Often in the toddler room we enjoy engaging the children in various baking or cooking activities. Many times, we end up making sweet treats like Christmas cookies or cakes or muffins. Looking for a healthier option, we decided we could warm up with a nice bowl of vegetable soup this month! As we looked through soup recipes, we stumbled upon the classic folk tale ’Stone Soup’ and wondered if we could incorporate it into our cooking activity. The idea of having each family bring in a vegetable felt like a great opportunity to engage the families and create some conversations at home about what we were doing in class.
Over the next week families all brought in vegetables to prepare for making soup. At group time we listened to the story of Sone Soup and had a discussion about how it relates to us in our class. We focused on the idea that if we share and work together, we can create something even greater! The morning when we made soup, each child was equipped with a cutting board, butter knife and some of the vegetables they had brought. With supervision, the children cut up their veggies and added them into the pot! Once all the veggies were in, our cook Brenda joined us to teach us a bit about spices and seasoning. She helped us to add the broth and seasonings then took our soup back to the kitchen to cook it up for us for lunch! At lunch the children were thrilled to eat the soup that they had created and the educators were thrilled to see all of the children eating so many vegetables! We had lots of conversation throughout lunch time as the children looked through the soup to find the vegetables they had added.
Throughout the experience we had taken lots of photos, this gave us the opportunity to put together a book. We titled it ‘Toddler Stone Soup’ and based it off of the original folk tale. The next day we had the chance to read the book as a group, giving the children an opportunity to reflect on the whole process. Each page featured a child with the vegetables they brought. As we read through it the children called out the names of their peers on each page building on their sense of self and their connections with one another.
