Baking a Cake

Timer & Bell sound effect (find in Media tab or instructions below).

Ask them to choose the flavor. Children can choose their own flavor for their own cake.

Ask what we need for cooking (e.g. bowl, spoon) and lay out these imaginary items.

Ask what ingredients we will need (e.g. sugar, butter, milk) and mix them.

Reach up high towards imaginary cupboards, or open low down drawers (so as to keep them moving).

Taste as you go along – and decide what else it needs (lemon, salt, vanilla…).

Put the cake in the oven and set a timer. Play the Timer & Bell sound effect (below).

Take it out (with oven gloves!), smell it, it’s very hot, blow on it.

Children do their own decoration with icing. Ask them what they decoration they made.

As above, except we are cooking one single cake in a standing circle.

As the children suggest ingredients (e.g. eggs), take two children from the circle to be eggs. ‘Crack’ them and put them in the middle of the circle.

The circle has become a giant mixing bowl!

Add a few more ingredients (e.g. butter and sugar), and keep adding children.

Mix them with a pretend giant spoon – all the ingredients children in the middle spin around.

The children round the outside become flames of the oven.

The ingredients children crouch down in the shape of one big cake. They slowly rise up, like the cake rising.