and processes involved in baking - and has documented its approach in a
new book, as Hannah Crown explains
Baking has long been a popular activity with young children - a chance for them to get their hands dirty, experiment with colours and textures, and learn about weighing, measuring, volume and time.
Reggio specialist Little Barn Owls Day Nursery and Farm School, in Horsham, West Sussex, has taken this idea one step further: running a four-month project concentrating on the means - the ingredients and processes involved in baking - rather than the end (the cake).
The nursery has created the 40-page Cake Book. Named by one of the children, the book is not a list of recipes, but a record of each messy stage of the process. The project involved three- and four-year-olds in sessions of between four and six children.
The idea
'Baking isn't just about following a recipe - there is a lot of exploration and learning potential there,' says Hayley Peacock, the nursery's managing director.
The project was born after the children became interested in harvesting fruit, vegetables and eggs from the nursery's farm school setting.
'Because there was so much food being generated by the nursery, one of the cooks started involving children in baking sessions each morning,' Ms Peacock explains. As a result, children started role-playing, being bakers and singing nursery rhymes such as Five Currant Buns.
This led to the idea of exploring what connections children made between ingredients, process and finished product, and their theories about weighing and time.
Key ingredients
Ms Peacock says, 'While we were trying to establish what children knew about the baking process, we found them referring to 'powder', or flour. We gave them time and space to explore flour - they realised they could use it to mark make and write their name. They were covering themselves with it and this investigating lasted several weeks. Then one of the children asked "where does flour come from?"'
Atelierista and project lead Catherine Grimaldi played the children a video of a flour mill in action and a hand-operated wheat grinder was brought in so children could explore grinding husks of wheat. Afterwards, children were asked to draw pictures of how flour is made.
These pictures are featured in the Cake Book, described as showing 'a sense of the force of heavy machines working to sift and grind the mill' through 'purposeful, deliberate pressure' applied with the pencil to the paper. Ms Peacock explains, 'This graphic language is one of the hundred languages children use to express themselves, according to Reggio philosophy.'
Bake debate
The children had varying opinions as to how long it took to bake a cake, so the next phase of the project was to explore time. 'Traditional settings would have just told the children how long it takes, but that wasn't the point; the point was for them to see the effects of playing with time as a variable,' says Ms Peacock.
Children were able use a real portable oven to bake their flour and liquid mixtures for as long as they wanted. This process of discovery meant that the children's first estimates of how long it took to bake a cake went from the outlandish '500 metres' to guesses of between two and seven minutes - not quite right, but much closer to reality.
To the light box!
In many of the sessions, a light box was used to intensify the feeling of discovery and magic. 'The light box helped to set the conditions for learning ... children were asking to turn the lights off to make the glow stronger.
'(The activity room) was a special place to be. They were in there for two hours engrossed, sometimes completely quiet, though it could be really boisterous and fun at other times.'
Following the wheat-drawing session, wheat stalks were used to make compositions on the light box. This turned into child-led experiments with honey, tracing paper and cherries. As the project entered its third month, staff noted the children seemed to be going further in the direction of experimenting on the light box using raw ingredients. Whole sessions of one to two hours were dedicated to playing and drawing with egg yolk, jelly icing, melted chocolate and flour.
Articulate
'Once they are given time and space to explore, and given quiet time - no adult voice constantly asking questions, but us letting them work out what they are interested in - they start to articulate what they are thinking,' says Ms Peacock.
An example is four-year-old Amelia on the subject of the different states of jelly: 'It's turned into yoghurt we have for tea. It's getting thick. It's getting stiff.' And later: 'I can't pour it because it has gone too sticky. I have to slide it with my finger.'
Sometimes, imaginative connections were made. Another child who had been to a theme park the previous weekend, Imogen, four, looked at patterns made by flour on black paper and said, 'This is how my tummy feels. I scream on a roller coaster.' Children were also working as a team, calling each others' attention to the task ('Just keep it on the table Josh. We need just three ingredients. Concentrate!'), while a three-year-old child fetched a pencil and paper to write down the necessary ingredients when she heard another child say 'Shall we make a list?'.
Shared thinking
'The sessions were not really proposed as activities. As with anything, we tend to just set the conditions for learning and see what happens,' says Ms Peacock. 'There were strictly no "learning objectives" for the children, and the reason the project lasted for so long is because the adults made informed decisions (about which questions or activities to pursue).'
The team had actively decided to continue with this project and a key thing they wanted to get better at was facilitating collaborative working between the children, she adds.
Staff concluded that a key outcome of the project was enabling the children to go from being 'independent learners to a group of shared thinkers'. Ms Peacock says, 'The Early Years Foundation Stage places a lot of attention on the rate at which children learn (as individuals), but it doesn't give much attention to learning as part of a social group.
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We give a lot of attention to children as social learners. This was about leaps in thinking, making connections about the way the world works.'
Hayley Peacock has founded the Inspired by Reggio network, with the aim of swapping resources, ideas and training. See www.littlebarnowls.co.uk. To enquire about the book, email info@littlebarnowls.co.uk.
