Bongiorno!

Today we studied a little bit about Italy. We read the book "Gaspard on Vacation" by Anne Gutman and Georg Hallensleben. We learned that streets in Venice are canals, the capital of Italy is Rome, and the language is Italian. We listened to the national anthem and counted to 10 in Italian (sound familiar?).

For our craft today, we dyed pasta (you know, since we were talking about Italy and Italians eat a lot of pasta...) and created family crests.

To dye pasta is very simple. You need vinegar, food coloring and pasta. Put 1/2 - 3/4 cup of vinegar in a bowl. Add 10 drops of food coloring. Put dried pasta in and stir for a short time.

Remove pasta and let dry completely. The colors will get more vivid as they dry. We used red, green, yellow and blue and then created other colors by mixing the left over dye.

Here are their crests (Boo's first, then Bug's).

We also completed the project we've been working on for the past few days. We've been talking about castles and what life in a castle was like the past few days - since we have been focusing on Europe. We used the pattern on this site to create a castle out of cardboard and paper. Then we painted it.

I carved a potato into a brick pattern to stamp on for depth. We also tore construction paper to create a moat. It ended up looking very cool.


We read about castles and did castle puzzles with the Usbourne Castle JigSaw Puzzle book.

For dinner, we had Italian Country Style Steak and Chicken

INGREDIENTS
• 3 chicken breasts, cut into small pieces
• 8 ounces sirloin steak, cut into cubes
• 1 large red pepper, sliced thin
• 1 large green pepper, sliced thin
• 1 large yellow pepper, sliced thin
• 1 large Vidalia onion, sliced thin
• 1 cup sliced mushrooms
• 1/2 cup olive oil
• 2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar

In a large sauté pan, add ¼ cup olive oil and sauté chicken until golden brown then add the steak and cook for 2 minutes more. Remove from pan and set aside.

In the same sauté pan, add another ¼ cup olive oil, cook peppers until tender; season with salt and pepper. Add the onions, mushrooms, balsamic vinegar and continue to cook until the onions are translucent.

Add the meats to the sauté pan, mix all the ingredients together, cook for 2 minutes, season with salt and pepper to taste. Serve immediately.

(I found the recipe on the internet but can't remember where so if it's yours, let me know and I'll make sure to credit you!)

I found this to be incredibly delicious! The kids verdict was not quite as good but they ate it anyway. This made a lot of food so I'll have plenty of leftovers to keep me happy for a few days!