December 3rd, 2009

Blog Managers:
"We put out the seeds and we started to make flour. You make flour and water and that's how we are making bread today. Bread is so good for your body because we can't eat peanut butter." -Lhitzy

"We played with friends today and we made a big volcano. We runned around. We made bread with play dough. It is almost Christmas and we are going to get our Christmas tree. And everyone played with friends. And there is four Sams." -Sam Mc.


Today we fully immersed ourselves in bread!

We used our new interactive chart on the "Muffin Man." We substituted different breads (melon pan, pizza, pretzel, etc.) in the "Muffin Man" song and sang along with the words.





We also used a felt board to reflect on the Little Red Hen story.


In the atelier, we practiced measuring wheat berries in the sensory table. We used our hands or fingers to flatten the top of our measuring cups to get an accurate measurement. We noticed that the wheat was hard, smooth and cold.




We also baked bread with play dough. We made fruit bread, such as strawberry and banana bread, muffins, and alphabet cookies. Ms. Katie made a pretzel with salt! Yummy!

We used tools like rolling pins to flatten our "dough." Some of used our hands, too.

We used alphabet cookie cutters to shape cookie dough.

We also continued to grind wheat into flour using a mortar and pedestal. It was such hard work. As we ground and smooshed, we noticed the wheat berries first flattened, then broke into smaller pieces until they made a fine flour.

Some of us used a grinding motion while others pounded.

Some of us tried using a rock. It didn't work as well because the grain kept jumping out of the bowl when we tried to smoosh it. It made sense why people in the olden days invented a mortar and pedestal! It is much more efficient and conserves grain!

Getting closer to becoming flour!

In afternoon centers, we finally had a chance to create our math graph based on our favorite bread choices.



We noticed that muffins were the favorite type of bread. We knew this because the bread column was tallest (i.e. the most people chose it). We also noticed that croissants were the second most favorite type of bread and the pita, tortilla and rye bread each had one person vote for them. We counted the number of people in each column, and how many people voted all together. We have lots of Mathematicians in this class!

Next week we will begin baking bread for the first time!