To begin our cooking lesson this week we read The Ugly Vegetables by Grace Lin. In the story the little girl compares her own family’s green leafy vegetable garden to the neighbors’ colorful flowering gardens. At the end of the story her Mother makes a special soup from her garden that attracts all the neighbors and encourages them to plant their very own chinese vegetables the next season along with their flowers. This was such a great book to teach about making growing vegetables and making Soup.
The author, Grace Lin, has a website with of resources and lots of other great titles. Here’s the recipe to make your very own Ugly Vegetable Soup from the book.
After reading the story the girls the girls went shopping for our ingredients to make Alphabet Soup. Pick your favorite soup recipe to use. We followed a simple minestrone soup recipe.
They selected vegetable words from the pot and had to find them on the counter. They each were responsible for washing the vegetable that they found from the counter. Then we divided up all the vegetables equally and started cutting with our metal butter knives. They did such a great job chopping up their zucchini, yellow squash, celery, carrots, grean beans and even some onions.
We measured our chicken broth and diced tomatoes and put then into the a pot and then the adult was in charge of cooking. Once all of their vegetables were chopped up we added a dash of all the seasonings, making sure to smelling first to see what we’re adding.
The soup only took minutes to cook. At the very end we added our Alphabet Pasta to finish it off. Each child had their own pot cooking, we were missing a few of our friends.
While our soup was cooking it was Alphabet Soup Time. Each of the girls received a few letters to play the game Alphabet Soup. Here’s the Song…
Now it was time to make our very own Alphabet Soup. Each child had the opportunity to cut their own pot with black paper. Then it was time to add the soup. They took alphabet pasta and glued it onto the paper. I love that they all look different. As we were working on it the girls came up with other ideas for the Alphabet Soup Song. Their ideas were a Rhyming Soup Song and a Sight Word Soup Song, which we will most certainly be making this week.
The whole house was filled the the aroma of our soup cooking while we were making our project. It was such a perfect way to relate to the book. They could not wait to taste their very own soup. It was so cute all of the bowls were empty within minutes. Then they each brought home a container to share with their families too. They were so proud of their own accomplishment.
I encourage you to check out your local libraries under children’s books and the topic soup! There were so many to choose from for this lesson. I am so excited to extend our collection of Soup books and foresee many more cooking lessons with making soup.
DO YOU HAVE A FAVORITE BOOK ABOUT MAKING SOUP? POST A COMMENT BELOW.
Amanda says
November 16, 2011 at 8:42 amI didn't know there were so many books about soup. Elly LOVED making this soup and serving it for dinner. She was so proud! We have been singing this song too – I need to make little rhyming word cards to play / sing with.
HumbleMom says
November 16, 2011 at 10:32 pmThis is such a great idea!