Play Kitchen

https://amzn.to/4iI4isq
In this blog post we explore play kitchens, and kitchens in space!

We Love Play Kitchens! 💕 🎛️🍽️🍌🥦
"You sure have a lot of kitchens."
"We do?"
Someone pointed this out when they walked into our home the other day. It made me think. Sure, we have an outdoor mud kitchen that doubles as our potting bench. We also have two small kitchens indoors, beside our real kitchen. 
 All of our kitchens get quite a bit of use. We play cafe, we practice life skills, we pretend like we're chefs - and we just plain like having little kitchens. 

I honestly didn't notice that we had three until someone pointed it out. 

Do you have a play kitchen in your home?

How do you use it? Maybe you will like some of these ideas for playing and exploring with them! This blog post is written with the intention of coming back and adding more playtime and learning activities revolving around kitchens. 
Kitchen Skills
What skills do we practice when we are using the play kitchen?
Pouring
Punching
Counting 
Scooping 
Dividing 
Sharing
We wrote these out on our chalkboard and put it up to remind the adults (and big kids) as we play. 
These life skills are easily modeled during playtime in the kitchen.
Pouring
Pinching
And so forth!

🍓 Fruit, Wooden Eggs 🥚 and Other Little Things 🥦

Over the years we have played around with moving things with tongs in our play kitchen, to help us develop fine motor skills - and to just have fun getting familiar with a real kitchen tool. 
One of the big hits was moving little stuffed fruits into muffin tins with tongs. Here's a photo of a basket of stuffed fruit beside a muffin tin. 
🍄🫛🍆🍅🥦🥔🍌🍐🍊🍋
For this activity we hid the fruits, vegetables, and mushrooms all around the room and went for a hunt to find them, then we placed each of them into muffin tins. We sang a song as we worked, "Where's the fruit? Where's the mushroom?" And so forth. Oh! I found a video that we made years ago about this! Here is a link to the video we shared on YouTube.

On Facebook someone asked:
"What do you do with Wooden Eggs?"
🥚🐣🍳🪵
(This is an image of a product that I share about at the end)

 Here is a link to a post on Facebook that inspired me, I harvested a few of these ideas there to share with you. Go check out more and join in the conversation.

Several of those responses had to do with moving the eggs with tongs!

Here are some of those ideas.

Have an egg shaped tray, and eggs in a basket.  Transfer them from the basket to the holes by hand or with tongs, 1 egg to each hole for a 1:1 association - this is early math. You can count as you go! You can also set them up in a way that the child has to cross the midline of their body with their hands. This engages their mind and adds a layer of complexity. 

Are the eggs different sizes or weights? You can sort them by size.

You can set out measuring tools like a scale or a ruler to practice measuring the eggs in different ways. Are two small eggs heavier than one large one? Are some of the eggs hollow and others solid? Perhaps they will trick you! If you use a digital scale to measure them, you can practice number recognition and greater- than and less-than. If you use a balance as a scale, that is a simple physics lesson. You can talk about greater than, less than, and equal to. You can sort them by small, medium, and large.

If the eggs are colorful, you can match them by color. You can group them by colors in the basket or in the tray.

Do you have musical instrument eggs? Some shakers are shaped like eggs, and they make beautiful sounds. They weigh less than solid wooden eggs but look similar. It would be fun to take a moment to lay down a beat with your eggs and make some music together!
(This is an image of a product that I share about at the end)
You can also use them as you talk about the life cycle of birds. You can talk about the different colored eggs that show up in nature. Even hens alone can lay a rainbow of eggs! Do you have hens? Maybe you can collect real eggs together!

Song
Do you want a song to sing and sign as you explore your play kitchen and the fruits and vegetables that make up our food?
We love a song from Daniel Tiger Neighborhood called "Look a Little Closer." Here's a video where we teach you some ASL to go with the song. https://youtube.com/shorts/UuCpTth319E?feature=shared
Here's a picture of me saying "closer"! ASL.
Note: I am not fluent in ASL, I am learning and appreciate any feedback that people give me on these videos.

Kitchens in Space
What does the kitchen look like on the International Space Station? 
Here's a picture.
Let's watch a full tour by astronauts!

What microbes live on the surface of the dining table on the ISS? Let's explore the Station's microbiome with MANGO! 

