play kitchen revamp

Posted: November 16, 2011 | Author: Jena | Filed under: Experimentation, Holiday, Imagination, Jena's work, playing with our food, Recycling, sensory, Small Motor Skill | Leave a comment »

We have an old pretend kitchen set, the kind I played with when I went to preschool. Solid wood, beautifully worn and loved and resilient, which is key with my kids.

We set this pretend kitchen up in our “real” kitchen as a holiday gift for the boys last year. Since then, it has been filled with all of our pretend food, pots, pans, plates, cups, scales etc etc etc. With this last lap around the sun, the kids and all their friends have had a ball in their mad science lab, I mean pretend kitchen. It’s a mess all the time. Friend H deemed it her chore to clean the kitchen every Wednesday and even takes pictures after she’s done.

Lately, I’ve been feeling like it’s just too full…forest for the trees and all that…So I pack up everything, except for a couple of plates and pans and tools. Minimal.

In the last couple of weeks, the kids and I have been on a mission to find things we can put in the kitchen as pretend food. We “mod podge” tree pods and pork rib bones. The kids enjoy using cork board that on another day they decided to break up into small pieces to use for “pet food” for plastic snakes.
My favorite find was some varnished branch slices buried in the shelves of the basement studio.

I set up a special little area for pancake grilling.
Little K has been playing, “cooker cooker,” lately. He makes pancakes in his grill and when he’s done, he lets us all know that he’s Little K again.
But while he’s “cooker cooker,” he likes to flip pancakes like mad with his mini scapula, handing out plates for everyone, making sure to blow on each one before you can eat it.

And as an extension to this, we make orange play dough with coffee grounds, and I shape it into little pancakes.

The cooker cooker says, EAT UP!

Best pancake book ever!
Pancakes, Pancakes!, by Eric Carle, 1970
Jack wants some pancakes, but first he must gather eggs from the chickens, wheat from the farmer, flour from the miller, milk from the cow. His mother shows him how to cook and flip them, and hungry Jack knows what to do with them next.

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