Overly Ambitious - Packed Lunch Edition

I've been eating the worst things for the past couple of. One reason is that I hadn't been able to get to the supermarket in weeks. I also had gotten way too close to my credit card limit and didn't have much leeway for food when there was a new collection at Ann Taylor Loft. I have a problem. Anyway, I had been coming across so many recipes on StumbleUpon and Pinterest that I collected a couple before heading to the supermarket and decided to challenge myself.
This week, I've decided to pack myself Pasta Fagioli for lunch. I could make it in bulk, store it in the fridge, and eat it for days without having to make myself another soggy turkey sandwich. I stole the recipe from A Nut in a Nutshell and altered it a bit to delete what I completely forgot to pick up at the market.

Ingredients:
1 lb stew beef chopped into 1/2″ pieces
1 cup onion, diced
1 large carrot, chopped
3 stalks celery, chopped
2 tbs minced garlic
2 14.5 oz cans diced tomatoes
1 15-oz can light red kidney beans
1 15-oz can great northern beans
1 15-oz can tomato sauce
1 cup water
3 cups V8 juice (about 5 small cans - regular or spicy)
1 tbs red wine vinegar
1 1/2 tsp salt
1 1/2 tsp oregano
1 tsp basil
1/2 tsp pepper
1/2 tsp thyme
1/2 lb ditalini


1) Brown beef using a little bit of oil. Once browned, place in a large stockpot but don't pour out the drippings. It's also probably a good idea to remove the pan from the heat if you haven't finished chopping the vegetables yet. I mean, it's not like I completely burned the drippings and had to saute the veggies in oil or anything.

 2. Chop the carrot, celery, onion, and garlic. I'm not quite sure how one "dices" an onion, but I'm pretty sure this isn't it.

 3) Saute the chopped veggies in the drippings about 7-10 minutes or until you've opened all of the cans you're about to pour into the pot.

 4) Add the veggies to the stockpot and pour in all of the remaining ingredients EXCEPT the pasta

5) Bring the pot to a slight boil, then turn the heat down to low and let it simmer for 1 hour. When you have about 10 minutes left, start cooking your pasta

6) Drain the pasta, add it to the soup, and then let it simmer for 10 more minutes. Then, Voila! You have Pasta Fagioli! 

It was tasty, but I will admit that it wasn't as good as my grandmothers. I sincerely doubt that she uses V8 in her recipe though

Just to give you an idea of how much soup this makes, these are my two pint sized mason jars that I packed for school with the rest of the soup. I can guarantee that a lot of this will end up being thrown out, which is a shame but I would rather not have my stomach explode.

I don't know when the next chance I will get to update is since my teacher is going to be absent this week and I am going to have a lot of prep work to do. When I do update, you will get to see my brilliant lessons on fabric. Get excited.
Until next time!


-Laura ♥

All of the Valentine's Day loot

Brought home a bunch of adorable little cards today and way too much candy. The cutest Valentine's Day treat came from one of the little boys. His mother got each of the teachers a box of Tazo "Calm" tea (prompting me to wonder what she has heard about the energy of our class) and a bag of homemade almond biscotti. The card on the front read "To my teacher". Very cute, and very much appreciated.

4 Hour Gift Tags

So I was at Target looking for small Valentine's Day gifts for my host teacher and classroom assistant and I found these cute little cookies. They're from a company called Emily's and they're dark chocolate covered fortune cookies with quotes and fortunes relating to friendship inside. They came in a nice little package and were $4 each. Sold.

I figured I would make little gift tags for them using my Cricut machine and call it a day. I already had the students' Valentines ready so that would leave me plenty of time to work on the lesson plans that are due this Thursday. Again, that was the plan. And since most of you reading this are either members of my family or have worked with me in an academic setting, you get that my plans don't always work out.
I don't know if anyone reading has ever owned a Cricut, but I will tell you that it is not always a cooperative machine. I have this theory that it was created by three, 55 year old women with limited knowledge of computers. I mean, that's really the only explanation. However, it (usually) does what it is supposed to and it does it pretty well. That is, if you take care of it properly and remember to replace the cutting mat every century or so. Honestly, you're supposed to replace the cutting mat every 3-4 months depending on how often you use the machine. I've had mine for well over 6 months and I've abused it. It's silly, really, considering a new one costs $3. But I just have to be a rebel. Needless to say, my paper would not stick to the cutting mat and the machine jammed about six times. Six. Take this image, then super-impose me banging my head against my textbook.

So what did I do? First, I ordered 4 new cutting mats off of amazon. They'll be here on Thursday. Then, I glue-sticked my paper down. Like a professional. I figured it was worth a shot, and it actually worked fairly well.
THEN I completely forgot that the Cricut does not just print out lettering ready to go. The middles of the O's and the A's and the D's and the B's had to be manually pasted once I pried them off of the cutting mat I had just glued them too. It was a lot of fun, and caused me to miss witnessing Cee-lo petting that mysterious white cat on The Voice.

Finally, at 9:30pm, 4 hours after beginning my gift tags, they were complete. And incredibly underwhelming. But they're finished and ready to give to my teachers tomorrow, so that's really all that matters.

I'm going to try not to DIY anything for the rest of the week. I have a long weekend coming up that should be filled with work, work, and more beautiful work. And possibly planning a new, ridiculous class project that my co-op will cringe at.

