Cooking in the Classroom: A Winter Baking Project with the Twos

By Nancy Howe, Head Teacher

“Pat a cake, pat a cake baker’s man

Bake me a cake as fast as you can

Pat it and poke it and mark it with a B

And put it in the oven for baby and me.”

—Classic English nursery rhyme

This winter, children in our classroom became bakers—not just for pretend, but for real. Our winter quarter baking project in the Tuesday/Thursday AM Twos program, Cooking in the Classroom, was a way for teachers to respond to and expand upon the children’s interest in pretend cooking, an early stage of imaginary play.

Outdoors in the sand area, it’s typical for children to use open-ended materials like sand and water to symbolically represent familiar ingredients and make foods that they like eating at home: soup, muffins, cupcakes and birthday cakes. Inside, children especially enjoy the sensorial properties and imaginary play possibilities of play dough. Teachers offer cooking tools in conjunction with play dough including rolling pins, plastic pizza cutters, tortilla presses, cookie cutters and small baking pans.

For our baking project, teachers selected simple basic recipes that allowed children to be actively engaged. Baking with real ingredients gave children the opportunity to not only practice stirring, rolling, kneading and other baking skills but to talk about ingredients, observe scientific processes like yeast foaming and to use their five senses to engage in all aspects of the baking process. Parents and grandparents participated as volunteer chefs. The enthusiastic involvement of teachers, children and family contributed to shared-classroom cooking experiences.

Pretzel Recipe

Ingredients:

1½ cups warm water

1 envelope yeast

4 cups flour

1 tsp. salt

1 tbsp. sugar

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. Bake at 425 degrees for 12 minutes.