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BestStart Bakers Shop
Over the past few weeks at BestStart Taradale, we have noticed the children have been engaging in a variety of role-play experiences. They have been pretending to be police-officers, All Black rugby players, check-out operators, and have been enjoying the family play area and dress-ups. To support their interests, we have been providing many different role-play extensions to further ignite the children's developing sense of imagination and creativity!
Many of the children love baking at BestStart and are often observed role-playing similar baking experiences in the sand-pit. Yesterday we decided to role-play being bakers and iced our own biscuits! This was such a fantastic opportunity for us to get into character and act out the many different roles of a culinary master! We created a few bakers’ hats (which we learnt is a way of preventing hair and sweat from falling into the baking mix), and got measuring and mixing!
To support our developing literacy skills, I created a recipe using both written words and pictures. This proved to be a really empowering 'reading' strategy for us all. Using the pictures as clues, we began to 'read' what ingredient we needed to add next. This really supported us in developing an understanding that information - such as a recipe, can be represented and read using both written words and pictures. These are wonderful early literacy skills to have and certainly reflect our 'Being School Ready' learning programme. Many numeracy concepts were explored too - including measurement, quantity, and counting skills.
Once our biscuits were iced, we created our very own 'Bakers Shop' at afternoon tea time. We decided to charge $1.00 for each biscuit. We paid for our biscuits using pretend money and an eftpos machine. We explored what the $ symbol represented too - dollars! This was a great way for the children to make sense of what they've perhaps observed in a supermarket, bakery, and in any other shop within the community.
This was such a fantastic learning opportunity for us all! As a way of extending our developing knowledge and skills, we could explore creating our own recipes using pictures and words. Watch this space!