Kids in the Kitchen Day 1

It is our first day of Summer School and the theme for this week is “Kids in the Kitchen”. We spoke about being chefs and what chefs do. Firstly they have to look like chefs, so we started making our own chefs hats. We decorated the band that will go around our head with sparkly squeeze paints and then we chose some beautiful sparkles and pasted them onto the paint. Tomorrow these will be dry and we will be able to wear our hats to cook “what is on our Tuesday menu”. We also had to think about the ingredients that we needed to cook with so we decided that if we are going to be real chefs this week, we have to go shopping. So we organized a list of things that we needed to buy based on the menu that our teachers had decided upon. They thought about things that we love to eat and they were spot on. Our menu is as follows: Monday – Pancakes;Tuesday – Pizza; Wednesday - Fruit shakes; Thursday - Rusks; Friday - Honey Joys. We discussed what fruit we wanted to buy; what we wanted on our pizzas etc and then Shelley asked us what we do when we want to go shopping? Where do we buy food? Can we just take the food out of the shop? How do we carry it? Oh, there were so many questions to be answered and we knew the answers. Finn was the main contributor to this discussion. The answers that we came up with were: “We need to go to the food store to buy the ingredients; we have to have money to pay for the food; we can take our own special bag to carry the food rather than use more plastic bags when we have so many in the kitchen at school and there is a store nearby called “Peacock” which is close enough for us to walk to.  So off we went, holding our teachers hands.

When we arrived at the store we took one trolley and two baskets. We put one basket on the top and one on the bottom. We all helped place the shopping items in the trolley. We also shared the job of wheeling the trolley and then we all gave the lady money at the cash register. She was very kind and gladly accepted us paying like this. Then we packed the goods into our shopping bag and returned the plastic ones that the lady had given us and we walked back to school “ready for action”. We were eager to start preparations for our cooking and all helped pour the milk, pancake mix and egg into the bowl. We stirred the mixture until it was smooth and then it was time for cooking and waiting. The waiting is the hardest part as we were so keen to eat the pancakes. We had to wait for the bubbles and then together we shouted: “1, 2, 3 flip”. It was quite tricky to flip the pancakes but it all worked out and we ate three pancakes and still ate our lunch when it was lunch time. We have big appetites. Today we had jam, honey or plain pancakes.

We spent some time in the library looking at books and today all of the shelves were pulled down so we had less books to choose from. Our teachers think that sometimes we may experience "visual overload", when there are too many things to see and choose from. It did help us as we had less books to choose from. We had a small morning circle time where we planned for our trip to the supermarket and we sang "hello" to one another.

Wishing you a good afternoon and we look forward to welcoming Maddie and Ashling to our Summer School tomorrow

Love Shelley and Darren