Love, Laugh and Learn

This is an activity that we used to do all the time in Nursery when I was teaching full time, and I knew Annabelle would love it with her new found interest in letters.

This is what we did – made some bread, shaped it like letters, ate it up! 😀

I used this recipe on Ocado for wholemeal rolls. I was just as excited as Annabelle about this as we haven’t made bread for ages. I have a bread maker but I’ve fallen out of love with it due to the big hole in the bottom of every loaf! We make pizza dough quite regularly so Annabelle knows about the process but I was looking forward to getting some proper bread baking (and another chance to use the terrifying looking dough hook on my mixer!).

Here is our kit, and as with all the best activities, these were all things that were already in our cupboards! –

First we had to weigh, measure, mix, and leave the dough to rise.

After patiently leaving it to rise, we got to our favourite bit – ‘knocking back’ the dough. There is something so very satisfying about giving the pillowy soft dough a good wallop! Annabelle likes to see how loudly she can slap it, and of course, get her fingers lovely and sticky! So much fun, and fantastic for developing finger muscles and fine motor control.

After giving our poor dough another rest, we started shaping it into letters. We rolled simple sausage shapes and I helped Annabelle shape them into letters. Today we just made uppercase letters because we had been looking at the initial letters in different names. This is how we used the activity at school – usually with the youngest children, to get them used to recognising their own initial letter and eventually recognising their own name.

We made:

‘A’ for Annabelle,

‘D’ for Daddy,

‘M’ for Mummy,

‘I’ just because she likes spotting the I in books,

‘L’ for Lola to reinforce the difference between I and L,

‘C’ for Charlie.

We also made some little rolls just for fun! When they were all ready, we brushed them with beaten egg. Annabelle loves having chances to use the wibbly jiggly soft silicone pastry brush and I don’t blame her! We decorated our rolls with sunflower seeds, poppy seeds and sesame seeds – just like putting the sprinkles on a cupcake but a whole lot more healthy!

Yum!

We popped them in the oven, tidied up, and enjoyed some yummy, yet educational bread with our tea!