Preschool Cooking

Our local bookstore, Cooperfields, hosted a cooking competition for kids.  Each bought a cookbook and choose a recipe to make and enter.  I picked out the cookbook Pretend Soup and Other Real Recipes for Preschoolers for Thomas.  This cookbook is awesome for non and early readers.  Each recipe is four pages long, with the first 2 page spread for the adult helpers and the second 2 page spread in pictorial form for the preschooler.  Thomas literally made several recipes with independently.  He loves the book and uses it in his play kitchen and even requests it for his night time story! This is a must have for any pre-reader!

For those of you interested he didn't place at the contest, but had a great time!  Here is his display:

Simple Games on a Rainy Day

So it is raining.... again... and I am trying to come up with some new and exciting activity to keep my crazy, I mean active, three year old entertained, when he asks to play in the kitchen sink. He grabs his stool and announces that he is going to make waffles in the sink.  I go with it, asking what kind of waffles, maybe blueberry?  Pretty soon he is pouring water back and forth between a mason jar and a measuring cup and using a wooden spoon to stir his waffles.  This lasts about 20 minutes then I add ice to the picture and he is off again.  Sometimes I have to be reminded how simple it really can be!

Cleaning Pennies

 

This has certainly proved to be a rainy winter!  Here is an activity I had come across several times and always thought it looked a little silly and passed it up.  On the recommendation of a friend I finally gave it a go, and boy was I glad I did!  Thomas LOVED it and insisted that he help Daddy clean his pennies when he got home. I loved it because it involved materials I already had and  some great learning opportunities!

Materials:

1. baking soda
2. vinegar
3. pennies
4. eye dropper (or medicine dropper)
5. measuring spoon
6. small bowl 
7. large bowl of water
8. towel

First, I showed Thomas what a penny was and had him go through our coin jar and find all the pennies he could and pull them out.  

Next, he put one penny in the small bowl, measured out 1/4 teaspoon of baking soda, and dumped the soda on top of the penny.  

Then he filled a dropper full of vingear and carefully counted out drops on top.  Of course it then it erupted in bubbles which got Thomas VERY excited.

After all the bubbles died down he transferred the penny to the larger bowl of water to "rinse" the penny off and then on a kitchen towel to dry. Then it was time to do another one!

He was happily occupied for about 45 minutes! The whole time he was learning: what a penny is, visual discrimination, remembering and following steps, counting, and observing chemical reactions.  All in all a great activity!

Possible literature connections:

"Snow" Fun

We have been having a lot of rain lately and more rain is coming! Being trapped inside with two little ones, one of which is a 2 year-old boy who doesn't seem to stop, can cause the best of us to look for an exit! So over the next few days I am going to post some of the activities that we have been doing at our house recently, and hopefully your guys will enjoy them as much as mine did!

"Snow Fun"

Materials:

1. shaving cream
2. small objects to find (we used Rub A Dub Abc & 123)
   
3. large dish
4. cup of water

First put down what you are going to have them search for in the "snow." We used some foam numbers.











Next have them bury the objects in the "snow," also known as shaving cream. Any shaving cream will do, though my son loved this activity so much and wanted to redo it over and over again, that I recommend buying some super cheap stuff at target rather than leaving daddy without shaving cream the next morning!








Then have them search for the objects in the snow. They can then clean them off in water and identify what they found. As you can see from the pictures I had my son complete this activity in the bathtub which helped keep the clean-up to a minimum!






All in all a very successful rainy day activity. My son wanted to repeat this game over and over again. I also really liked that not only did it keep him entertained for almost an hour, but all the time we were working on identifying numbers in a fun way!











Possible Literature connections: