I have always loved simple things in life, and when something simple ends up having a lot of depth to it – well that is even better!!!!
Here is a simple way to do some baking with your children – it is so simple, yet as I discovered it turned out to be a great learning experience for us all, and it was super fun.
You will need:
- Marie biscuits
- Icing sugar – mix with boiling water to a smooth, spreadable consistency
- Food colouring for icing (optional)
- And then items to decorate with, these could include:
- Marshmallows, sweets, raisins, pretzels and sprinkles
Recently my 5 year old Taylor has been going to speech therapy. We have discovered that she struggles to describe objects or items and does not find it easy to follow a set of instructions. I decided to take advantage of our time together baking, and use this opportunity to make it fun for her. So we turned our baking into a game – I gave simple instructions, and if she followed the instructions correctly, her biscuit design would start to take shape – it reminded me of the game Pictionary – but with biscuits and icing!! We always started with smearing icing on to form the glue and then we could add the items as decorations in the attempt to create something.
This worked really well! I could bring in many age appropriate concepts such as:
- Colour: use a red sweet
- Spatial concepts: put the red sweet in the centre, and the yellow sweets around the edge of the biscuit
- Simple mathematical concepts: break the pretzel in half
The possibilities were endless!!
Taylor followed these instructions really nicely and the end result of our first round of biscuit making was a clock! We then did a few more rounds and made faces, a bunny rabbit, a unicorn, a nest, a flower and a reindeer. There sure are many things that you can make with Marie biscuits!!! These could be wonderful, simple ideas for kiddies parties, or Bakerman days at school.
Then it was time for them both to put their thinking caps on…….use the ingredients that were left and come up with their own design which they could then describe to me.
Cameron’s thinking face!
This was the fun part, as they now got to design their own biscuit. What I loved the most about giving them the opportunity to make their own, was that suddenly we didn’t just have a face – but we had an entire body!!
This was perfect – Taylor now got the opportunity to describe an entire body. We got to work on her body concept, and she even used words like underneath my nose or on top of my head.
I have to say that our Marie biscuit Pictionary fun was a huge success. We had fun whilst working on some basic concepts and our biscuits looked and tasted great!
Contributed by Victoria Bruigom of Clamber Club Toddlers – Olivedale
Tel: 074 116 5690
Email: olivedale@clamberclub.com
Website: www.clamberclub.com