Our Journey Westward » candy

Pretzel and Nut Bark Recipe

Cindy — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 18:10:02 +0000

Here’s one of my favorite and super-easy Christmas sweets.

Pretzel and Nut Bark

3 cups semisweet chocolate chips

1 cup thin pretzels broken into small chunks

2/4 cup salted nuts of any kind (I use mixed nuts)

1/3 cup white chocolate chips or almond bark

2 Tablespoons (more or less) of Christmas colored sprinkles (any style)

Line 13×9″ pan with foil so that the foil hangs over the edges. In a large bowl, microwave the semisweet chocolate chips 1-2 minutes. (Stir the chips after one minute, microwave in 30 second increments until chips are melted.) Stir in pretzels and nuts. Spread in pan.

In a smaller bowl, microwave the white chocolate chips or almond bark for 1 minute or until melted. Place melted chocolate in a plastic ziptop baggie. Snip the corner and squeeze the chocolate over the bark in the pan. Lightly cover with sprinkles. Chill for about 1 hour (until firm).

Lift the bark out by the foil, then peel the foil away. Break the bark into pieces. Keep chilled until ready to eat.

Living Math – Graphs Galore

Cindy — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 03:22:00 +0000

October/November = lots of falling leaves and lots of candy. What better to do with both of those things? Math, of course! )

Whether you have extra M&M’s, Skittles, Smarties, Runts, or just a big bunch of assorted candy bars, take a few minutes to turn those sweets into more than cavities. Even little bitty ones can sort candy, place the pieces on a blank grid, then color a bar graph. As the kiddos get bigger, all the more fun they can have graphing their candy. Here’s a post from last year about how we used M&M’s to do all sorts of graphs. This year, we did some candy graphing, but not quite as in depth as last year.

And don’t forget all those autumn leaves! Make a nature walk even more productive by collecting a sack of leaves to sort and graph.

Literal or concrete graphs are not only fun, but help younger ones understand better what a graph on paper represents.

After making the concrete graphs, my children jotted the information and used centimeter grid paper to design their own graphs.

Happy graphing!

M & M Math Activities and Links

Cindy — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 00:21:00 +0000

Talk about a fun week of math learning! Here are a couple of the activities my children did during our week of m&m math fun. Overall, we covered estimation, sorting, counting, adding, word problems, pictographs, bar graphs, comparison graphs, pie graphs, graphs made in a spreadsheet program, fractions, fair shares (division), mean/median/mode, decimals and percentages. I’d say that was enough math to rival any textbook curriculum for a week!