making fairy bread in the classroom

For our week of A Rainbow of My Own it was all rainbows all the time. For our cooking project I set up a fairy bread station. While it is not cooking as we know it, it is a lovely food prep project that kiddos really enjoy. We talk about steps and sequence, ingredients, and tools used. We observe what is on the table and the children make declarations and predictions. They then use their fine motor skills to spread the butter onto their bread and sprinkle the sprinkles on top. Food prep is a wonderful opportunity for learning. I try to incorporate it into the classroom each week. When we are unable to work on food or drink prep we usually follow a recipe of sorts such as making play dough. Enjoy!

oh, the fun that we had: pink ink

Another fun project from One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish was making Pink Ink (it's what the Yink drinks).  We do a lot of recipes in the classroom, both real and made-up (concoction making and experimenting). Recipe following falls right in line with early math skills. Children are learning sequencing along with cause and effect (what happens when we add something, what happens when we leave something out). Cooking and recipe following in the classroom is always exciting. The children also learn new vocabulary words and further develop all those motor skills that are so important to coordination, balance, and learning.

 

For our Pink Ink recipe I wanted to do something easy that mostly focused on following steps in order. My first thought was strawberry milk but that was just so pink. Then I thought of making a french soda without the fizz and off I went in search of juice. I knew we were going to use whipped cream and sprinkles so I went with a no-sugar added option. The problem with that is the more natural the juice the less pretty it is (not really a problem but it was funny when the pink ink was hardly pink).

 

The set up included clear cups on plates and a happy curly straw. The first step was to pour some juice into their cup. Each child took a turn and poured as much or as little as they wished. We do a lot of pouring practice in class when we make cocoa (which is always a treat and I need to do a post on the cocoa fun) and the children know that sometimes a spill happens and that's okay, we just clean it up. They all know where the dishtowels for cleaning up are which makes it easy and they own it.

After juice came milk  then whipped cream (we did not get a chance to make our own cream so I sprayed some on top for them).

 

After the cream came the sprinkles (which thankfully had soooo much color in them the drink did indeed turn pink after much stirring had happened) then the straw.

 

 

The children oohed and aaahed over their concoctions and went about investigating them as they would any set of science supplies I set out for them. I asked them to use their senses and tell me what they observed. There was a lot of enthusiastic sniffing and poking and tasting. Oh so much fun!

making play dough in the classroom

 I often forget to make new play dough for the classroom but luckily we have a cabinet with all the ingredients we need and a microwave for heating up water to pull it all together. Often we will mix away with no recipe other than each child who is present getting to add a scoop or two of each ingredient at hand. As we work on our recipe I use vocabulary to enhance the process and now each child clamors to be the one who gets to level it off, or knead the dough.

 We use flour, salt, oil, cornstarch and water in our dough. If I remember to bring in cream of tartar we add that as a preservative but otherwise hte cornstarch adds a nice smooth feel to the happy mess.

 This batch here was for a week of faux snow play and so while it did not have any color added, it did need a glitter boost. Everyone loves a turn shaking glitter into the mix.

 I need to find a big mixing bowl for the classroom. I keep an eye out at the thrifts but until then we use whatever we have on hand. Sometimes a bucket, other times this aluminum tray. We began with a bouquet of wooden spoons but many of them seem to have gone into hiding. I need to find more of those as well.

 The children love making their own play dough and will often play with it more than usual when they have had a hand in the making. The sparkles in this batch made the dough all shimmery while the cornstarch made it smooth and pliable. This snowman was the first thing that got made that morning.

 To add to the play there were small clear, blue,  and white flat backed jewels; glittery styrofoam balls,snowflake shaped cookie cutters, and a handful of classroom made stamps.

We made the stamps from a pack of sticky-backed foam snowflakes and a handful of our play blocks. Later, our large foam snowflake stampers made an appearance and were a complete hit!