I have observed a trend in my friends, and my on-line friends, to try to go back to a simpler time. Grow your own food, use cloth diapers, make bread from scratch. I admit that I enjoy being caught up in this trend as well.
At school, we just completed a unit on pioneer life. We studied this in preparation for a field trip to a local pioneer village.
As a follow up to the trip, we made two recipes: handmade butter and Irish soda bread.
If you use these two recipes, make the butter first. That way you can use the buttermilk and the butter in the bread recipe.
The Butter
Students enjoyed making the butter, and noting three different steps of turning whipping cream into butter. First, it
was all liquid. Second, it was all solid. Third, it was half liquid and
half solid: the buttermilk and the butter.
The Bread
The first step, if you are not using buttermilk, is to mix milk and vinegar. I asked the students to predict what would happen. Some ideas were that they would bubble, separate, and have no change.
Students took turns reading out the steps, measuring, adding, and mixing in the ingredients.
We had the extra challenge of doubling the recipe to make two loaves of bread. This was great numeracy practice!
And finally ... the soda bread! If you haven't tasted soda bread before, it does taste like the baking soda / salt. One person spit it out, but the others enjoyed it.
We especially enjoyed it with the handmade butter!
Other activities: Start the unit with a KWL chart, read short stories about different aspects of pioneer life, read Penguin Reader level 3 of Anne of Green Gables using the great activities provided in the book to build a variety of reading strategies, and go on a field trip to pioneer village.
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