Category Archives: Baking

Baking, Creative movement, Creativity, Expressive Arts, Froebel, Imaginative thinking, Literacy, music, nature, Outdoor Learning, Snack, Social Studies

What have we been doing at Cart Mill this week?

July 5, 2024 Miss Campbell Leave a comment

This week at Cart Mill we have been taking part in a wide variety of learning experiences across each of our playrooms and our garden.
In our Discovery room we have continued along our Jack and the Beanstalk learning journey by investigating “forces” and “travel”. Our mission was to find a way for Jack to get to and from the castle without the giant seeing! To do this we decided to fill the balloon with air and let it go to see how far it would travel towards the castle. It’s been so much fun seeing how much air we need to make the balloon go fast or slow.

In our Studio we have shown an interest in diggers and have been using the water tray as our construction site. We used dried rice to represent the dirt and had great fun using the construction toys to fill, empty and transport the rice. We used our technology skills to look at videos of real construction vehicles on our smart board. This experience had such a great level of engagement from all our children, especially our younger ones. We even found a Danny go video called “digging in the dirt” to all join in with, incorporating our health, well-being and movements skills.

In our Home room we have continued to develop our baking skills by researching recipes, measuring ingredients and making yummy vegan treats for our afternoon snack! The best part was taste testing our baking!
In our playdough area we have been experimenting by adding different scents to our playdough. We’ve tried peppermint, lemon and orange extracts. We even tried chocolate powder to make chocolate playdough. It smelt so good and looked just like chocolate. This week we decided to wander out to the the planting area to choose herbs and flowers to introduce some different scents. We picked basil, thyme, garlic and some flowers. As we grow in confidence, we are able to make our playdough independently using our self serve playdough station. It has been lots of fun choosing loose parts to add to our playdough and creating wonderful models.
Between the smells of playdough and daily home baking our home room smells delightful.

And finally our garden! The weather has been a little varied this week with showers of rain in between the sunshine. As usual, we didn’t let that stop our fun! We have used the gross motor rollers to mark make, played role play games using the play house and even took part in music and movement games such as head shoulders knees and toes. We extended our muddy movers skills by playing catch with the sticky ball and catching mitts. It was lots of fun taking turns with catching and throwing.

We all love learning through our play at Cart Mill! I wonder what we will do next week during our summer adventures?

UNCRC article 28- we have the right to play.

Baking, Outdoor Learning, Social Studies

Gardening is Great!

April 10, 2024 Val MacLean Leave a comment

We love gardening in Cart Mill and the weather never stops us getting out to see what we have growing in our garden. As it has been a little cold recently, we took a trip into the greenhouse to see if any of our seeds had popped up through the soil and they had! We checked that everything had enough water to drink and looked to see if any of the plant pots needed turned round – did you know that plants grow towards the light so sometimes they can look a little squint when they start to grow?

With everything looking okay, we thought we would test out our sense of smell. We have some herbs growing in the greenhouse at the moment so we each got to pick a small leaf and rub it around in our fingers. Then we had to take a big, deep sniff and guess what we could smell – it was mint! It was just like toothpaste.

We then moved outside to see what was growing in the planters. We have some lovely spring flowers growing but we suddenly spotted some big green leaves – is it cabbage?

No, on closer inspection, we discovered it was rhubarb. We wondered if there was anywhere we could use some rhubarb – I know, we could give it to Gail and she could help us make some rhubarb muffins! So, we decided to pick some – but not too much, to hand in to the baking area. It was quite hard to pull but we tugged and we twisted and CRACK, out the stalk of rhubarb came. After thinking about it, we decided that two stalks would be enough.

By now it was raining quite heavily so we thought we better go inside. Although, we had one last use for our rhubarb, an umbrella!

Gardening with children has so many benefits, which is why we are so fond of promoting it at Cart Mill. Benefits include: improving your mood, gardening reduces stresses and improves your overall mood; it is a great form of exercise, gardening is physical and can keep children active; understanding nature, gardening allows children to get close to worms, bees, flowers etc; stimulate senses, gardening helps us use all our senses; gardening can promote healthier eating, children also get an understanding of where food comes from and how it looks in its natural form; it is cheap, gardening is a great way to learn together with very little cost, even if you don’t have outdoor space, you can grow tomatoes or peppers from seed at your window; It is fun! The most important part of gardening, you can explore, investigate and see thing happen – sometimes you just need to be a little patient!

Baking, Creativity, Snack, Social Studies

The great Cart Mill bake off🧁

March 8, 2024 Miss Brown Leave a comment

Today the children wanted to make muffins for snack. They each washed their hands and put aprons on before starting as we spoke about the importance of hand hygiene especially before and after preparing food. We looked out all the ingredients and pre heated the oven.