☕Cafe and Money Sense 🪙
We love playing Cafe!
Our oldest girl even made a sign for our family's cafe, the Cuddle Buddy Cafe!
We pick a "Cuddle Buddy" stuffed animal and bring it to the cafe, where we can enjoy a delicious meal alongside our buddies.
Here's a menu that we made together for our cafe. Our youngest wrote a few letters then asked me to write the rest. We spoke about how much money each item would cost and traced coins that add up to that amount. Then we drew pictures of each item so those who can't read yet can still pick something from the menu. Here's a picture of one of our menus.
You have 5 pennies! 🪙🪙🪙🪙🪙  That's 5¢. You can afford to purchase milk for 5¢  or fruit for 3¢. What do you want? A fruit? Great! Here is an orange 🍊 
oh, you also have a quarter and a nickel? You can buy bread and milk, too!
Thank you! Oh, look, you have two pennies that you can save for another day.

Messy Play
Play Kitchens are great for sloppy and messy play. We especially love using our outdoor play kitchen with mud, leaves, rocks, sticks, and seeds like acorns. 
Soapy messes are fun - and often clean enough for indoors.

Then there's always Oobleck. That non-Newtonian fluid leaves cornstarch in its wake. It's potentially very messy, so we tend to use it outdoors primarily, but we have enjoyed using it indoors a time or two. It can be a lot to clean up, but doable.
Here's another blog post where we explore Oobleck.

Recommended Products 
Do you want to purchase a play kitchen, or items to use in your kitchen? 
My friends asked me to point them in the right direction with some suggested products to purchase to do my lessons, so that's why I have taken the time to share these links with you.

Here are some fun options to explore on Amazon. We will earn a little money if you purchase something after following one of these links. The token earnings that Amazon throws my way have not added up to anything beyond pocket change. This is purely for your convenience.

A highly rated mud kitchen: https://amzn.to/3BhoIry
A highly rated play kitchen: https://amzn.to/4iBNYcv 
Painted wooden musical shaker eggs: https://amzn.to/3OWedwP
Plain wooden musical shaker eggs: https://amzn.to/3ZSD7nc
Colorful wooden eggs: https://amzn.to/3ZQIqUm
Wooden model bird eggs: https://amzn.to/3ZVzsVG
Kid-friendly Tongs: https://amzn.to/3OUB5g2
Felt fruits and vegetables with name labels on English: https://amzn.to/4gdTUXz
Basket of fruits and vegetables: https://amzn.to/3OXtc9I
Wooden egg tray: https://amzn.to/49Cvapy
Digital Kitchen scale: https://amzn.to/49GLA0o
Bucket Balance: https://amzn.to/3DkdHX6
Small Ruler with inches and centimeters: https://amzn.to/3VEjVqQ
Pretend coins and dollars: https://amzn.to/4gVmTjd

Baking and Dividing
Let's practice dividing with our play kitchen.
Years ago a friend gave us this Leapfrog brand oven. It has held up to an incredible amount of abuse over the years. 
When I looked around our play kitchen for products that I wanted to recommend for other families, this one came to mind. I looked it up and I was delighted to see that they're still making them!
We can divide up our bread into 3 parts, and click them back together again. Our pizza can be divided into fourths. We can practice sharing, talk about dividing things equally, and talk about fractions as we use these toys.

Do you want to purchase this toy for a child in your life? Here is a listing for this toy on Amazon. If you follow this link and purchase an item, we will earn a little money.
Here's a couple of links! 

Play Kitchen meets a Real Recipe!
Big sis picked out a recipe, found the ingredients, and set them out in the play kitchen so little sis could make it when she gets home.
Chia seeds and Agave nectar from ALDI.
Lemon grown at home. We keep our citrus trees indoors. 🍋 🍋‍🟩


This cookbook is called:
"Help Yourself Cookbook for Kids" by Ruby Roth
Cutting our lemon with a kid friendly vinyl knife. Here's a link to the knife we like: https://amzn.to/3P51uIc. Do you also want a small wooden cutting board for your play kitchen? Here is a link to one: https://amzn.to/3P3isqi
We contained our mess and kept our board from slipping by placing a thick absorbent cloth under our butting board. It is a Gerber brand cotton cloth. Here is a link to a package: https://amzn.to/4iI4isq
we love our easy-to-read measuring spoons. Here is a link to this product in another color: https://amzn.to/4iN0iGW

We like to hand squeeze our citrus. Here is a squeezer like the one we used. https://amzn.to/3ZJPrF5
Do you want a canning funnel like the one we worked with? Here's a link. https://amzn.to/41JKLlb

Would you like to purchase this cook book on Amazon? If so, here is our link! 

If you purchase an item following these links, we will earn a little money. It's a simple way you can support the education efforts on our page. We provide this link because friends asked us to, so they can find the specific books and products that we use in our lessons.

Get out there and play together!

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