By Mary Munday, Head Teacher
This past year in the Tuesday/Thursday AM Twos, we discovered the children had a strong interest in cooking. This became apparent one day early in the fall when a teacher set up a table with a large bowl, cooking utensils, a recipe book and the ingredients to make soft bread pretzels. The table filled up quickly with children requesting, “I want a turn! I want a turn!” The teacher gave each of the children a turn to help by scooping flour or salt, mixing yeast with warm water, and stirring the ingredients together. Finally, the dough was ready for rolling, pounding, twisting and shaping for the cooking pan. After all the dough was placed on the pan, the group took a trip to the kitchen, where the teacher carefully placed the pretzels in the oven. They headed back to the classroom and washed the flour and other ingredients off the table and resumed playing. About 10 minutes later, a few returned to the kitchen to pull the warm bread out of the oven for snack time, and the class enjoyed the delicious pretzels at snack time together.
Noticing that the children were fascinated by cooking, the teachers tried a few more recipes over the following weeks. Next we invited families to come in and prepare a favorite recipe they enjoy at home. The sign-ups filled up fast, and soon we were on a weekly cooking adventure with our families. Each week, the table filled up as the children were immediately interested in the process. They joined in to scoop, pour, mix, knead, roll, chop, bake and taste many delicious recipes. The children cut fruit and made a big fruit salad, kneaded dough and covered it with sauce and cheese to make pizza, and made many types of breads. The enthusiastic involvement of children, families and teachers contributed to a shared classroom experience.
Cooking with children presents many learning opportunities. Children explore basic math when scooping and adding ingredients, or counting eggs as they get cracked into the bowl. Their vocabularies are enriched when teachers read the recipe out loud, and their basic reading foundation is strengthened when they see teachers read from left to right and top to bottom. Children get to explore through their senses by smelling the ingredients, pounding the dough, watching bread rise and tasting new flavors. Cooking in the classroom creates a group experience full of turn-taking opportunities as the children work toward a common goal together, passing the bowl around the table to help measure and stir. Cooking can also boost children’s self-confidence as they use real tools to make actual food to share with the group.
The cooking project created a stronger classroom community as families joined us weekly—sometimes coordinating with each other—to work on a recipe for the classroom. Children were excited to have their parent, grandparent or caregiver act as another teacher in the classroom for a day, and teachers looked forward to supporting the families each week. As a culminating project, the team of teachers put together a cookbook to give to all of the families at the end of the school year so that they could make some of their favorite classroom recipes at home.
Finally, the cooking project inspired teachers’ choices of books and songs for the end-of-the-day story time.
Here’s one of the children’s favorite recipes:
PRETZELS
Ingredients:
1 1/2 cups warm water
1 envelope yeast
4 cups flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon sugar
coarse salt
1 egg
What to do:
1. Mix together water, yeast and sugar.
2. Set aside for 5 minutes.
3. Put salt and flour in a bowl.
4. Add yeast mixture and mix to form a dough.
5. Shape dough into creative twists.
6. Beat 1 egg and brush onto twists.
7. Sprinkle with coarse salt.
8. Bake at 425° F for 12 minutes.
Chop, chop, chippity chop
Cut off the bottom
Cut off the top
All of the rest goes into the pot
Chop, chop, chippity chop
Choices of books at story time incorporate themes about cooking:
Pete’s a Pizza by William Steig
Bear Wants More by Karma Wilson
Bear Says Thanks by Karma Wilson
Growing Vegetable Soup by Lois Ehlert
The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle
Bunny Cakes by Rosemary Wells
Muncha! Muncha! Muncha! by Candace Fleming
Bread, Bread, Bread (Around the World Series) by Ann Morris
If You Give a Pig a Pancake by Laura Numeroff and Felicia Bond