Blog four – Yummy Yummy Pizza!!!!
18/4/2011
Today in my centre, children made pizza and baked it in the oven for their lunch. In modern life using oven for baking and cooking is one of the easiest and time saving technology for cooking. Children were active in cutting tomatoes and sausages and spreading them on to the top of the pizza base along with grated cheese. During the process of preparing pizza, children explained their own experience with their parent when making pizzas at home. ‘K’ said “I don’t like chicken sausages”. “My mummy makes chicken pizzas at home” said ‘G’. It was a very lovely cooking time for children in the centre by talking, sharing and turn taking to fill the pizza base. Te Whāriki says that ECE settings should be like a home away home (Ministry of Education, 1996). Centre provides children the same routine and experiences in their daily learning. Smorti says that process of cooking is a technological activity or system developed, used and adopted by early childhood services to meet children’s needs (P.6).
When pizza is ready for baking, I heated the oven to 200 degrees Celsius. For the safety measures and according to the centre philosophy, children are not allowed to the kitchen. So I opened the kitchen door so that children could watch what was happening in the oven. I put pizzas into the oven. I told children that it takes 10 minutes for the pizzas to get ready. I used digital alarm clock for the children to see the timer to count the minutes for the pizzas to get ready i.e. approximately 10 minutes.
It helped children to learn simple counting up to 1-10 minutes by reading off the time from the alarm clock. It enabled children to experience some of the technologies (eg- cooking oven) and resources for mathematics (eg- digital alarm clock). From this cooking experience, children developed their fine motor skills through cutting, grating and spreading ingredients on the pizza base. It helped children to gain knowledge of science on how the oven heat can help to cook food to eat, learn simple mathematics by counting minutes from 1-10 and it also developed interaction and communication with each other.
Hi Liby, great cooking with the children. I like the way you used the timer too, letting you know when the pizzas were ready. Just an idea Liby, you could explain to the children about material change that is the difference in texture of the ingredients before and after the pizza base was mixed. Also what the pizza looked like before and after it was cooked. For example colour change,texture and smell. This explains how materials change when mixed together or heated as stated "children can make or play with dough, focusing on the way the materials change when mixed together or heated",(Johnston, 2005, p.88). I like your reflection.
ReplyDeleteJohnston,J.(2005).Early Explorations in Science(2nd Ed.)Open University Press and McGraw Hill.