The Best Homemade Play Dough Recipe

2011 play dough creation

I don't remember the last time my kids genuinely played with play dough for fun, but I still make this homemade play dough recipe almost every week.

I sell the play dough, undyed or dyed the color of your choice, by the pound in my Pumpkin+Bear etsy shop, but I don't see why you can't simply have the recipe so you can make your own!

2008 play dough creation. I added glitter to the blue one!

The recipe makes about one pound, three ounces of the softest, squishiest play dough you'll ever feel. It's reluctant to dry out, it holds shape well, it's soft enough to feel awesome on your hands but firm enough that playing with it strengthens those little grip and finger muscles, and it dyes like a dream. 

And it takes VERY little time to make! Certainly a LOT less time than it takes to drive to Wal-mart and back for Play Doh!

Another 2011 play dough creation. 

Here are the ingredients you need:

• 1 cup flour. I try to use the cheapest flour I can find for this recipe, usually bleached all-purpose. However, when my kids were tiny and sometimes "needed" play dough right that minute, I used to use whatever flour I had on hand. I've used unbleached flour, wheat flour, and on one personally very sad occasion, organic flour (grr! It's so expensive!), and the play dough always came out great. I know different flours will change the necessary water content, though, so if you're trying for something specific, you'll probably want to experiment a bit.
• 1/2 cup salt. The gold standard for this is, again, the cheapest iodized salt you can find. A couple of times I've run out and used salt with a larger grain, and although it worked, you can definitely see and feel the larger grains in the finished play dough. Cheapo iodized salt, however, will make your play dough as smooth as butter!
• 2 tsp cream of tartar. Cream of tartar aids consistency and stability, so you can skip it if you need to, but the play dough won't be as nice in texture or as long-lived. 
• 1 tbsp oil. Again, any oil works for this recipe, but I like to use the cheapest available. Canola is the cheapest, but if all I have on hand is olive, I'm just as happy with the finished play dough. You'd think that the color of olive oil would affect the tone of the finished white play dough... but it doesn't!
• 1 cup water. 
• dye (optional). If you want to dye your entire batch a single color, dump it into the pot with the rest of the ingredients. Otherwise, knead the dye into the finished play dough. I have tried every dye I can think of, from the cheapest to the nicest store-bought food dyes, homemade and store-bought natural dyes, liquid watercolors, and powdered tempera. For color saturation, my favorite BY FAR is powdered tempera! It will stain your hands while you're kneading it into the play dough but it won't stain your hands while you're playing with it. It also lightens the play dough in a way that feels absolutely magical and wreaks absolute hell on my ability to fit a full pound of play dough into the containers I sell it in. 

Step 1: Add all ingredients to a single pot.

Just dump it all  in!

Step 2: Cook over medium heat, stirring continually. 

This is time-consuming, because you want to cook the play dough low and slow so you don't scorch it, and you have to stir it continuously to keep it from sticking to the pot. I've never timed myself, but I do get through several minutes of a podcast or streaming show while I stir.

When the play dough loses its gummy appearance and wants to ball up, remove it from the heat and remove the play dough from the pot.

Put the pot to soak in the sink before you even try to wash it, because flour + water = glue!

Step 3: Knead until smooth.

When you dump the play dough out onto your work surface, it will look like this:

As soon as it's cool enough to touch, knead it until it looks like this!

Here's the final weight of my finished play dough:

It's ready to play with immediately, and will keep for several weeks in the refrigerator in an airtight container. When my kids were little, I'd toss it when it started looking dirty from their play, but also toss it immediately if it smells rancid or the texture and consistency change for the worse. 

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

DIY Density Discovery Bottles

The bottle on the left contains marbles, corn syrup, colored water, glitter, and canola oil. The bottle on the right contains colored water and canola oil, and I've just shaken it.

This tutorial was originally posted on Crafting a Green World way back in 2015!

Use any old water-tight bottles you have on hand to create density discovery bottles for your budding scientist. 

Other than playground sand, which is apparently pig-filthy and will make your ocean in a bottle look polluted, there are a lot of simple, easy, around-the-house ingredients that will encourage babies through big kids (and even adults!) to be excited science explorers.

Glycerin falls through the colored water and rests below.

Discovery bottles put interesting ingredients into a clear, sealed bottle for easy exploration to create a liquid density experiment. 

