Cooking in preschool is always an exciting adventure! The tools, the scooping, pouring, and stirring. The smells and the sight of watching our food creations change. Of course, the tasting! Sampling and sharing our thoughts on the taste. We made cranberry sauce and more mashed potatoes today. Before we cooked the cranberries, we talked a little bit about how cranberries grow and what a cranberry bog looks like. The raw cranberries were new to some of our friends. We investigated the fruit before we set into our project. They all got a chance to feel the tough outer skin. We all agreed they are a very pretty color. We cut each of their tiny berries open so they could see what they looked like inside. We found teeny tiny seeds. One friend commented that it had a 4 leaf clover shape inside! Once our cranberries were sugared in the pot, we made some orange zest. Z words are few, so we took this opportunity to introduce some fun vocabulary. Our friends got some orange zest in the palm of their hand so they could take in that delightful aroma. After the zest, everyone got an orange slice (or smile as we call them) to squeeze the juice into the pan. That completed our recipe, so they were invited to eat the flesh once they squeezed the juice in the pan. After the berries were boiled and cooled, they all got the chance to mash them up. They are ready for the feast!
Our snack today was golden raisin, nut, pretzel cheese nip mix and carrots. After snack, we read the story
Sharing the Bread, which was a fun rhyming story about everyone in a family cooking and working to prepare the meal. We compared what they were making to what we will be having at our feast. We then had some fun making butter. We filled up four jars with heavy whipping cream, we put on our Shake It Off song by Taylor Swift, and set to shaking those jars and our bodies. How amazing to see the solid fat come away from the milky liquid! Now we have butter for those mashed potatoes! Fantastic.
After lunch, center tables were set up with shape and number puzzles, and markers to draw. We tried to get outdoors for dismissal, but the rain drops were too heavy, so we retreated back into the library. There we read a few more stories that a friend brought to school to share.
