Kids Makin' Dirt Cups with a Gummy Worm

How about letting kids make their own dirt cups? No, not real dirt, Oreo dirt. After all, dirt cake, or dirt cups are FOR kids. This is an easy recipe, even a kindergartner can manage to make a dirt cup with a bit of assistance.

Ingredients and Materials for Eight Children

• 1 package of instant chocolate pudding
• 2 cups of cold milk
• 16 Oreo cookies
• 8 regular gummi worms - not the sour kind
• 1 can or whipped cream
• 8- 8oz. plastic party cups
• 8 snack size, zip top bags
• 8 plastic spoons
• 1/4 cup measuring cup
• 1 plastic knife for leveling the pudding
• 1 black permanent marker

Note: I make the instant chocolate pudding ahead of time. One package will yield eight -one fourth cup servings.

 Before starting, have each child write their name on their party cup with a black permanent marker. 

1. Give each child an Oreo cookie and have them put it in the zip top snack bag and crush it up. Resist the urge to help. It is okay to have larger chunks in your"dirt."

2. Demonstrate and explain how to use the back of the plastic knife to level the pudding in the 1/4 cup measuring cup.

• Assist as necessary with the leveling procedure. Then, the kids will use their spoon to scrape the pudding out of the measuring cup and into their cup. 

This is where I talked about the importance of measuring ingredients exactly when following a recipe. 

3. Each child can now dump the crushed cookie into the cup and stir it in.

The cookie filling will stick a little bit to the inside of  the bag, but that is okay because they are going to crush a second cookie.

4. Tell the children they are going to squirt about the same amount of whipped cream into the cup as they have pudding. 

• Then they are going to stir the whipped cream into the cookie/pudding mixture until it is all the same color, or well blended. 

This is why I use 8 oz. cups. the children can stir, but keep the mixture in the cup. 

5. Give each child a second cookie to crush in their zip top bag and a gummi worm.

•  Make sure they understand that they are not going to stir this cookie into the pudding even though their spoon is still in the cup. 

6. Have children dump the crushed cookie on top of the pudding mixture for topsoil and put the worm on top of the crumbs.

Remember - the plastic spoon stays in the cup.

7. Place "dirt" cups on a tray and refrigerate for 30 to 40 minutes.

 This is just enough time to go on a walking field trip and look for different kinds of dirt, or have containers of potting soil, sand, and regular dirt for children to look at and examine with magnifying glasses. 

Now it is time for the kids to eat their very own "dirt" cup. Yay! Homemade happiness in a cup!

Fractured into Faithful, my Poetry Ebook

Whoopee! Yahoo! Fractured into Faithful by Sallee Bonham (me),  is now a Kindle ebook at Amazon.com. Hours of writing, revising, organizing, and editing are finally over and the end product is for sale world wide! Poetry and short stories taken from the peaks and valleys of my journey through life. Click on the link and sample Chapter 1.

 

Meth Addiction: A Mom's Perspective

Thanksgiving is almost here and I'm having trouble feeling thankful this morning. I am dealing with an adult child who has drug issues, law issues, and living issues.

Watching my church-going, God-loving, straight A, National Honor Society, cheer leading, piano-playing, tap-dancing daughter turn into a meth-addicted high school dropout hasn't been easy. Her step dad, my husband, died in 2005 and I feel like this event is what started her down the path she has chosen to follow for the last seven years. The first year, her sister and I tracked her down late at night several times because she wasn't home by curfew. "I hate you!" became a familiar phrase. One day she attacked my minivan with her bare hands and put three dents in the cargo hatch. Every time I asked her if she was taking drugs, she became indignant, looked me straight in the eye and lied to me. One morning when she was "sick" I took her to the hospital and had her tested for drugs. The results were positive and there was no more lying to me. She completely and totally shut her sister and I out of her life. Her friends understood her. Her friends liked her. Her friends were...

Verbal abuse became physical one night and I ended up calling the police to remove my sixteen year old from my home. What a mess! I was too embarrassed to tell the truth about my broken nose. Who wants to tell people that their teenager attacked them and broke their nose? This was just the beginning.  One morning ,about an hour after I had taken my daughter to school and watched her walk across the crosswalk to the high school building, I received a call from the sheriff's department and the high school. My daughter and one of her "friends" had been stopped by law enforcement officers who were observing a local drug house. The police took the two young women to school and proceeded to call in a K-9 unit and have the lockers of both girls searched. Nothing was found so truancy was the worst offense that came out of this. Why wasn't this a wake up call for my child? It was a wake-up call for ME.

Today my daughter is living with her thirty-two year old fiancee in a broken down, dilapidated trailer with two nonfunctional cars in front of it. He has already been in and out of long term treatment(prison for addicts) and regular incarceration. This morning as I write this, I believe he is in jail in southern Missouri. My baby girl is going to court this morning. She is seven months pregnant, working as a waitress, and believes she will be incarcerated. I am helpless to assist her. She is twenty-two years old.