Tot School - Baking Week 2

Kahlen is 38.5 months old

We are following the Hubbard's Cupboard curriculum for 2's called Joyful Learning so for two weeks, we are learning about Baking. This week, it was Cake and Pizza.

Unfortunately, I didn't make it to the library this week, very sad we didn't get to participate in stART this week :( We still did our crafts, but didn't read the books that were supposed to go with them.

We did get to do a shamrock craft with a friend, though, which was good for the kiddos. I was watching a friend's kids so she could get some work done at her new house, so I thought a craft would be a better way to entertain them for a little while. I got the idea from No Time For Flashcards here

Here are the kiddos hard at work

Here are what the other two kiddos were doing :)

The finished product.

I just took the ribbon I already had on the door from our Valentine's Day banner, took off the Valentine's stuff and added these shamrocks. This will probably be the extent of our St. Patrick's day crafts because I'm excited to start our next unit, which is a month long Easter unit.

For our first day of school, here are our trays:

Since I didn't have a book, the yellow tray was a YouTube video of Pat-a-cake since we were talking about cake.

Next, we made grape playdough

Then we made birthday cakes with our playdough while singing pat-a-cake

We then put candles in the cakes, four in her's since she'll be four on her next birthday and 1 in mine for her brother's next birthday. She asked me if we could fire them, so I lit them and let her blow them out

 I had her sort the candles by color next and then we talked about which color had the most, which ones were the same, etc

Our next tray was counting and number recognition. We had three paper cakes that I drew a number on and then we glued paper candles and flames on. She was pretty focused through the first one, and lost focus starting in the middle of the second one. By the third cake, she was done, so we didn't do the flames on that one. It took us about 10 minutes to get to that point, so I'd say that's pretty good.

After we did our handwriting worksheet and our verse song, she wanted to play with the playdough more. So she did. For the next hour. And after nap. And the next day. Take a look at the video on my Mommy Monday post to see what she was doing with it :)


For our second day, here are our trays:

First, we made paper pizzas. We had three pizzas varying in size, and a baggie full of toppings (cheese, green peppers, sausage, olives, and pepperoni)

She did great on the first one, started lagging on the second one, and didn't want to do the third one (sound familiar?) I did the third one since we were planning to use them for another activity later.

Next, we sorted a bag of clip art images into "baked" or "not baked" items (bread = baked, beach ball = not baked). Then we matched their letters up:

She's not really getting the whole sounds of letters and beginning sounds thing yet, but can't hurt to start now. Also, she's not very solid on letter recognition, so that's something we'll definitely be working on!

We were going to do an activity with "pizza boxes" as seen on the light blue tray. The activity goes something like this: Cut up the pizzas we made into pizza slices. Sort them by size into the correct pizza box, small, medium, or large. Reassemble pizza inside "box"
We didn't get to it because the pizzas took a long time to dry after gluing the toppings on. Guess I should have used a glue stick, oops.

Since she's in such a singing phase right now, I love doing the verse songs with her because she picks up on them really quick. Too bad she's so opinionated these days and only wants to sing it once :)

Last, we made pizzas for lunch. I let her basically do the whole thing. She's been helping me cook for a long time, so it wasn't really a stretch except that she was having a hard time keeping the sauce on the muffin.

And, yes, she's still wearing her pajamas. Actually, I completely forgot to get her clothes out of her room before I put the little man down for his nap, so she got to have a pajama day. She was thrilled, of course :)

Wow, we actually did more than I thought!

I hope to post our Easter plan sheets for the next two weeks soon, so keep an eye out for them!

~S

Tot School - Baking Week 1

Kahlen is 38.5 months old

We are following the Hubbard's Cupboard curriculum for 2's called Joyful Learning so for two weeks, we are learning about Baking. This week, it was Bread and Muffins.

We didn't do our normal routine for the first day because we were able to do school with a friend. She's one of the gals I swap kits with for tots, which works out really really well and I would highly encourage doing this if you have friends with kids that are similar ages.

