Ms. Amy's Blog @Child Central Station

It is Strawberry Season! We are very fortunate to have a family connection to the Crane Berry Farm in Chassell. The children love to help us with the berries. They help to wash them and to cut them for freezing or baking. One of my little friends just can't get enough when it comes to cutting berries. She has been cutting, and cutting, and cutting. This is real work for little hands. Armed with a cutting board and a butter knife she has been cutting off the "green parts" from the "red parts" or the stem from the berries. Today, we took the activity a bit further and made up a batch of strawberry freezer jam. We added 1 1/2 cups of sugar and one package of pectin. It is important to mix the sugar and the pectin well before adding the berries. In a separate bowl, we mashed our berries with a meat tenderizer. We like our jam to have big chunks of berries, so we only mashed them up a little bit. Then we added 6 heaping cups of berries to our pectin...

Today was a day of strawberries! We spent a good 45 minutes cleaning and cutting all of the "jam berries" we had. (My aunt and uncle own a strawberry farm in Chassell, Michigan- The Crane Berry Farm). I did not expect interest to last as long as it did, but the children were super excited about cutting the berries. After we cut the berries, we made some strawberry drop biscuits: 2 1/2 c. whole wheat flour 1 Tbsp. baking powder 1 Tbsp. honey 1/2 c. margarine 2/3 c. milk Strawberries to taste- we added between 2-3 cups (we like lots of berries!) Mix dry ingredients cut in margarine, add milk and honey. Mix well. Fold in Strawberries. Drop by spoonfuls on baking sheet. (We use parchment paper on a cookie sheet). Bake in oven pre-heated to 400 for approximately 20 minutes until they look like this: Cool, and then Enjoy! They were devoured, no leftovers today. :). We also made a pretty cool project from our ber...