Super-Easy DIY Felt Food

Last week, I attended a training all about cooking in the classroom.  You can see our most recent cooking adventure here.

After we were finished in the big kitchen, the children moved immediately to the play kitchen to continue their work creating wonderful goodies to eat.

I've been meaning to add some simple felt food to our kitchen, which was inspired by an exhibit at our local children's museum.  At the museum, they have a pizza parlor area complete with brick ovens, pizza peels, aprons and fabric crusts ready to be filled with toppings made of a wide variety of textured materials.  It's actually called 'Texture Cafe' and it's always jam-packed with little chefs.

Eventually, I'll add some different textures to our kitchen as well, for now, I had a bunch of felt laying around and decided to just start cutting.  At the training, we were given a bag full of kitchen tools, one of which was a pizza pan, so I figured I'd start there.

If you do this at home, you'll want to be sure to use high-quality sewing/fabric scissors so the felt will cut well.  Thinner felt may cut with regular scissors, but thick or 100% wool felt will not.

I used red felt for sauce and then darker red for pepperoni, small yellow pieces for cheese and green for some sort of veggie - green peppers, maybe?  My husband has challenged me to make a crust like the ones at the museum, so that might be in my future, but in the meantime, the kiddos have been using the wooden bread slices that came with our Melissa and Doug toaster.

Since I was feeling in the mood for Italian, I tackled some spaghetti and meatballs next.  Just some longer strips of yellow, some brown circles for meatballs and the remnants of red left from cutting the pizza sauce and voila!  An Italian favorite!

Of course, we can't forget fruits and veggies.  I just cut the shapes freehand to sort of resemble common fruits and veggies, but I also included a variety of ovals, circles and rectangles to allow the children to bring the foods to life.

Finally, I decided that the food needed some dimension, so I decided to make some felted woolen fruits/veggies.  I made a small ball of each color.  It's up to the kiddos to figure out what they are exactly.

Making felted fruit - or felted balls of any kind is ridiculously simple.  All you need is some wool roving, a pair of old stockings and a washing machine and dryer.

- Roll the wool roving into a tight ball and stuff into the toe of the stockings. 

- Tie a knot in the stockings so they are stretched tightly around the ball and it will not be able to move.

- Repeat with other colors being sure to tie a knot between each ball or they'll felt together.

- Wash on hot with a teeny bit of detergent and then dry thoroughly in the dryer.  I never have an exact formula for this, I take them out of the stocking and check them and if they look as though they'll hold together, I'm done, if not, I tie them all back up and wash/dry again.

I'm currently working on a half-dozen felted eggs - more on that to come!

DIY Montessori-Inspired Sound Bottles

I've been perusing the Montessori materials websites lately and finding activities that I can recreate on my own without breaking the bank.  It all started with our sewing basket, which is a classroom favorite.

A few weeks ago, my son asked for 'yogurt smoothies' during our weekly Trader Joe's trip and I happily obliged knowing just what I was going to do once my lil man helped out and drank all those yogurts.

Sound bottles!

Although the sound quality isn't as good in the plastic bottles as it is with the more traditional wooden cylinders, I decided to try it out anyway using whatever was around the house to make my first set of bottles.

I used water, popcorn kernels, dried pinto beans and rice.  I measured 1/4 cup of the items into their assigned bottles because I wanted the bottles to feel the same as the kids were shaking to allow for the sound difference to be the only variable.  Once everything was measured, I hot glued the tops, just in case.

I labeled the bottom of each bottle for the children to check their work.  Even though they aren't reading, they can recognize the individual words as shapes and decipher whether or not the words match.  

My son loved the activity as soon as it was presented and I am allowing him to help out the other children as they discover the new game.  It never ceases to amaze me how quickly children can not only discover a new activity, but also understand its purpose.  On the very first day the bottles were in their new home in the classroom, I heard a little guy shaking away and after a moment or two, a joyous, "That's a match!!"