Ingredients:

3 scoops of gluten free flour
1/2 scoop of sugar
1 teaspoon of Xanthan gum
1/2 teaspoon of baking powder
100 ml Soya milk

“Can I add raisins?”

“me too”

The children measured all the ingredients out and carefully added them to their bowl, giving them a good mix using their gross motor skills.

“it’s so hard to mix now, it’s not soft”

Now they are ready for the oven. We discussed our rules about using the oven.

“It’s very hot, only adults allowed”

“You need oven gloves, so you don’t burn yourself”

When they were ready we let them cool down in the kitchen. Next we gathered chopping boards and knifes to cut up the muffins and we cut them up and shared them equally between 3 plates to have for our afternoon snack. They even had a wee sneaky taste test for all their hard work.

“hmmm yummy our friends are going to love these”

Article 29 – I have the right to an education which develops my personality, talents and abilities.

Baking, Snack

December Round Up in the Baking Area

December 21, 2023 User deactivated Leave a comment

Over the last few weeks in the baking area the children have enjoyed lots of different experiences starting with making our own potato scones for St Andrews day, they worked so hard peeling, chopping, mashing and shaping before practicing their spreading skills buttering and of course enjoying the taste.

They have also been busy making a variety of different muffins for snack time, we’ve had blueberry, raisin and banana.

The children have been working on developing their fine motor skills at snack time having a go at spreading butter onto crackers, cheese onto bread and jam onto bread which has been voted the best.

We enjoyed the process of making fruit kebabs, peeling, chopping and carefully pushing them onto a skewer we introduced a wee bit of maths by recognising and following a simple pattern or making up their own.

We ended by making some delicious gingerbread cookies and decorating our “ home made” empire biscuits.

Baking, Expressive Arts, Outdoor Learning

Welcome to the Cart Mill kitchen 😀🥤🎂

November 20, 2023 Miss Simms Leave a comment

Today in the mud kitchen the children were pretending to work at Cartmill Cafe. They discussed with each other what they going to make.
” I love tomato soup” “I like the colour of it, Red is my favourite colour “

”I am making a birthday cake, a chocolate flavoured one”

“Hot chocolate, but you need to be careful it’s not too hot when you drink it, I like it with marshmallows “

”spaghetti bolognaise, with wiggly spaghetti “

The children then wrote their ideas on the menu

The children gathered their utensils and began filling and pouring their ingredients. They used gross motor skills to mix and stir added natural resources such as leaves, stick, stones and pine cones to their recipes.

“It needs to cook in the oven for 10minutes”

”I need more water in the soup”

”It’s still too hot, it needs a little water to cool it down”

We then showed each other our creations and had a little pretend nibble.

“ Here’s a drink with a straw”

”My birthday cake has lots of candles”

” I have the bestest chocolate cake”

Baking, Snack

Spiced apple cake for snack🍎

November 7, 2023 Mrs MacRae Leave a comment

The children at Cart Mill love to bake. For our afternoon snack we have been introducing some homemade baking.

Today we have been busy making some spiced apple cake. Baking helps to develop the children independence skills. The children are able to following instructions, carrying out small tasks independently.

First we chopped our apple into small pieces. Our children know how to keep ourself safe while using the knifes.

“We need to sit on the chair”

“We are need to be careful, we don’t want to chop our fingers”

Chopping the apple not only promotes independence but help develop fine motor skills and co ordination.

Next we use the measuring spoons to measure out the ingredients helping develop our numeracy skills.

1..2 scoops of flour

1 scoop of sugar…

Once we added all our ingredients and gave it a big stir. It was hard work, we had to use lots of muscles.

“It’s all sticky”

”It’s going to taste yummy”

Here are all our children enjoy sharing the snack with their friends.

Article 27 – You have the right to food, clothing a safe place to live and to have your basic needs met.

Baking, Block building, Creativity, Expressive Arts, Snack, Special Event

Happy Halloween 🎃

October 31, 2023 Miss Campbell Leave a comment

It’s a Hallowe’en fangtastic day here at Cart Mill. We have taken part in a variety of autumn learning experiences across each of our play rooms and garden.

We made spooky mud pie potions in our mud kitchen.

We also turned our water tray into a witches and wizards’ caldron using food colouring, shaving foam and different sized containers to create more potions.

We had opportunities to create Hallowe’en coloured crafts in our gross motor art area

In our Home Room we sang Hallowe’en songs and made Frankenstein’s green and purple sparkle playdough. We used our fine motor skills and imagination to mould our playdough into different shapes.