When my kid wanted to learn ballet, I hopped into her ballerina world. When she wanted to learn watercolor art, I also learned along with her. Now that she's into boxing, I am also getting in that ring, so to speak. At a certain point last year, my little one got into baking cookies. We got to a point where we needed to sell the cookies because there was just so much. So, she got into her mini business. Which meant I also got into entrepreneurship during that phase.
Baking isn't just baking. I used this activity as an introduction to fractions. Most kids need visuals so that they'll be able to understand topics being served to them. Drawings and playthings are fine, it literally shows them a visual representation of fractions. But experiencing fraction firsthand through mixing the dry and wet ingredients cements the idea into their brain like a memory.
Home economics is not yet part of our curriculum but baking is a fun activity that gives a lot of learnings and as an added bonus, there's a chocolatey sweet goodness towards the end. The tiny baker was enthusiastic and wants to do all the mixing. At least until such time when the mixing becomes tough. That's when I take over. The next step anyway is to start putting it in the oven so basically, it's my shift already.
While the dough is setting and baking afterwards, the tiny baker busied herself with the banner of her little bakeshop. First, she had to figure out a name for her little bakeshop. She did not take much time for that. She already knows what to name her little cookie shop. Tiny Bakers Cookie Express. Has a good ring to it.
The wait time for the cookie dough to set before you could start putting it in the oven takes a bit of a long time. What better way to pass the time than to make an artwork. I think she really did a good job at creating her cookie shop's banner. She always brought this whenever she delivers the sale. We live in an online world now, so most of her sales were made online. She sent messages to her aunts and uncles and they were mostly the ones that bought the cookies.
When she made her sales, we had another lesson in Math about money. We have just finished reading The Richest Man in Babylon at that time and it was a really good application of the lessons from that book. Teaching and learning is really a lot easier when what they're learning is right in front of them. She was able to put away a considerable amount of money on this cookie sale. Plus, she was able to afford herself a new book.
This little baking and sale activity was not really in our lesson plans, but like what our homeschooling mentor said, our child is our curriculum. The only plan we follow is for her to learn and love what she learns so she will continue to love learning. The only way to do this is to follow her lead. We are not an entirely child-led homeschooling style, but we want to make sure that the learner is enjoying the process altogether.
It just amazes me that with just her statement "Nanay, I want to learn to bake cookies.", we were able to learn Maths (fraction and money management), some Home Economics, some Arts and crafts, a little bit of social skill activity.
We were also able to do some nature walks on the way to deliver the cookies. We could have just taken a trike on the way around, but we chose to take a walk. In doing so, we were able to make some nature observations. We saw the different plants that were all around our barangay.
Would you look at that? Who knew there's so much happening in baking aside from the actual baking itself. I had a different plan on those days we did our baking. But I was able to let go of that day's plan, and follow a new and improvised plan, and it was still full of learning and discoveries.