First we read our stART book, the Little Red Hen. We then did a Yeast Experiment which was quite fun, although pretty messy, that's what happens when you allow the tot to do everything, I guess :)

 

Here they are listening to instruction. The little one was supposed to be playing with play dough, but for some reason today she wanted to eat it, so mommy held her instead. No picture, but I just put my little man on my back in my ErgoBaby so he could still see what was going on.

 

You can see the sugar spilled all over the table, but they must have gotten enough in, because it worked (mostly)

I was glad there were two of them since the one didn't work very well, but the other one did. They got to watch them inflate as they were working on their baker's hats.

We let them all watch The Little Red Hen on a scholastic video that my friend has while we cleaned up. It was a great afternoon, and I hope to be able to do more school projects now that they will be living 1/2 a mile from us (they move tomorrow!)

On our second day this week, we talked about muffins.
Here are our trays:

We read If You Give a Moose a Muffin for our stART project and made muffin tin paintings.
Then we made Muffin Tin Crayons. I happened to be at OfficeMax this week and found some crayons on clearance for 50 cents a box, so I bought two boxes.

Kahlen thought this one was funny since usually she's not allowed to peel or break her crayons and I was asking her to do both! 

I ended up using a knife to get the wrappings off since it was just taking too long to unwrap them all (all the while, I kept thinking about this little girl in the Sunday School class I teach that is lightening fast at peeling crayons). 

 

Here's right before we put them in the oven. Bake at 250 degrees for about 8 minutes, checking to see when they look melted enough. I think we ended up baking ours for about 12 minutes total.

 

Let them cool for at least half an hour. Pop them out of the papers, and tada! Rainbow crayons. She doesn't love to color with them because of the ridges left from the papers, but she likes the idea of them and it was still a fun project.

While they were baking, we did a sequencing file folder game. She wasn't a huge fan since it made her think, but she did a pretty good job. I might have her try it again this week, but we'll see how that goes.

We were going to do do-a-dot page with the letter M but she did not want to follow my instruction about one dab per dot, so we skipped that one. She did enjoy the handwriting practice pages for B is for Baker and M is for Muffin.

Join us for Tot School! Already doing some great activities with your tot? Link up here!
This week, we'll be learning about Pizza and Cake.
~S

stART - If You Give A Moose A Muffin

 

Each Thursday A Mommy's Adventures does a great blog carnival. Read a story to your child; then accompany it by art.

This was our second stART project for the week. We read If You Give a Moose A Muffin by Laura Numeroff.

Very classic Laura Numeroff book. We haven't read very many of this series, so Kahlen thought it was great (Although there really are very few books that Kahlen doesn't love)

Our project was muffin tin painting. The balls we used were a little too big, but it still worked. We took paper muffin tin liners and placed them in the tin. We then rolled rubber balls in different colors of paint and rolled them in the muffin tins.

When everything was dry, we glued them onto a piece of paper so we could display it on our craft wall.

 

Sorry, not very many pictures, it was a project that needed mom's help :) I think marbles would work better with a muffin tin, maybe next time...

~S

stART - The Little Red Hen

 

Each Thursday A Mommy's Adventures does a great blog carnival. Read a story to your child; then accompany it by art.

This week, our first book was The Little Red Hen by Heather Forest 

 

Cute pictures to accompany this traditional story. We liked the baby corgi especially :)

We got to do our stART project with a friend this week; one of the mommies that I swap kits with for preschool came over so our kids could play and we decided to do our preschool activities too. This is one of two we did (I'll post the other one later when I post about tot school for the week).

So, after we read our story, we made baker's hats.

 

Each kid had three circles and a square of white construction paper. They glued the circles on in a line at the top of the square. 

Then we took two long strips, stapled them together, and measured their heads. Then we stapled that together and stapled the square onto the front.

My friend also had the story on a scholastic video, so after we cleaned up, the kiddos watched this.

It was good because the little siblings joined in too, one at a time :)

 

  

Good thing they didn't think about last week's game of Five Little Monkeys (okay, there's only four at the time, but that's because the littlest one was sleeping)

~S