A Piece of Cake: A Room 1 Baking Experience

In planning our room 1 “wedding party”, the children agreed that we would need to celebrate with a cake. A few days prior to the event, we gathered the ingredients and tools we needed for baking. Cooking offers children a variety of learning experiences. It's a practical way to teach kids basic life skills, as well as academic skills involving reading, science and math. Here is what we uncovered during the baking of our wedding cake.

We made observations and predicted change and talked about the purpose of each ingredient. We practiced our sequencing skills and procedural talk by following the steps of the recipe. We also explored with math as we compared the sizes of cups and spoons and counted and measured the ingredients.

As we incorporated the ingredients we carefully used our fine motor skills to gently pour them into the bowl.

Our senses came into good use as we explored the ingredients. This experience encouraged us to use our eyes, ears, nose, skin and tongue! Some of us really liked the smell of cocoa best and others thought the vanilla smelt like cookies.

We made emotional connections with our friends by sharing personal stories of baking, at home, with our families.

We explored the safety involved in baking; reading the labels, being aware of our surroundings as to not spill or break anything and using oven mitts when touching something hot coming out of the oven.

We used our imagination and language skills to think about what our mixture reminded us of and came up with new words to describe it. Julius called the cocoa, “brown snow.”

Baking also boosted our self-confidence. There was a great sense of pride and accomplishment when the children assisted in cleaning our baking tools. It was wonderful to see the children using their collaboration skills to ice our finished product.

So, how was the learning from this experience made visible? Well, in one of our sensory bins we purposefully placed the same materials we used for baking. Using these materials with the “magic sand” (flour mixed with baby oil) the children were observed re-creating the baking experience using newly learned, and more precise language. For example we heard:

“Now I am going to add one cup of oil”

“I am going to add cocoa to make it chocolate.”

“First I mix it, then I put it into the oven” (procedural talk)

This was one of my favourite experiences this year. Such great learning and such wonderful memories.