We recently read an old favorite of mine titled, “The Doorbell Rang” by Pat Hutchins. I have had my copy of the book for years and it even came with a cassette tape for the listening center (some of you may not even know what a cassette tape is – yikes!)…
The book is about a couple of children who sit down at the table to eat some cookies their mom made. Before eating, the children divide the cookies on to two plates so they each have an equal amount. Just as the children are ready to eat their share of the cookies, the doorbell rings and in comes two more friends. Now the cookies must be divided into four equal parts. Each time the children start to eat their cookies, the doorbell rings again and two more children come until every child has only one cookie to eat. But I won’t tell you what happens when the doorbell rings just one more time – I don’t want to spoil it for you…
Of course, this is a great book for math, sharing, and simply talking about cookies. We focused a little on everything. We started by retelling the story. I had a tray of DIY felt cookies and invited two of the children to come and eat them.
The first two children needed to divide the cookies in half so that they each had the same amount while the other children looked on…
The children caught on quickly and divided their cookies but then someone said, “Ding Dong!” and now two more of my students joined in and once again, we needed to divide the cookies some more. We continued on until everyone in the group had a cookie…
One thing that is hard to express to you through this post is how generous the children were with each other. The children made sure that everyone had a cookie in the end. One child even offered to give up his only cookie so that another child could have one but fortunately, we had plenty to go around and everyone got to pretend to eat a cookie by the end of our story…
After retelling our story, the children went off to explore cookies in a variety of ways. One of our centers was the listening center where the children could take our book and listen to it again. The children loved listening to the story over and over again…
And one of our other centers was the fun process of making puffy paint cookies…
The children used the home made puffy paint to decorate their cardboard cookies…
As the children completed a puffy paint cookie, then Miss Lauren popped them in the microwave for 30 seconds to cook them up! This dried out the puffy paint just enough so that the cookies were now ready to go home. We had to let our cookies cool off just a few minutes first though as they were a tad hot when they came out of the microwave…
Some of the children made one cookie, others made two and at least one child made six cookies in all! Some of the cookies had paper sprinkles on top, and others were just decorated with the puffy paint icing…
To make puffy paint…
- 1 Cup of Flour
- 3 tsp Baking Powder
- 3 tsp salt
- Food Color or liquid water color to add coloring as desired
- Water
I mixed all the ingredients together and added enough water to make a paste with the flour. I filled squeeze bottles (that I bought from Walmart – next to the spatulas and other cookware) with different colors of the flour paint. If the mixture is too runny, add more flour. Too thick, add more water. Better to be thick than runny…
A fun day of story telling and making cookies! Now I am kind of craving a real cookie….
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