Valentine's Day Crayon Hearts

A couple of weeks ago I was clicking away on Stumbleupon when I came across this explanation on how to make heart-shaped crayons for your students. It looked simple enough, so I bought a silicone candy mold off of Amazon for about $8. I figure that I can use it again for crayons or candy. Then I went and grabbed some packs of crayons from the dollar store. I was able to get these 48 packs for $1 each, so I bought 5 packs.

Then came the task of peeling the wrappers off of the crayons. This was especially fun with dollar store crayons, because sometimes I would peel off one wrapper and find a Disney one underneath. One crayon wrapper was covered in Hebrew writing. I'm not quite sure how this happened, but I don't question dollar store finds. I will say that peeling off the wrappers took much more time than I expected (about 2.5 hours) but it gave me something mindless to do while watching TV.

I separated the crayons into blues, greens, yellows dark purples, and grays and pinks, reds, oranges, light purples, and whites. I put the ugly browns, blacks, and puke greens to the side. Then I used kitchen scissors to chop the crayons up into small pieces.

I set the oven to 200 degrees and placed my crayons in the silicone mold. I made sure to place a baking sheet underneath to catch any drippings. If I was smart, I would have covered it in foil so that I didn't have to clean the pan later but, alas, I did not.

About 5 minutes later, I checked the mold and added crayons to the ones that had melted down. After a total of around 11 minutes, all of the crayons had melted down and they were ready to take out of the oven.

I then had to let the crayons cool. This took a very long time and I only had one mold, so the process became much longer than I had expected. Once the crayons were solid enough to move, I popped them in the freezer to speed up the cooling. Then I pushed them out of the mold one by one.

Eventually, I had a whole bunch of rainbow heart crayons ready to go.

I had created these little cards and expected to be able to glue the crayons right to the card. That's what I expected to do. I tried hot glue, to no avail. Then I tried Elmer's glue but that was a no go. So what did I do?

By this time, it was 2am. I was tired and out of wine and completely out of DIY adrenaline. I realized that I had some tiny plastic bags with hearts on them that I had grabbed at the dollar store, so I put one crayon of each color in the bags and stapled them to the cards. Stapled. Like a true professional.

In the end, I have to remember that my students are five and six year olds. They take what you give them, don't say thank you, and then destroy it. This particular group will destroy everything you love if you let them put their hands on it. So I don't exactly feel bad for stapling together their Valentines.

A Week of Abraham Lincoln

This week, I taught my first social studies unit to my kindergartners. In preparation for President's Day later this month, we decided to teach the kids about Abraham Lincoln. I had some reservations about the unit, since it meant bringing up the topics of slavery and assassination, but the kids took everything very seriously and learned quite a bit. However, every time I asked them to tell me something they knew about Abraham Lincoln, the first answer would be something like "he got shot". Oh well. I tried.

Day 1 
I love using story pockets to introduce historical figures. In honor of Abraham Lincoln, I decided to use a story hat instead. After I revealed each item, the students took guesses of who we were going to be studying. After both the penny and the $5 bill were out of the hat, one student figured out that Lincoln was the man of the week.

After we unpacked the story hat, we put together a KWL chart with our learning goals for the week and then watched the BrainPOP biography of Abraham Lincoln. I don't have a BrainPop paid account, I just keep signing up for free trials under different email addresses. They'll never know.



Day 2
We read Abraham Lincoln's Hat by Martha Brenner. It's a cute story about how Abraham Lincoln would keep his important papers in his hat so that he wouldn't lose them. Then we decided what we would put in our own hats. Some of the writing was pretty adorable.

 "I would keep robots in my hat"

"I would put books in my hat"

Day 3

Okay, here's where it gets overly ambitious. Today, I had about an hour and 15 minutes to use with the kids so I decided to do something a little more fun. We started off by reading A Picture Book of Abraham Lincoln by David A. Adler. Then, we talked about how Abraham Lincoln was as a child and a young man. Then the stupidity began. I decided that it would be fun to make our own log cabins. Not out of popsicle sticks or cardboard, but out of pretzels. Pretzels and chocolate frosting. 

For a class of 24, I had to buy 4 bags of pretzel sticks, 6 cans of chocolate frosting (for 6 tables), and a bag of caramels for the door and chimney. Altogether, it cost about $23. Then I had to gather and wash about 24 empty, small milk cartons from the cafeteria. What happened after that was a complete mess. I hate that I had to crop out their adorable, chocolate-covered faces, but I don't want to violate any policies. 

Anyway, this is how my log cabin looked.

And now for some of the kids'

They came out pretty cute, but the kids were a complete mess. I don't mind a mess (they're only five, after all) but my co-op didn't seem so thrilled. The tables washed down in less than 10 minutes and the kids were mostly clean by the time they got home. One child's mother did question the chocolate around her son's mouth and my co-op explained that "the student teacher did a fun craft with the class". To that, the parent responded "I guess that's how they learn". Still not quite sure what that means.

Day 4

It was the final day to learn about Lincoln, and my supervisor came in to observe me. We filled in the "know" section of our KWL chart and then learned a little bit about how we could use a timeline to show all of the important things Abraham Lincoln did in his life. Then we created our own class timeline. This sounded like a good idea when I thought about it, but then I realized that it meant creating an individual page for each member of my class (all 24 of them). I had to come up with 24 important dates and 24 coloring pictures to go along with them. This resulted in some pretty funny pictures of Lincoln.

All-in-all, the week went pretty well. Hit a few minor snags, but everything got cleaned up and I got good marks on my observation. Next week I only have a day to teach about George Washington, so let's see how far in over my head I can get.