My lovely friend Alex, from whom I steal lots of play activity ideas, posted an Instagram photo a while ago of her and her son baking together. Since then, it's been on my list of things to do with Isabelle and today was the day.I am not a natural baker, and the whole thing tends to stress me a lot. With that in mind, I decided to weigh the ingredients out into separate containers while Isabelle was asleep, and set up the tuff spot on the floor to contain the mess. When she woke up, after a quick snack, we were ready to rock.
She really loved working with the dry ingredients, and the first thing she did was to scoop the flour from one bowl into the big bowl. The other dry ingredients were in our scoops, and she loved adding those in. Last Christmas, Simon bought us some personalised wooden spoons, so she used her 'Isabelle' spoon to stir those ingredients together. She spilt a lot of the sugar, so we spent some time scooping that up with our hands, and feeling how 'gritty', 'bumpy' and 'rough' it was between our fingers.
When we added the wet ingredients she took a dislike to the batter. I had assumed she would, given previous experience with similar textures. The only wet ingredient
she loved was the lemon essence which she spent ages sniffing, giving her little nose a work out.
At that point, I gave her the muffin cases to pop into the tin which diverted her attention. She put them in the muffin tin, wore them as a hat, crumpled them up and generally had fun with them. I encouraged her to scoop the batter into the cases, but she wasn't interested at all, so I did that while she played with the rest of the cases.
Once the fairy cakes were in the oven, it was time for washing up. I filled the big blue bowl with soap water, and dumped the other bits into it before putting it back on the tuff spot. This was, without doubt, Isabelle favorite part of the whole activity. She immersed herself up to the elbow in the water, scrubbing and splashing, and using the scoops to transfer the water onto the tuff spot, before using the brush to 'paint' the tuff spot with the water. She played with the bowl of soapy, dirty, water for over 10 minutes, and only stopped when she soaked herself so much she became uncomfortable.
The buns came out of the oven shortly afterwards. The certainly weren't anything to boast about, but Isabelle enjoyed them which is all that matters.
This was a great activity, and she enjoyed the different aspects of it so much that I know we will bake again in the future. Until I saw Alex baking with her little one, I assumed that at this age they would be too young to bake. Of course, she doesn't "get" the whole thing, but she enjoyed it nonetheless. It was super for her hand-eye coordination while she was scooping, and the different smells and textures of the ingredients were a lovely little sensory addition. We got to use a lot of new words - such as gritty - during the activity, which was wonderful as Isabelle's speech is very good and she loves learning and using new words. Overall, this was a great little activity for communication, and she was able to follow simple 1 step, and more complex 2 step, instructions really well. A definite success today.
