Recipes for Teachers and Parents

Especially in spring, when spring fever challenges teachers, cooking and baking can be a huge help to teachers with children as young as kindergarten or preschoolers and on up to high schoolers. Home schooling? When the weather starts going soft and it's necessary to bring new interest to classroom lessons, try cooking! Homeschooling? There is so much that can be taught in the kitchen at home.

Science and math are naturals. Show children how to count, measure and weigh ingredients carefully. Illustrate what can happen if the measurements aren't precise. Teach geography lessons with that classic project, the relief map (recipe below).

Illustrate history lessons with vintage resipes recreated in a modern kitchen, followed by a discussion of how things have changed and how they haven't. Reading is certainly part of everything one does in the kitchen.

For teachers everywhere (and for parents faced with summer or holiday boredom), here is a trio of recipes that can help abolish spring fever, banish winter doldrums, in any classroom setting. Kids will come alive again, eager to see what happenes next.

Relief Map

This activity is perhaps the easiest exercise on earth (from the life experience of a mom of six).

Ingredients

• 1 cup salt
• 1 cup water
• 1/2 cup flour

1. Mix it all together in a big, heavy sauce pan and cook it gently over supervised medium heat until you get a thick, elastic or rubbery mass.
2. Depan it onto parchment paper and as the stuff cools, knead enough flour to make the dough workable (like clay) but not too stiff.
3. Form your map on foil, parchment, a plastic cutting sheet or any pliable, disposable surface. Paint it with acrylic craft paints and air dry the whole thing.

Caution: don't try to keep it forever - these have been known to end up wormy after a period of time.

Spring Flower Cookies (from Mrs. Bee's Busy Classroom)

Makes about 30 cookies.

• 5 1/2 cups unbleached white flour
• 4 sticks butter or margarine
• 2 cups dark brown sugar
• 2 tablespoons cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• pinch of salt
• pretty paper doilies

1. Preheat the oven to 350* F. Grease two large cookie sheets.
2. Mix all the ingredients together in a large bowl. When well mixed, put the dough on a lightly floured board.
3. Pat it to about 1/4" thick. Use a flower-shaped cookie cutter to cut the cookies. Place them about 1/4" apart on the cookie sheets and bake them for 15 to 20 minutes.
4. Let the cookies cool about 10 minutes on the cookie sheets. Remove them with a spatula. Cool cookies completely on a plate or rack before putting them on doilies.

Kid Dough Clay-like Stuff (Dough You Play With)

This recipe is originally from an awesome book called Feed Me, I'm Yours c.1983. (30th Ed. is Feed Me, I'm Yours by Vicki Lansky, Meadowbrook Press 2008)

Makes about 30 cookies

• 2 cups of plain flour
• 2 cups of water
• 1 cups salt
• 2 tbsp of cooking oil
• Food coloring (liquid)
• 1 tbsp cream of tartar

1. In a heavy, large saucepan, combine dry ingredients with oil.
2. Combine food coloring with water and add to flour/salt/oil mixture. Keep blending over supervised medium heat, with a large wooden spoon, until the mixture is warm, well-blended, and pulls away from the sides of the pan, forming a homogenous, lumpy mass.
3. Turn it out, cool it if necessary, to be able to touch it. Knead it and play. Kids love to handle this dough when it's warm - a very pleasant experience.

NOTES: Store in tightly covered plastic food storage containers. Keep an eye on stored quantities for mold or mildew - discard if that occurs and make more.

Need more classroom and home-based school activities? See Suite101 reviews of educational activity books and Garfield in the Classroom.

Classroom Cooking Is Fun

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