This month at RisingOaks Early Learning | St. Patrick, the toddler 2 children at RisingOaks Early Learning | St.Patrick have explored their interest with cooking. This interest emerged earlier in the month, with the children using plastic food, the play kitchen, and utensils to pretend to make meals, eat, and serve them to peers continuously throughout their day. This has sparked the beginning of our project in the toddler 2 classroom, where we have been introducing different foods, cooking ideas and materials used in the kitchen. In the kitchen area, Deborah provided pictures of different fruits and vegetables seeing the toddlers interest as they named fruits such as banana, carrots and pepper. When the new pictures were added, Augustus and Clementine were first to recognize corn and avocado. Those that were unfamiliar with the vegetables repeated words such as kale with Deborah. Nancy displayed a table set with plates, utensils and cups for the toddlers to use in their play. The toddlers used the stuffed animals as guests at their table, serving food on the plates and pretending that their stuffed animals were eating the food. Cileena added baking trays into the kitchen for the toddlers to use to place food, cook up meals, and serve food. Adding felt cookie cut outs the toddlers used the trays baking cookies using the spatulas to remove and pat the cookies into place. The magnetic trays allowed the toddlers to use magnetic letters and explore making words and menus. As a way for the toddlers to deepen their understanding of fruits and veggies, Deborah also made a Velcro “find and match” menu where the toddlers could match pictures of different fruits and veggies to the picture on the menu. As they place the picture they name the fruits or veggies. Zoey pointed out an orange as she matched her orange picture to the menu. Robbie has been interested in reading food books like, “rah, rah, radishes” from our classroom library. This book rhymes fruits and veggies in a clever way pulling the toddlers in to listen as it is being read. To introduce different cooking utensils into their play, Cileena added spatulas, whisks, serving spoons, and potato mashers into the kitchen. To help them understand how to use them, the toddlers used them as paintbrushes in a painting activity seeing the different textures and lines they left behind as they used them. The toddlers are beginning to learn and understand cooking in a deeper sense. To further expand their learning, our next steps will be to have the toddlers make their own snack which they can make and enjoy proudly.