Although many bottles use colored rice or beans that a kid can shake or shift to find toys hidden inside, density discovery bottles rely on the interesting property of a substance's relationship between its weight and its volume. Two substances with very different densities will not mix, or they'll mix and then settle. 

 And yes, you've seen this while cooking, but my dear Watson, have you ever really observed the phenomenon? Put it in a clear bottle, and you'll be able to. 

 Although you'll want to make these discovery bottles for babies, it's otherwise a very kid-friendly project, accessible even to toddlers. It calls for loads of hands-on, messy exploration, and your kids could easily spend hours at it--my two big kids went back and forth to it all day, then kept their most interesting creations to study the next day, as well.

DIY Discovery Bottles

You will need: 

•  containers. Any clear jar or bottle with a tight-fitting lid will do, although I'd avoid glass, since this project is intended for children. That being said, of course, my children, who are 9 and 10, did much of their exploration in large test tubes. The bottles that we kept, however (the test tubes have long been rinsed and put away), are simply clean plastic peanut butter jars with the labels removed. 
• eye droppers, funnels, measuring cups, a kitchen scale, and other useful tools. These will periodically need to be rinsed or washed off as you work. 
• hot glue. If you're going to keep any discovery bottle for further play, you'll really want to glue the lid on. Really. Glue it on BEFORE your kid goes to stand on the carpet with it. 
• interesting substances. There are so many options here, and they're all going to be found inside your house. Look around for anything that's colorful, and anything that is thin and watery or thick and sticky, but also just grab stuff, and let your kids sort out their physical properties. Here are some ideas:
• alcohol. Rubbing alcohol or vodka and plenty of headspace will allow you to freeze your bottles so that you can observe the effect.
• corn syrup. If you can stand to buy it (you don't have to eat it, but your purchase does support big farming), this this one is a must-have. It's very dense but still flows, and it's clear, so you can really see what's going on with it.
• craft sand. This is apparently a clean sand, but I don't know where it comes from or how it's processed, and I don't own any, so I didn't use it. Sand, nevertheless, would be a VERY interesting substance to include.
• dish soap. Leave plenty of headspace, and your bottle will have an interesting effect when shaken.
• glitter. Not only is the glitter pretty, but depending on the substance, it will fall, float, or mix.
• glycerin.
• marbles. These will fall interestingly through the various densities of substances, especially the corn syrup.
• oils. Unfortunately, the least eco-friendly oil--mineral oil--is also the most awesome for this project, since it's clear. Buy a bottle for the sake of Science if you can stand it, because it's worth the ability to really see the plane of interaction between oil and another substance, but otherwise use any other cooking oils.
• vinegar.
• water. Dye your water with liquid watercolors or food coloring so that you can see it better as it flows among the other substances.

The tutorial for this project is so simple that it isn't even a tutorial at all: all you have to do is play and explore! 

Colored water, dropped from a test tube, sits on top of corn syrup and below mineral oil.

Since my kids were doing this for Science, I required them to keep notebooks that recorded what substances they were mixing, their reactions, and their comparative densities based on these reactions. They played and explored forever in this way, and it was refreshing to see that even in a kid-land that includes, in my opinion, too much Minecraft and My Little Pony, they were thrilled by something as simple as dropping drops of colored water into a test tube half-filled with clear mineral oil. Have you ever tried that? It IS pretty great. 

Corn syrup, itself, is also pretty great. You could fill a bottle only with corn syrup and interesting little objects--marbles, glitter, dice, clean shells--and simply watching each object fall slooooooowly through the corn syrup is quite fascinating. An observant kid (and they're all observant) will notice that the object even leaves a little trail through the corn syrup as it falls. 

Or, fill your bottle half with corn-syrup and half with colored water. Add oil. Add glitter. 

Another never-fail option is simply colored water and oil. You can't dye oil, so if you're not using a clear oil, the trick is to dye your water a color that complements the yellowy, greeny oil that you've chosen. Blue, green, orange... there are a lot of colors that work. Regardless, the colored water and oil behave VERY interestingly together, so you don't want to pass this combo up.

Liquid starch is dropped through mineral oil, glitter, and colored water.

Play around with substances and mixtures to your heart's content, but when you've found a combination that you love, wipe down the bottle's rim and lid with a soapy washcloth and dry it well, then run a line of hot glue completely around the inside of the lid and screw it on the bottle. 

