5/19/2008

Cooking activities

I love cooking in the classroom. I have at least one activity every other week if not more often. We have done the jello to a home made salad from our garden. Mini pizza's a great! We made mashed potatoes one year as well. We never make things from boxes, everything is from scratch.

So, when we made egg salad one day for lunch, we made the mayonnaise (egg whites, oil, lemon juice) and boiled and peeled the eggs ourselves. I brought in a bag of potatoes to peel (using our fine motor and eye-hand coordination skills), cut up into cubes (for the most part the teachers did this, but we did allow some very capable children help while strongly supervised), and then, after boiling, we mashed the heck out of them.

We made a cake one year as a going away party for an assistant teacher, made from scratch. What was even more impressive about that was that the children managed to keep it a surprise for more than 1 week! We also made lemonade and sold it to the parents and the rest of the center as they came to pick up their children. A great lesson in math and money.

I will go into more details in how to do a cooking activity in the near future; and we will finish up our observation to lesson planning soon as well. Today, however, I want some suggestions:

What kind of cooking activities have you done? Leave the recipe as well so others can share with their classrooms as well.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

We make this really good orange sliced recipe:
Peel a bag of oranges (you can use as many or as few as you need) squeeze a couple lemons over the top (depending on how juicy they are, we typically use 3-4) then sprinkle a minimal amount of sugar over that (I usually only use one tablespoon over the entire batch)
Then refrigerate for a couple hours.

You could also freeze this and make a yummy iced treat; it's perfect for a warm day. Nice and juicy and cold! The children love it, and they help out a lot:

They peel the oranges, they use plastic knives to cut it into rounds, and they squeeze the lemons themselves. The only thing I have to do is put it in the refrigerator because they aren't allowed in our center kitchen (too many dangers)