KinderBoys: Community Workers - Bakers

Yesterday we had our third KinderBoy class at the house.  We have yet to get our whole class together.  This is a nasty time of year for illness!  But we had a great time discussing Bakers as community workers.



AS usual, we started with a book  called Bakers (Community Helpers)

Side note: I so much prefer the term Community Workers instead of Community Helpers.  Maybe I'm about to get all right-wing conservative on you, but I think that Community Workers more accurately portrays the way our economy works on capitalism:  You get paid when you WORK and produce.  Yes, helping is important, but it's not something we do for money. We help because it's the right thing to do, not because the government is paying for it or for any personal motive.  So we work to earn money in our community.  We help in our off-time hours because that's just what Christ taught.  Yes, sometimes we help while we are working. That's always a bonus.

Moving on....

Then we pulled out the Baker's Hat!  Each boy got to wear it for a moment as he remembered something from the book about Bakers.
 


I knew the boys would want one to take home, based on past experience so we made chef hats.  Not quite as cute as baker hats, but the best I could do with construction paper and tape.

 I used the extra large sheets of paper.  And that didn't even seem to be big enough so I added on another regular size sheet with tape.  TIP:  Make the black line higher.  The strips were cut down so low that they began to flop over and I had to tape them up again.  I put the envelop there to cover up the name.  But...then realized that was silly because I didn't also cover them up in the following pictures.  Sigh.

 Here they are cutting out their hats.  They only had to cut on the lines until they reached the black line. The lines were 2 inches apart.

I explained to the boys that baking is very exact.  Bakers have to measure things very carefully.  So to introduce the concept of measuring/weighing, I decided to use a food scale and teach them about grams. I know that in the US we don't usually use grams as we cook, unless it's a foreign recipe.  But my son loves to play with the food scale, so I went this route. I could have (Should have?) let them practice measuring blue or green water with measuring cups. Or shown them a set of measuring spoons and let them practice filling and leveling the spoon with flour.

Anyway, here's the chart I made on our white board

 And the food I collected to be weighed.

First, I let them look at the food (without touching it) and guess which was the heaviest, then the next and the next heaviest, until they thought they had all the food lined up in order of heaviest to lightest.

Then we weighed each food and graphed the results on the chart to see if they were right.  They weren't.  But it was a good lesson in "Looks can be deceiving."

My food scale doesn't sense things lighter than 5 grams. So our lightest item, the tea bag, didn't register.  So that's when I pulled out the Right STart balance

WE put the teabag in one cup, and the boys put in ONE gram cube at a time until the balance was, well, balanced.  We discovered that the teabag was more than 3 and less than 4. So we had a chance to discuss halves!

Ok, at that point the boys were more than anxious to move upstairs for some real baking!

I had risen some soft pretzel dough in the fridge overnight.

It was perfectly risen in the morning! Love it.

I divided the dough into 16 pieces according to recipe and showed the boys how to make snakes, and then how to fold them into pretzels.  So fun!

The pretzels needed 15 minutes to rise.  So during that time we decorated cupcakes that I had made the night before.  I'm big on advanced preparation for these classes. It keeps everything running smoothly.

Sprinkles were FLYING around the kitchen.  But that's ok.  Instead of using food coloring to make the frosting pink, I used a beet that I had baked, grated finely, and added to the frosting.  It didn't change the flavor and it colored the frosting so well!  Check it!

I like the flecks of color actually.  Maybe you don't. ? I let them eat one cupcake now and take one home for later.  Frosting was being consumed at an alarming rate, however!  So I think I just discovered the best way ever to get kids to eat beets!

As they muched away, I was boiling the pretzels in baking soda water until they floated.  Then I let the kids help me put an egg wash on the pretzels and sprinkle them with cinnamon sugar.  Here's a finished plate of baked goods to take home:

Oh, while the pretzels were baking, I kept the kids busy by explaining to them how yeast works and I let them watch a bowl of yeast "proof".

And then I read them the classic Gingerbread Man. I have had this book since I was THREE years old, so it's pretty special to me. My kids know it by heart.

Parents were arriving just as the pretzels were coming out of the oven.  Those were the fastest 90 minutes in home education history!!