After it's screwed on, you can run another line of hot glue around the bottom of the lid if you're feeling paranoid--and with who knows what inside that bottle, feel free to feel paranoid. 

 Set these discovery bottles on a shelf somewhere that's convenient for you or a kid to return to whenever you want to give them a shake or a turn and watch the pretty colors and interesting interactions. 

Although you'll have used shelf-stable substances, you'll also want to check on them every now and then, and if you see any sign of bacteria growth, obviously pour them out, wash the bottle, and pitch it into the recycling. 

I Finally Got Covid

Welp, I lasted almost three years without Covid, so it was a pretty good run, I guess.

I don't know if I finally picked up Covid at the gym or at one of the high schools I sub at or during a Girl Scout cookie transaction or somewhere else (my money's on the high school), but my reign as smug Covid virgin is now over. 

It's funny (funny weird, not funny ha-ha), because the day before I started feeling sick, and three days before I'd finally test positive, I randomly looked up how long my latest bivalent booster was supposed to last. I read an update that said it was generally wearing off 4-5 months later, and I was all, "Dang, four months?!? I got *my* booster just a little over four months ago!"

Fucking sigh.

I just keep on testing positive and feeling miserable, so I'm pretty stoked for the day that I can leave my bedroom quarantine, or, barring that, just for the day that I wake up and then don't immediately feel like lying down for a nap.

And you guys! I had to miss my trip to go visit my college kid! This was going to be the first time that I got to see her after leaving her at college. We had tickets to see the live show of our collective favorite podcast, and we were going to buy her some new clothes because it turns out that I was right and she was wrong about how many outfits one needs at school (ahem), and then we were going to kick around Columbus for a day while I looked in her face and squeezed her around the middle and listened to her voice and just generally soaked her in properly.

Instead, I lay miserably in my bed at home, following along on Life360 as Matt did all those delightful and much-anticipated activities in my stead. He got to take her to see Cecil and buy her a new coat and wander off on a pointless detour to the pet store--

--and buy her fresh produce (the kid was about to murder someone for some berries) and take her to the zoo:

I am still utterly distraught and beside myself with jealousy. I will never get over it.

My high school student did occasionally leave gourmet baked goods at my bedroom door, at least:

Yes, she made that fruit tart from scratch. No, I have no idea how delicious it is, because I lost my senses of taste and smell and all I can perceive is that it's crunchy and juicy and soft and cold.

You know who else is really helpful when you're sick?

Cats, man. Cats are phenomenal when you're sick. This particular dude has been happy as a clam to spend his days snoozing on top of the quilt on top of the electric blanket on top of me lying like a lump in bed and staring mindlessly at moving pictures on screens.

I did decide, though, that when I can muster a few extra percentage points of brainpower and I'm feeling like being a little productive, I should at least try to martial the energy to whittle down my massive collection of library books by performing the novel activity (lol) of actually READING them, gasp! 

And it turns out that when you spend literally (lol) half of your days reading, you can mow through a lot of books!

Discounting a few that I skimmed and/or abandoned without finishing, here's what I've burned through in the past ten days:

• Harrow the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir
• Juliette Gordon Low, by Stacy A. Cordery
• Jo: An Adaptation of Little Women (Sort of), by Kathleen Gros
• A Heart That Works, by Rob Delaney

Delaney's book reminded me that when I was a kid, I randomly read what I feel like is an unusual number of non-fiction books written by parents about their deceased child's terminal illness. My grandparents owned Angel Unaware, probably because it was written by Dale Evans, although they, too, had lived through the deaths of two of their children by the time I found that book on our shelves, so who really knows--I never asked, and I never heard them, or to be honest anyone of their generation, ever speak voluntarily about any topic having emotional content. I am fairly positive that I bought Alex: The Life of a Child from Wal-mart, where I scored most of my mass-market paperbacks until I was old enough to prowl the mall and their Waldenbooks store--can you imagine the luxury of a full-on bookstore INSIDE A MALL?!? I bought SO MANY inappropriate books there, from the Simon Necronomicon to every every single lurid tale of dubiously consensual incest that V.C. Andrews could come up with. I don't remember where I found Death Be Not Proud, but I loved that one the most because of all the loving descriptions of chemistry equipment that the kid continually requested for his at-home real science laboratory. 

