Jamming- Child made holiday gifts for parents

This year, we made placemats and orange jam for holiday gifts from the children to the parents. It took several days to make them, but they were well worth the effort.

For the placemat, the children drew a picture of their family and colored it on one side, and on the other side, the children's handprints in paint. Then I ran the cardstock through the cold laminator and rounded the edges with scissors.




The orange jam is marmalade, technically. We had orange grating available as a work in the classroom for several days and I showed it to four and five year olds.




Then eventually we peeled the grated oranges as a group, sectioned them, and removed seeds.



And then the cooking part was made with mostly teacher assistance. Children could do all the measuring though.

We collected jars for putting the jam in and the children decorated their own labels.



I super recommend this easy and yummy gift for the holidays. In the future, I think we'll give a small loaf of child made bread to go with the jam.


Recipe (tripled for 22 jars):

2lb Oranges/Rind
4lb Sugar
2 pints water/collected orange juice
2 lemons

Wash the oranges thoroughly.

Grate the peel off of as many as you can.

Peel off the remaining white parts, remove seeds, section by hand (keep all the juice).

Squeeze two lemons worth of juice.

In a very large pot, cook the oranges, juice, and water for about 40 minutes- rolling boil (we cooked it for about 1 hour because it was 3x the recipe).

Add the sugar and boil again for about 30 minutes. (If you don't trust the setting or the jam, add a few boxes of gelatin- I did.).

Let it stand for about 15 minutes and the ladle into very clean jars.