Austrian Jam Cookies

These Austrian Jam Cookies are a classic that kids love to make and to eat!

1. In a medium bowl, cream together 1/2 cup butter and 1/2 cup coconut sugar. Add 1 tsp vanilla extract and 1 egg yolk; mix until fluffy. Stir in 1 1/2 cups all purpose flour or Namaste gluten free flour.

        We love to count to 10 in German with our soft Austrian accents while we               mix... eins, zwei, drei, vier, funf, sechs, sieben, acht, neun, zehn!

   2.   Measure out the dough by teaspoonfuls, and roll into balls.

   3.  With a finger, make an indention with each cookie.

    4.   Fill the holes with strawberry jam.

    5.  Bake in an oven preheated to 300 degrees for 15 minutes and cool.  Yum!

We learned about the Austrian painter Gustav Klimt and how he loved gardens, flowers, and especially his cat by reading the fun children's book 'Klimt and His Cat'.

We studied his mural painting 'The Tree of Life' and talked about all the different shapes we saw in the painting.

Then we created our own 'Tree of Life' painting using a Klimt inspired stencil, gold paint, and various stamps:

The kids were delighted when we removed the stencil and they saw their beautiful tree!

All month we have been listening to Austrian composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - especially his violin pieces - to prepare for our field trip to Sandro Cocco's Violin Studio!


Sandro is a luthier who builds and repairs violins.

We walked from the garden to his studio on South Congress and saw this beautiful mosaic on the way.

Once we arrived at his studio we could smell the pine in the air and were surrounded by all kinds of violins and stringed instruments.

Sandro showed us the original maple wood that he would carve into a violin and we explored all the different parts and sounds of violins.

Sandro played us the cello and the violin and we compared the different qualities of the instruments.

Thanks so much Sandro for an amazing field trip!

This 'still life of a bonsai tree' was a fun drawing exercise - it's interesting to see what shapes and details the kids notice.

We collected different leaves and practiced our tracing and cutting skills.

We identified a Texas Red Oak in the garden and gathered leaves to make a                 Fall Leaf Collage.

We really loved squeezing out the glue ourselves!

Before yoga class we colored these 'tree pose' coloring sheets and practiced writing the letter T.

In yoga class we warmed up for tree pose first with "I am sunshine!" (a version of warrior pose):

Then to start working on balance we did crane pose:

For our peak pose 'Tree!' we like to say this little poem from Teresa Anne Power's ' The ABC's of Yoga for Kids':

I am an old and solid tree.
My roots grow deep into the ground beneath me.
Bending one leg, I bring my foot to my thigh.
Balancing can be tricky, but I'll give it a try!
I focus my sight on a single spot.
Yoga improves my concentration a lot!

And for our final tree experience, we planted a Texas Everbearing Fig Tree in the garden.  Each group helped dig the hole, plant the tree, and water it in with compost tea.

Wait a minute... that's not a fig tree!

That's more like it...

How much fun can you have with a wagon?  A LOT!

Then the kids built their own train and choo choo'd to the beach!

We got this awesome time lapse puzzle and these stacking robots at Anna's Toy Depot on South Lamar!

The kids LOVE this sensory swing.  It is designed to stimulate the cerebral cortex by the swinging and spinning motion. This sensory integration in the brain provides a healthy foundation for complex learning and emotional intelligence. 

We love how well they are negotiating at taking turns and helping each other enjoy the swing!

We love carrots!

Cooperative building!

Truck track!

Watering heroes!

Free play!

Happy Birthday!

Paint It Purple!

And finally, check out these 10 Lessons That Art Teach from the National Art Education Association at www.arteducators.org.  Our son also attends the Dougherty Arts Explore Preschool (which we love!) and they handed this out to all the parents - we thought it was worth passing on. Enjoy!

1. The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships. Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it is judgment rather than rules that prevail.

2. The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution and that questions can have more than one answer.

3. The arts celebrate multiple perspectives. One of their large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.

4. The arts teach children that in complex forms of problem solving purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity. Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.

5. The arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form nor numbers exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.

6. The arts teach students that small differences can have large effects. The arts traffic in subtleties.

7. The arts teach students to think through and within a material. All art forms employ some means through which images become real.

8. The arts help children learn to say what cannot be said. When children are invited to disclose what a work of art helps them feel, they must reach into their poetic capacities to find the words that will do the job.

9. The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling.

10. The arts' position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young what adults believe is important.