Baking Bread - an activity for the letter Bb

What could be tastier than freshly baked, warm bread, with butter melting into it?  Yum!  Engaging all their senses really helps the kiddos make connections, so we bake, smell, and best of all taste bread for the letter Bb week. Everyone washed hands, and came to the kitchen counter to help.

 Here are our ingredients.  We also needed a recipe to tell us how much of each ingredient to put in.

 

First we poured in the water.

 Next we added 3 Tablespoons of honey - yum!

  

  

We needed some butter...

 

... and oats, because it was oatmeal bread...

 ...lots of flour!

...just a little dried milk powder.  The kiddos thought that was silly - the only milk they see is liquid.

 ...and a little touch of salt.

Ms. Paula added the most important ingredient of all - yeast.  Yeast is the ingredient that makes the little bubbles in bread.  We looked at a piece that was already cooked and could see all the little bubbles in it!

 We put the bread pan into the bread machine to cook our bread, and set up an experiment with yeast.  If yeast makes bubbles, we thought maybe we could catch some in a balloon.  Ms. Paula put honey, yeast and water in a bottle, and topped it off with a balloon.  The balloon was very empty, and floppy.  We wondered if it would stay that way, or get some air in it from the yeast.

After nap, when the bread was cooked, we looked at the balloon.  Here's what it looked like!

Even better, here's what the bread looked like:

 So, was it a good cooking day?  Well, there were only a few crusts left over!