I don't really know what I was wanting from those books about child death when I, myself was a child, although I can guess that it was probably something like interest in a peer's lived experience, morbid curiosity about death, fascination at witnessing an adult verbalizing their complicated feelings about their relationship with their child... also, I was such an avid reader that I read the back of the Pop Tart box while I was eating breakfast, the golf magazines in various lobbies, and the motel's King James Bible if I ran out of books while on vacation. 

Delaney's book was partially the same--I checked it out from the library because people were talking about it on Reddit, picked it up to actually read it out of boredom, and found that the peer's lived experience that I'm now interested in belongs to the parent. A Heart That Works is both awful and beautiful, and I probably didn't need to read something that would have me crying so much considering how stuffy I am, and it was definitely a bad idea to read something that would have me desperate to hug my children during a period in which I definitely cannot hug either of my children.

But later, Syd and I sat on the floor in our different rooms, separated by a crack in the door that I peeped through, and she told me about the nice day she'd had driving around town with a friend, running their parents' errands and spending their pocket money on costume jewelry. Even later, we all Zoomed with Will, and she talked about how her classes are going and how unappetizing the cafeteria food is and what she might want to study next semester. And then Matt, who's decided to just ride or die my Covid infection even though he's still happily negative, brought me something crunchy for dinner and watched TV with me until I fell asleep at the super wild time of approximately 9:00 pm. 

It was the Covid-era version of everyone I love hugging me hard, and I'm honored and grateful to have it.

Ocean in a Bottle Pinterest Fail

This post was originally published on Crafting a Green World way back in 2015!

My journey began with a super-cute Pinterest craft project: the ocean in a bottle. 

To make the ocean in a bottle, you--in theory--add sand, blue water, oil, and seashells to an upcycled bottle. The sand settles on the bottom, with the seashells resting on top, then the blue water, then the oil, looking just like a lovely little beach scene. Tilt the bottle, and the oil and water react to make rolling waves. 

Fun, right? It's also--in theory--an excellent demonstration of density, the relationship between a substance's mass and its volume. 

My children are studying density right now, so I set this ocean in a bottle project up for them on a recent school day. I gave them clean peanut butter jars, the three substances of sand, water, and oil, and asked them to make a prediction about the relative density of each substance. 

Next, I had the kids measure the density of each substance. Density equals mass divided by volume, so density is easy to measure simply by weighing an exact volume of a substance. Since the kids were comparing densities, they used a balance scale to weigh a half-cup of each substance--and they were each surprised to learn that a half-cup of water weighs more than a half-cup of oil! Yay, math! Yay, science! 

Based on their weight and volume measurements, the kids then revised their comparative density predictions to oil, then water, then sand. 

I instructed them to pour a half-cup of each substance into their peanut butter jars and observe. I waited for the squeals of happiness. I waited... 

"Um..." my older kid said. "Is it supposed to look like muddy water?" 

Well, no, not so much. And yet... yeah. Muddy water with oil on top. Huh. 

I guess that whoever made this project and put it on Pinterest used, like, sanitary, hypo-allergenic, clean sand. I used, like, SAND sand. Sandbox sand. And did you know that sandbox sand is apparently pig-filthy? The sand itself may settle in the bottle, but the filth mixes in with the blue water, turning it a nasty, muddy, green-ish brown. Dirty water in a bottle. Or maybe polluted ocean in a bottle. Either way, it wasn't *exactly* the adorable craft project that I'd intended. 

Fortunately, the kids, themselves, couldn't care less--they were having a fabulous time exploring with water, oil, and sand, and had no expectations of what the final product should look like. Muddy water with oil on top? Fine! Now let's scoop out a pile of sand and pour oil on it! And then stir it with sticks! And then dump it in water! 

And that's pretty much how all our projects end up, so no disappointment there. The good news is that now that I've figured out what NOT to use--sand, dirt--I've got a good idea about what TO use, and as a different project on a different day, I set the kids up creating their own density discovery bottles out of all kinds of cool ingredients. I'll show those to you soon! 

P.S. If you've got any cool discovery bottle combos that we should try, tell me in the Comments below. Science is depending on you! 

Photo credit: cute ocean in a bottle image via Education.com

"A Sad Tale's Best for Winter": The Winter's Tale in our Homeschool High School

My teenager took this pic of the empty stage before The Winter's Tale began. Lots of clock imagery and candles!

