpy, stompy giants to have at it!

Once the town is flattened, call back the builder-uppers to re-construct the town. (And so on and so forth. Repeat.)

This game, though simple, is a big hit in our house. The kids really relish the two vastly different modes — construction and destruction — and they really like all the verbal building up we did about those scenarios. (We also tried to trick each other by building ‘hiding houses.’ These were homes built away from the main part of Pretty Town. Sometimes the giants missed the hiding houses during their stompfests, leading to some celebrating by the surviving Pretty Towners.)

Pretty Town is sure to be a foot-stomping, fo-fumming good time. (Please just don’t plan your next family vacation there.)

–S

This might come as a huge surprise, but my kids aren’t perfect. They sometimes break our rules. Also, they sometimes don’t listen. And they have been diagnosed with an extreme case of lollygagging. In addition to lollygagging, my kids are often slow pokes. They dawdle and have even been caught dilly-dallying. No, they’re not perfect.

(For the record, I am not perfect either. And for the record, my lovely wife is pretty much perfect in every way, I admit it.)

My kids are especially sluggish when it comes to getting ready for school. So my pretty-much-perfect wife and I have developed two helpful games to get the kids a-movin’:

Race to get dressed. Kids like racing and competitions. They also like seeing who wins and who loses (and of course, they like to be the winner.) When it’s time to get ready, my wife will say, “Okay, race to get dressed,” and my kids don’t need any further explanation. They’re out of the room and off to their dressers. Clothes fly and, though sometimes someone might need a helping hand from a parent, the process is greatly sped up.

(Since we don’t want any ruffled feelings on the way to school, we try to judge the outcomes each day as ties. If somebody is almost done getting dressed, it’s a tie. Also, if one child would technically lose the competition due to not having a shirt on, we say, “Oh, it was so close to being a tie. All you needed was your shirt, and it would have been a tie.” This tends to keep all the competitors happy. And if they do get a little upset — well, at least they’re all dressed.)

Get Away from the Ogre. Nothing will motivate children to get moving like an unpleasant and rude-mannered ogre. Apparently, I might have a medical condition, because I transform into an ogre when it’s time to get into the car. I tell the kids that unless they are in the “safe area” (their car seats), the ogre will eat them up. And he’ll use ketchup. I count to three, and the quite motivated kids are suddenly dashing towards the car. No more dawdling! (And sadly, no snacks for the ogre.)

These two games are not just fun for the kids — they’re effective in getting us out the door on time for school. Well, almost on time. We’re more like five-ish minutes late now. I mean, we’re not perfect, except for my wife.

(If your kids respond well to the ogre in your house, and you want to reward them for their efforts, check out this rather cuddly ogre toy. Yes, it’s Shrek.)

(Many kudos and thanks to deletem3 for the awesome ogre image used above!)