C Is For Cooking & Cupcakes

Today we started with out calendar.  Then we looked at the letter C.  Our nursery rhyme of the week is "Patty Cake" which the kids already know.  We are also concentrating our sense of taste this week.  It made for a pretty mellow day of school today.  We read several books about baking, food and a section from "The Flip Flap Body Book" on tongues and taste.  We sangs all of the songs the kids could think of that had food in them.

 Next we played in the little kitchen for awhile.  I had Two Fish move it up from the basement last night.  It will go back in the toyroom later.  I gave them ice cube trays full of things to taste and we talked about: spicy, sweet, sour, bitter etc.  The trays included:  vinegar, sugar, honey, salsa, lemon juice, salt, a hot tamale candy, a black licorice candy, a tiny piece of garlic.  They tried everything and had fun gaggin over the nasty stuff.  Then we frosted cupcakes and ate them.  Next we made salt dough together.  The kids got to taste every ingredient.  They were less than impressed.

They spent a good 30 minutes playing with their salt dough and then we made a letter C with the dough.  They had fun rolling out the long "snakes."  Then we went outside to play with our new sensory bin.

I didn't think about a sensory bin for this month until late last night.  I had grand plans to make a fun Fall or Halloween theme one.  Maybe I will switch the stuff out later this month when they tire of it.  I already bought a big bag of pinto beans when they were on sale and then I looked around in the toyroom and decided to use all of our toy dinosaurs since they don't get played with that often.  It was a hit.  The kids loved it and spent 25 minutes digging around in the bin.  The beans weren't super messy either.  It might be a good indoor sensory bin.  Easy to cleanup. 


After they got bored with the sensory bin we went inside for another round of snacks and then we used scissors to cut out the letter C.  This time I used regular glue tinted  with paint to make the letters.  Cheaper than glitter glue.  We read another book and it was time for Buddy B to go home.  Another excellent day of school.  Red Fish has been playing with a friend all afternoon but I'm sure she will test out all of our projects when she gets home.