As you might recall if you hang out on my blog's Facebook page with me, I have... opinions about how Shakespeare's plays should be explored with high school students:

Considering that Shakespeare didn't even write the plays as we currently read them, and they were instead reconstructed from the actual materials that the actors and other theatre personnel used, often with typos and undoubtedly with/without elements included in the production of the plays but perhaps not written down, I don't place value on "reading" the plays, other than the ability to reference them for citations. 

If that's all you've got access to, then obviously go for it, but that's not all you have access to. DVDs and the internet are the best resources for exploring Shakespeare's plays, because there you can see the plays how they're best seen, interpreted through the eyes of actors, stage managers, dramaturgs, costume designers, hair and makeup artists, and and lighting technicians. 

In my homeschool, we study approximately one Shakespeare play a year this way, usually through a student production at our local university. I don't know about the local theatre options anywhere outside of my small city, but our local theatre productions are AMAZING!!! They're generally equal to anything professional that I've seen, and I can name several of their productions off the top of my head that were better than a professional show. 

This recent production of The Winter's Tale wasn't as exciting as last year's Macbeth, done in the round in a converted formal dining hall, or my favorite, a years-ago female-only production of Julius Caesar, but my teenager liked the costumes (so many underbust corsets!), and all the acting was perfect, and the plot is so bonkers that you can't not have an opinion. 

And, of COURSE, the whole point of even going to the production is to see in real life the world's most famous stage direction: "Exit, pursued by a bear." I gripped my teenager's arm tightly in anticipation of this moment, which was acted by a group of modern dancers. During intermission I was all set to provide my teenager with a lecture on Elizabethan England's obsession with abducting bears and holding them hostage while being mean to them, but it turned out that she already knew this... because she remembered it from Magic Tree House. 

Thank you, Stage Fright on a Summer Night!

We'll be studying more about Elizabethan England and Shakespeare later this Spring, so for this particular unit, watching the play and discussing it with each other (with an emphasis on how the costumes aided/hindered meaning) was sufficient, but there's a ton more history, geography, literary analysis, comparative analysis, and research that you could do to flesh this one play out into a larger study. 

For a simple and easy to follow plot summary, I like these three-minute animated plot summaries from The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Here's the one for The Winter's Tale:

I like to have my kids watch these before we see the play, because it's no fun if you can't follow the plot!

And more importantly, not only is it no fun, but your brainpower won't be available for more sophisticated analysis and thoughtful opinions if it's busy struggling to figure out what on earth is even going on every minute.

Along with the plot summary, it's important to know the characters and how they're related to each other. I'll download any infographic I find that's attractive and accurate--

via the Illinois Shakespeare Festival

--but I also like to pull from the millions of educational guides to specific plays that various theatres have made available online. They're usually written to classroom teachers and so will include a lot of classroom activities that you may or may not want to modify to suit your homeschooler (discussion questions make great essay topics!), and a lot of background info on different topics that's usually written at an appropriate level for students to read and enjoy independently.

Here are some good ones for The Winter's Tale:

• A Noise Within. This is my favorite study guide, with tons of contextual information and some quite solid student activity suggestions. 
• Seattle Shakespeare Company. I like the way that the character map is divided by Act in this study guide, although the suggested student activities are corny.
• Yale Repertory Theatre. Along with the character map, I really like the Actor's Notebook section in this guide. It shows students how to read and interpret the play as an actor would.

For more in-depth resources, the Folger Shakespeare Library has articles and lesson plans, and full-text downloads of the play in various formats. Even if you're reading the full text of the play with your homeschooler, it's good to have the full text so you can reference lines that interest you and find scenes and quotes to illustrate, etc.

Here are some other hands-on activities to incorporate into any Shakespeare study:

• Globe Theatre. Understanding the layout and infrastructure of the Globe is crucial to understanding how Shakespeare's plays were originally meant to be experienced. Kids who like hands-on activities, puzzles, models, and imaginary play might like to build this paper model of the Globe... or you can build it for younger kids, make them a set of mini paper dolls to go with it, and let them create their own small world productions.
• stick puppet theatre. Another fun way to get kids involved in reading and reciting Shakespeare is to help them turn part of a scene into a puppet theatre. Kids can draw their characters, color in line drawings, or just help choose images, and then they get to memorize their lines and put on a play!
• historically-accurate recipes. Because cooking is a great way to homeschool! I wish there was an excellent Elizabethan England cookbook that I could recommend, but at least there are plenty of historically-accurate recipes shared around the internet by various historical societies and museums. The one below is from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust!

