Bread Week!

This week was all about bread! The children were also introduced to more kitchen tools and the baking process. The kiddos were cooking up pizzas in the pizza oven and also using it as an oven for cookies, muffins and cakes. Yum! The children enjoyed using the chef hat, oven mitts, aprons and kitchen timer while baking their favorite treats! The timer was a big hit!

Bread week began with explorations of different types of grains. Mrs. M brought in her kitchen grinder and the children had an opportunity to grind up wheat.  The children also got to look at, feel and smell wheat flour, rice flour and oats as they compared the different types of grains that created each flour. When asked about their bread knowledge, the children could easily name different types of bread while some of the children associated bread with meals. For example, one kiddo called out, "spaghetti and meatballs!"

Later in the week, the teachers whipped out the bread maker and made a very yummy loaf of cinnamon raisin bread. The children enjoyed the bread for snack on Thursday. While making our second loaf of bread, we discovered that baking, unlike cooking, is a science. If you don't measure ingredients just right, your recipe will not turn out right. Which is what we discovered when we forgot to add sugar to our bread recipe (it definitely wasn't as full and puffy as our first batch on Wednesday!). But we still gave it a try and it wasn't so bad!

This brought us to our experiment with yeast.  Did you know that it's the yeast that causes bread to not only to rise but it also gives bread those teeny tiny bubbles? To sum it up, yeast "eats" sugar which gives it energy to bubble. By mixing dry yeast, warm water and sugar together, we created, "activated yeast." If you add activated yeast to your bread recipe, the yeast begins to bubble which creates those tiny bubbles inside of a loaf of bread, equaling a bigger, fluffier loaf of bread!  To make a long story short, the children got to observe activated yeast and watched the bubbles form. But the bubbles didn't begin until we added the very important ingredient: sugar!

Finally, the children ended the week with a bread taste test. Everyone got to try cinnamon raisin bread, matzo - a flat bread similar to a thin cracker, Naan - an indian bread which is mainly flat but slightly puffy and a sandwich wrap - flat like matzo but flexible. The favorite of the class was the cinnamon raisin bread with matzo as the close second! Who knew bread came in so many different forms?!

What's up Next?
Bread week snuck in before we turned the classroom into a cafe! Next week, the classroom will undergo a transformation into a cafe for the children to prep, cook, and serve their cafe guests.  Stay tuned for all of the fun!


Home Extension Activity:

Since our classroom will be turned into a cafe next week, consider taking your child out to a restaurant or cafe to see how a restaurant runs.  Who do you see working in the restaurant? Who cooks? Who serves the food? Who takes the money? What does the menu look like? What types of food do they serve? You child will be ready to run our classroom cafe with their new knowledge!

Upcoming Dates and Reminders:

April 3: April Tuition is due

April 17-21: SEE closed for Spring Break
April 25 & 26: School picture days! Stay tuned for more info!

Pictures from the Week:

Baking pizzas in the pizza oven!

Watching the bread maker spin the ingredients together!

Have a great weekend everyone!
Joanna