As an Experience Early Learning Blog Ambassador, we receive the Experience Early Learning preschool curriculum in exchange for sharing our honest and authentic stories resulting from our personal experiences. As always, our opinions on amazing things for children are 100% our own. Keep in mind that all preschoolers do things in their own time and on their own terms. What one is ready for, another might not be. Please use your best judgement when planning activities for your children.
This is part two of our cooking week with Experience Early Learning (formerly Mother Goose Time).
It is food week for the Nursery Rhyme theme and on the day that we learned about Hot Cross Buns, we decided to make real Hot Cross Buns!
The children were very excited about it. We have baked fairly often, and I always talk to them about how the ingredients that we usually use, like flour, sugar, eggs, salt, etc that are used in each of the dishes that we make.
We added to our ingredients graph that we started and will keep adding to it.
Graphing is a wonderful math activity that students will be using for many years, even while in the upper grades in school.
For Hot Cross Buns, we used this recipe from Sally’s Baking Addiction https://sallysbakingaddiction.com/hot-cross-buns/
Each of the children washed their hands, and as always, I refer to the word recipe, and tell them that what and how much of these ingredients we use. I usually say that we are using half a cup, or one tablespoon.
We take turns going around the table to have the children come up and add what is next and stir the bowl.
I also put small amounts of the ingredients into a small dish so that they can use their senses and smell and feel the product. They are not, however, permitted to taste it as it goes around (but at first when we started doing this we always have one who wants to!!).
Some things, like chocolate chips (when we made cookies) we let them each have one.
Some of the children wouldn’t touch or smell, but most of them enjoyed it a lot!
After the dough was ready, we split it up, gave each child a plate with flour on it to let them knead the dough. I talked about the word KNEAD and how it’s different from the word NEED even though it sounds the same.
As long as they had flour on their hands and plate, it wasn’t too sticky but some of them didn’t!
We put their names on the bottom of cupcake liners and put them into a baking sheet to raise.
While we were waiting, we started working on today's art. It was a great invitation to create process art experience that allowed the children to make their own hot cross buns.
Look at this gorgeous inspiration photo that Experience Early Learning sent for the children to enjoy during this process art experience!
Instead of shaving cream, we used Mr. Bubble Foam Soap. The children had a blast "piping" their own icing onto their pretend hot cross buns.
After they were finished icing their hot cross buns, they added a bit of glitter too.
It was a lovely way to give the preschoolers another hands-on sensory experience related to this topic.
Experience Early Learning (formerly Mother Goose Time) is always so great about giving us lots of themed ideas that coordinate with our daily topics.
We decided to extend the science project by showing them how yeast rises. I added sugar, which feeds yeast, to one bowl and no sugar to the other. They have been pretty amazed at the difference!
We let them rise for awhile and baked them. They came out of the oven just as the children were eating lunch, so I made a powdered sugar icing (using powdered sugar and a squeezed orange) but unfortunately, it got too wet and I was out of powdered sugar, but oh well!! I bet you’ve had off days too!!
We had the children eat them after eating their lunches and one said that he liked the raisins, but most of them just said that they just liked them and ate it all! We had a grandma come in to pick up her child and she kept commenting on how good it smelled in the building! I agree!!
We will send the recipe home and ask parents to make it with their children. Cooking is really very easy and really great for children and parents to do together.
The preschoolers has a wonderful time exploring Hot Cross Buns in so many fun ways thanks to Experience Early Learning.
What are you going to bake this week?