• The Game of Shakespeare's Life. This game would work best after reading a biography of Shakespeare. Bonus points for asking the kids to research more historical or biographical events to fill in the rest of the spaces!
• Shakespeare-themed Poetry Tea. We love our poetry teas!

Depending on what your kid is into, there are also all kinds of creative ways they can explore, analyze, and interpret Shakespeare's plays, including writing fanfiction, staging and acting out scenes, creating dioramas of a scene or the theatre, making trading cards of the characters, drawing a book or program cover, illustrating a quote, creating infographics, etc. 

Add on a nice little analytical essay to finish it up, and you're all set!

So Many Cooks in the Kitchen: All the Ways We've Homeschooled with Educational Cooking Projects

King cakes from scratch!

 As I was writing the other day about my kid's experiences with baking throughout her childhood, I got interested in trying to remember what-all we actually had cooked together as part of her homeschool education. 

Spoiler alert: it's been quite a lot!

Projects like these have been such a part of the pattern of our days that I couldn't remember off-hand more than a few notable ones: the cookie map of Ancient Egypt. The cookie Solar System. Mason jar butter. Experimenting with yeast.

Fortunately, THIS is why I've been a blogger for 15-odd years--it's so I don't have to lose my precious memories because of my terrible memory!

I had SO much fun going through my blog archives to find all the times we incorporated a specific cooking project into our homeschool. I didn't count the times that we did stuff solely for fun (even though that's all educational, too!), like our cookie bake-offs and our dyed rainbow waffles and cupcakes, or the food that we made together just as part of life, like yogurt popsicles and applesauce and endless DIY pizzas and quick breads. In this master post, I'm just counting specific projects that we did that were for specific topics of study. I wish I could go back and do them all over again with those magical little kids!

ART

• sculpture: bread sculptures. Bread dough is edible clay! It's also interesting to kids to see the transformation in their sculpture that comes from baking the bread. Of course, bread dough is just one more interesting sculpture medium that all kids should be exposed to, along with all kinds of clays and papier mache and anything combined with a good hot glue gun. You could also incorporate bread sculptures into subjects like math and literacy, sculpting bread dough snakes into shapes and letters and baking them into breadsticks. 

GEOGRAPHY

• Japan: homemade mochi ice cream. Try making your own awesome Japanese treat! Cooking and tasting Japanese cuisine is a great way to build context in a kid who loves anime and manga. If kids are interested, the library usually has kid-friendly cookbooks of Japanese cuisine, and I feel like most places have Japanese restaurants. It's a great segue into a study of Japanese culture. 

• local geography: locavore food prep challenge. Kids learn first-hand about the local food movement and what foods are grown and currently being harvested in their location as they collect ingredients and make a dish consisting entirely of local foods. If kids are really interested in local foods, you can spend spring through fall visiting every u-pick farm in driving distance, and look for places like independent dairies, local breweries, honey farms, and other local food providers who offer tours and workshops. Learning how to preserve those food products is a great next step! You can do also similar cooking challenges anywhere--collect ingredients and make a fun meal at an Asian or Mexican grocery; set a budget for kids to shop for a meal at the grocery store and then cook it independently; find all the Fair Trade items, etc. Even younger kids can play by finding foods with specific colors or something new they want to taste or something that starts with a certain letter, etc.

• New Orleans, Rio de Janeiro, Venice: king cake. Mardi Gras/Carnival is a great time to dip into a geography unit study of New Orleans, Rio de Janeiro, and/or Venice. Not only is there the local cuisine of each area, but also the local music, the costumes, the dances, the parades--so much for every sense! If kids love that kind of thing, there are all kinds of nation- and region-specific holidays you can explore throughout the year to build geography and cultural knowledge. If kids just like baking, you can actually learn quite a lot of American history just through baking cakes!

• map skills: cookie map. This is one of my favorite homeschool projects to do with young children. We've made cookie maps of every place imaginable, from the United States as an Independence Day project to various countries that we've studied to places that illustrate historical events. Kids can use frosting and candies to embellish the map and add features, and can make flag labels out of paper and toothpicks. The possibilities are endless! 