While I teach KinderBoys, my older girls go to another HS mom's house for cooking class.  You can follow their adventures at this blog:
http://4littlepiglets.blogspot.com/2013/02/cooking-class-part-2.html

Kinderboys - Police Detective Lesson Plan

I have four children.  My third child, the only boy, is five right now.  Since he lives in a house full of girls, it's important to me that he has plenty of time to hang with other boys and just BE a boy.  So I created a class for him called Kinderboys. 

I started teaching Kinderboys this fall at our co-op. But things didn't exactly go as planned, and it ended up being just a 3-week session.

So starting today I began a new session of Kinderboys, held at my home.  We currently have 5 boys in the class and I think that's pleeenty for now. :)  Love their energy!  This session we are focusing on Communities and Community Workers.    My theme was inspired by some curriculum I bought from Moving Beyond the Page.   It's an ok curriculum.  I don't love it as much as I was hoping too.  It's a little too School-ey, if you know what I mean, and doesn't really seem tailored to the home schooled child.  It's supposed to be for "Gifted" kids, but I'm not sure which part of it is supposedly "gifted".  The only part of the lesson that I incorporated  today was a printing page for the letter P.

Anyway, it served as a guide to spark some ideas and I took off from there. Actually, let me say that the internet did most of the work for me and I just added a few of my own ideas to it.  I'm so grateful to all of you moms and teachers who post your work and your ideas to share with the world. 

So today I introduced the concept of Community and defined it as "a group of people who live and work together."  We talked about different levels of communities all the way from families to nations.

We started by reading



I asked the boys to count all the different jobs they saw people doing in the book. At the end I asked them what their favorite job from the book was. 

Then I asked if they had seen any police in the book (no).  I asked them to close their eyes while I pulled out a police hat



They thought that was pretty cool.  I let them each try it on. I asked each boy, as he took his turn to wear the hat, what he thought police officers do for work.  Some of their answers were interesting.  "Put people in chains!" was my favorite answer.

So to clarify what officers, and especially POLICE DETECTIVES do, we read this book



That helped!

From there we practiced doing things that police detectives do. 

First, we talked about the importance of keeping your body fit if you're going to be chasing bad guys.  We did some Alpha Exercise!  I have cards that have exercises on them corresponding to each letter of the alphabet.  So we spell the child's name, and do the exercise for each letter of the name.  I think I Have a post on this blog somewhere about those cards.

Then we did some target practice.  That was fun.  We used a dart gun to shoot at this target drawn on a white board and keep track of our points.  Each boy got 3 shots.

Next we talked about fingerprints.  I got my ideas for this part of the class from this site:
http://www.squidoo.com/detectives-lesson-plan 

We took finger prints using washable ink, classified their patterns (loop, whorl or arch). Using the magnifying glass to look at finger tips was fun.

Then we lifted our own finger prints off of a mirror and added those to our folders as well.  To lift our finger prints, I had the boys press a greasy finger onto a hand-held mirror, dust the print with cocoa powder, and cover it with a piece of clear tape.  I found that the best way to remove excess powder without destroying the print was to use the ends of my hair as a brush.  Sounds crazy, but it really worked well. Every other brush I tried removed too much of the print.  Then we lifted the tape and put it on an index card which we added to our files. Here are some pictures of the file folder I put together for the boys with their finger print books i.  You can see the cocoa powder print on the bottom left.


Here are some pictures of the file folder I put together for the boys with their finger print books in them. 

We didn't' have time to color the Nate the Great hat during class. I sent that home with each boy. But we did have time to make badges.

And we took mug shots of each boy.  Here's my kiddo's "bad guy face"

I think one of our favorite activities was the shoe print matching game.  We talked about foot prints being clues for detectives.  Then I showed them the paper with all the shoe prints on it and gave them a bucket of shoes. As a group, I asked them to match the shoe to the print.  It was fun to watch them discuss it and come to a consensus.  They got most of them right!

At the end of class we read Nate The Great



while eating popcorn and applesauce.  Yum!  We had a great time and it took the entire 90mintues. Our Kinderboys meet every other week, with field trips in between. So next Friday we're going to tour the police station.  Then we'll have a class on construction workers and carpenters.