Cooking & PATs

One of Reese's favorite activites, and one that I try to incorporate daily, is some sort of cooking or baking. Not that I'm some Marth Stewart! Even making Mac & Cheese counts as cooking my my book :) But Reese is grasping concepts of measurment, which is neat to see developing! Here, we're making bread. Reese is measuring the water to mix with the corn meal for the first step in the bread process.

Pouring the yeast into the warm water.

This was the next day, helping make chocolate pudding. I'm glad I used the large measuring bowl & I'm glad the milk jug was almost empty. I think the entire jug of milk ended up in the bowl by the time I snapped a quick picture! But...was still a good teaching opportunity. We checked the box, and found out we only needed 2 cups of milk. We checked the bowl and found that we had poured 4 cups of milk, and Reese decided that we had too many cups. So we put some back in the jug, & kept pouring it back into the jug until we had our 2 cups. Reese is becoming quite proficient at reading a measuring cup...he got right down at counter-level and everything to read the measurement. What a chef!

PATs this week was right up Reese's alley. We met at the Flower Mound Music Conservatory for an introduction to some fun instruments. The first was the piano, and our guide took some parts (can't remember the names!) off of the piano so the children could see inside and the hammers doing their work.

Next came the drums. Reese was already familiar with drums because Grammie has a full set at her house & she works with Reese on keeping the beat. As Grammie says, "The drummer's job is to keep the beat. The rest is all fluff!"

Everyone had a chance to push the keys on the saxaphone while our guide played. Reese didn't understand why he couldn't take a turn at blowing into it. :)

The Music Conservatory offers piano lessons starting at age 4, so we'll have to see if Reese is interested in something like that as he gets a little bit older. He absolutely has a love for music, but I don't want to force lessons upon him at a young age if he's not interested in listening to a teacher. He wants more to do his own thing, and he actually tries to play music and not just "bang"...but I don't know that listening to a teacher would be much fun at this age. So we'll see!