• Taiwan: bubble tea. If your kid is into bubble tea, this could be the first restaurant-quality food that they learn to cook at home, because it's a SUPER accessible recipe. It fits great into a unit study of Taiwan or the entire continent of Asia, or expand the geographic interest by making or tasting special drinks from all over the world while studying those places. Take it in a new direction with more exploration of the mathematics of spheres or the science of polymers. Boba is also another preschool-friendly sensory material, although it's a choking hazard for under-threes. 

HISTORY

• Ancient Mesopotamia: Gingerbread Cuneiform. See what it's like to write cuneiform... and then see how delicious it is to eat it! Other great Ancient Mesopotamia enrichment activities could include building models of a ziggurat or the Temple of Ishtar and listening to The Epic of Gilgamesh. Take the gingerbread cuneiform in a different direction by having a kid use the stylus to draw maps or diagrams or spelling words, or premake a gingerbread moveable alphabet to practice word building.

• Neolithic Great Britain: gingerbread Stonehenge on a cookie cake. Kids get their hands on this Neolithic henge monument by building it in gingerbread on a cookie cake base. This one is mostly just for fun, so it would be a good thing to make as a little celebration when finishing up the relevant unit study. It also almost certainly ties into ancient astronomy, so you have a ready segue into the history of science. Gingerbread is also just a great structural material, so you could have a go at building pretty much any architectural creation with it--how fun would a gingerbread Eiffel Tower or Egyptian Pyramid be for Christmas-time?!?

• Ancient Greece: cookie and Jello map. Here's your assurance from me that your kids' cooking project does not have to look perfect, or even attractive... or even not gross. I think this cookie and Jello map of Ancient Greece that the kids made looks SO gross, but they put a ton of research into it, worked really hard on it, and learned what I wanted them to learn. And they said it was delicious! 

• pioneer studies: Mason jar butter. You'll probably come to this project inspired by reading Little House in the Big Woods or visiting a living history museum. It's an especially good activity when it's miserable outside, because it gets little bodies moving and occupies them for quite a while--and then you can have a snack! Contextualize the activity by visiting a humane dairy farm or getting a 4-H kid to let you milk their cow, or doing other living history projects. It pairs well with the picture book Fry Bread, which also includes a cooking project!

LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

• J.R.R. Tolkien: Lord of the Rings feast. Themed dinner and movie nights are my absolute favorite thing! After we read each of the books in the Lord of the Rings trilogy together (Matt has read SO MUCH TOLKIEN out loud in his life!), we had a movie night with a themed dinner to watch the associated film. It's very fun for kids to remember their favorite details from the book and figure out recipes to represent them. Sometimes they like to make foods written about in the book, like seed cakes or rabbit stew, and sometimes they like to make foods that represent other part of the book, like these Ring of Power doughnuts, above. You can make a themed dinner about ANYTHING, and it's always educational for the kids to research what they want to make, shop for the ingredients, and cook it.

• children's books: Amelia Bedelia Bakes Off. The kids thought that Amelia Bedelia was SO FUNNY, and I still remember how absolutely thrilled my kid was when we finished Amelia Bedelia Bakes Off, she turned the page, and found a recipe there for Amelia Bedelia's cake! All praise to that author, because my kid could make the cake right then, using ingredients we already had on hand. Making recipes from children's books is such a great literacy connection. It builds context to the real world, and it makes reading feel even more fun than it already is. We also own and have really liked cooking from the Green Eggs and Ham Cookbook and The Little House Cookbook--any literary cookbook written around a children's book is probably going to have kid-friendly recipes.

   MATHEMATICS

• fractions: Rice Krispy Treat fractions. Make Rice Krispy Treats, pour into a square or round cake pan, then when they're set have a lot of fun cutting them into various fractions. You can use any food that can be set in a round or square pan, but Rice Krispy Treats work particularly well because they cut cleanly without a lot of crumbling. Combine it with all the other hands-on ways that you can explore fractions, because it builds a kid's number sense by seeing the same concept illustrated multiple ways. Rice Krispy Treats are also a good sculpture tool for all kinds of art and model-making projects.

• geometry: heart-shaped cake. Making a heart from a square and circle is a neat little trick--and it's delicious! You can extend the geometry play with paper geometric figures that kids can pattern and make pictures with. If you're feeling really ambitious, you could then bake a cake of whatever picture they've created with their shapes!

