"Icing Sugar For Decorating Cakes" Adept, Home School Teacher: Australia

Ingredients: Icing sugar mix, Water, Food Coloring

Method: Mix icing sugar with a little bit of water to form a running substance, not too runny though. Add food coloring to suit. To harden put in the fridge to cool.

"Let's make playdough!" Adept, Home School Teacher: Australia

This is the very, very best recipe for play dough that I have ever found! I hope you love it as much as my children and I do.

Ingredients: 1 cup of flour, 1 cup of water, 1/2 cup of salt, 1 tablespoon of oil, 2 teaspoons of cream of tartar food coloring

Method: Mix it all up in a saucepan. Heat and stir over a hot plate until the playdough has thickened and leaves the side of the saucepan. Turn out onto a bread board to cool.

Preserving: Place into a plastic lunch bag and store in the fridge. If you do this, it will increase the life of the playdough dramatically.

"Recipes Are Not Just for Cooking" All Grades

There are a number of things you can accomplish by using recipes. Kids could learn about foods from all over the world and gain an appreciation for different customs and traditions. Skills such as measuring quantities or amounts of ingredients, the mixing of ingredients and chemical changes that occur, or the content of food and the caloric index. Kids love to eat what they prepare. It is easy enough to obtain a cooking element to heat food or you can prepare the food ahead of time and tell the students what you had to do to get to that final product that they can enjoy eating. A great site to start with is:

http://teachnology.subportal.com/recipes/

"Making Invisible Ink" Nancy Telestra: Rome,NY

Making invisible ink is relatively easy. All you need is milk or lemon juice as "ink," paper and something to write with such as a small brush, an old but clean fountain pen, or even just a Q-Tip. Providing that the paper is white, and providing you use your "ink" sparingly, the message is pretty much invisible to the eye. Be sparing in your use, though. Too much "ink" will cause the paper to buckle up a bit and the writing will show. And be sure that your writing implement is very clean and doesn't leave traces of some old ink or paint.

Now take the paper and carefully heat it up over a burner on the stove. Obviously, don't let the paper catch fire.... pretty soon the message will turn up as brown writing.

How it works is really quite simple. There are chemical compounds in the milk and lemon juice that have a low burning point. These are carbon compounds such as those that make caramel. When you hold the paper over heat, these compounds scorch and turn brown before the paper does, so they leave their mark and reveal the writing.

At least 5 different kinds of the invisible ink can be made, using white wine, vinegar, lemon juice, apple juice, milk, iced tea, and orange juice. And if you have time, see if other types of acidic fruit juices also work. Have fun!

"Letters Home" Nancy Ozril, Teacher

"This week I planned a great activity that ties in Veterans Day. I'm having students imagine they are away at war. They are writing a fictional letter back home. They are to tell their friends and family what the conditions are like and what they miss most. Some students really got into and made fully 5-page stories. To prepare for this activity, I had students do a web quest on the conditions of war time."