For the shortest month of the year, the Junior Room has been very busy learning all about the Pancake Café. In Play Time, we started the topic off in Construction, using wooden blocks, Lego and Magsnaps to create different cafés. The children really enjoyed thinking about all of the areas of a café, including places to sit, play areas for the children and toilets for the customers! Next up was Playdough – the children used various mats to make different foods, like toppings on a pizza, and then moved onto create freely, moulding the playdough to make doughnuts, cupcakes and even utensils we use to eat! In Small World, Lauren created a café with a kitchen, seating area, playground and outdoor seating. The children enjoyed using the dolls to act as waiters, chefs and customers and even decided to offer take away orders! In the garden, they set up a vegetable patch and a BBQ so that they could use fresh produce in the café kitchen – what amazing imagination!
One of the most overlooked jobs in a café is the washing up, so for Water Play the children practiced washing the dishes using washing up liquid and sponges. The children also enjoyed pretending the water was food and poured each other cups of tea and coffee. Next up was Role Play where Ms. Mills had set up a Pancake Café for us to explore. The children used paper menus and pictures on display to make orders and wait at their tables. In the kitchen, the chefs listened to the orders from the waiters and created the meals to send out to the customer. Hosts welcomed customers into the café from the door and took take away orders. The children loved using some of our new resources like wooden doughnuts and biscuits, and pretending to be related to each other.
We spent the whole of February working hard on one Art project: cupcakes. Firstly, we practiced our fine motor skills by ripping up paper to papier-mâché a balloon. Once it had dried, we mixed brown and white paint to make the perfect shade to show a golden-baked cupcake. We had to wait again for that to dry and then we selected our favourite colours of tissue paper to twist together to make the icing. Lauren helped us to use a hot glue gun to stick the icing to the cake and Ms. Mills made us cupcake cases out of card. Finally, we cut up coloured paper to make sprinkles. We though our cupcakes looked good enough to eat!
In SPHE we looked at the food pyramid and how to keep ourselves healthy by eating a balanced diet. As part of Geography, we learnt about different cuisine from around the world, looking at the world map to match countries with their traditional foods. There were lots of food that the children already love to eat like croissants, chocolate, pizza and a roast dinner, but there was lots of unfamiliar food like sushi, curries and tapas which they enjoyed learning about. To continue with Geography, the children learned all about how chocolate is made, including the optimal climate that is needed to grow the cocoa beans. We spent the rest of the month looking at celebrations: learning facts about Australia for Australia Day on 26th January and enjoyed exploring ways to decorate our houses for Chinese New Year. We celebrated St. Brigid’s Day on the 1st of February, by making beautiful blankets to remind us of the story of St Brigid and on the 14th February, we learned about the legend of St Valentine.
You can’t have a café without tasty treats so the Juniors spent an afternoon baking! They worked together to follow instructions from Ms. Mills to chop, melt, mix, pour and spread. The children practiced their new maths skills of measuring using the scales to find the correct weight and measuring cups to find the right volume of ingredients. This was a fantastic afternoon that the whole class really enjoyed, especially when they were allowed to lick the bowl!