• logic: edible chessboard. My kid and I baked this blondie and brownie chessboard during a time when chess was of high interest to her, and it was so fun! There was some good patterning and ordering involved, but things really got wild when we started removing squares from the board and figuring out how to play around them. Kids who like puzzles and games or are at all creative or mathy can get really into chess, and there are a lot of kid-friendly chess enrichment activities around. These two matching brownie and blondie recipes would also lend themselves to even more fraction exploration, patterning, and, if you frost them with letters, moveable alphabet play.

• telling time: clock cake. This is more fun than educational, but it does require practical knowledge of how a clock face is organized and the ability to write the numbers. You could expand this lesson by cutting the cake to demonstrated elapsed time, or instead writing fraction divisions on it. 

PRACTICAL LIFE

• reading comprehension/following directions: Jello. As soon as a kid can read pretty well, I think it's so educational for them (and SO fun for you to watch!) to be given any variety of easy-prep packaged food and encouraged to read the directions and make it all by themselves. Jello is perfect for this because the only cooking required is hot water, and it's very hard to mess up Jello! Instant puddings, canned biscuits and sweet rolls, and boxed cake mixes are also easy enough for a young independent reader to make.

• how it's made: homemade peanut butter. This requires a high-powered blender, but kids find it fascinating to see how easy it is to make their own nut butter. My kid did not prefer this freshly-blended, peanuts-only peanut butter (even though the peanut butter I bought her at the time was also peanuts-only, sigh), but found it VERY fun to blend other delicious things into it. You can blend in honey, maple syrup, jam, and even more creative ingredients like spices and whole fruits. Cinnamon honey peanut butter was DELICIOUS! If a kid gets into the "how it's made" part, they might LOVE the TV show, much of which is free on YouTube. If they get into the blender part, introduce them to making their own smoothies and hummus and other nut butters. Blenders are VERY fun!

SCIENCE

• astronomy: cookie Solar System. This is an all-day or multi-day project, but it is SO MUCH FUN! It requires calculation, geometry, a lot of research, and a lot of problem-solving, but the result is a tasty collection of cookie planets with correct relative size. My kids had a lot of fun reading about each planet so they'd know what color scheme to frost it and how many mini M&M moons to give it. It goes great with any other Solar System activities, many of which are equally hands-on. If you get a good cookie recipe that doesn't spread, you can also bake cookies to represent mathematical concepts like arrays and area models and larger map projects--can you imagine an entire cookie map of the world, with a different cookie for each continent?!?

• cell cycle: states of meiosis cookie models. Reinforce the stages of meiosis by building an edible model. You can turn just about any diagram into a cookie or cake model with enough creativity! Plant and animal cells also lend themselves well to being made of cookies or cake, and I have seen an AWESOME cake model of a World War I trench.

• fungi: yeast bread. The day that my kid learned that yeast is alive is one of my favorite days of homeschooling. She was so interested that we put aside whatever else we'd been planning to do and instead did some experiments with yeast, watched an educational video about fungi, looked at yeast through the microscope... and baked yeast bread! This would be a great intro to all kinds of kid-friendly yeast baking projects, including collecting wild yeast and making sourdough. 

• chemistry: gelling and spherification. Learn how polymers work by creating gelatin juice spheres. Other hands-on ways to explore polymers include making milk plastic and slime. Or continue with edible states of matter by playing with non-Newtonian fluids, densities in liquids, and ice. These taste-safe spheres also make a good sensory material for babies on up! 

• polymers: authentic homemade gummy candies. If you've got a kid who adores gummy candy, don't fall for those DIY kits or tutorials that essentially use just unflavored gelatin and juice or Kool-Aid. They do not taste like authentic gummies, and your kid will not be fooled! You really can make authentic gummies, though, that really do taste awesome, and your kid can get some hands-on experience working with polymers while you're at it! Kids who like this might enjoy other DIY food kits. There are SO many, from growing your own mushrooms and window gardens to making your own cheese and chocolate and gum.

• properties of matter: density cake. This an easy and kid-friendly recipe that kids can run when they're learning about the properties of matter and density. Kids can do some similar experimentation to make a liquid density tower, although that one's not edible. If mix-ins seem to encourage your kids to try new foods, you can expand that into all kinds of bake-offs and cooking play. 

I wish I'd taken better photos of the kids doing all this magical cooking, because I'd love to write a book of educational cooking enrichment projects, but now I don't have anymore mini models! Maybe my teenager could help me with some illustrations to use instead...