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Heart Shaped Bread Recipe

Making food in the shape of hearts for Valentines day is a hit with most kids.  Here’s an idea for creating heart shaped bread with kids.  We’ve shared these with my child’s class and it’s a big hit and an easy way to stay away from sugary sweets that we typically see at holiday parties.
Heart Shaped Bread Recipe with Kids

Making Heart Shape Bread with Kids

We are learning about the Grains Group in our Little Hands that Cook with Books Balanced Eating Fun Series!  It’s getting close to Valentine’s Day so I thought it would be to include a heart into the lesson so we’re making heart shaped breadsticks.

My daughter was very excited to make her very own heart breadsticks so I decided to let her use the premade dough.  The next time we do this we’ll make it whole wheat breadstick recipe to add some more Grains into our diet.  I want her to know the process of making bread from scratch.  You could easily do heart shaped pretzels too!  Here’s what we used to make our heart shaped breadsticks.

Heart Shaped Breadsticks

Ingredients

Refrigerated Breadsticks from Pillsbury
butter
garlic salt (or desired herb)
Parmesan cheese

Directions

1. Separate dough into 12 strips
2. Take two strips and twist and join to create heart shape on baking sheet
3. Brush with melted butter
4. Sprinkle with herbs and parmesean cheese
5. Bake at 375 for 12 minutes
6.  Enjoy with someone you LOVE!

 Books About the Grains Group
The Grain Group by Mari C. Schuh
The Great Grains Group  by Marcie Aboff

While our breadsticks were cooking we had a Lesson about the Grains Group.  I had her find items in the pantry that she thought would belong into the Grains Group.  We laid them out onto the counter and labeled them with the premade labels I made.  They included words like bread, cereal, rice, pasta, popcorn, crackers.  Once we found the items we played a quick game to decide if they belonged into the Whole Grains Group or Refined Grains Group.  I pulled out some pictures I printed of the different whole grains, here’s the site.  Ideally I would like to have containers full of whole grains too for a more hands on approach.  Then we tried to find items in our pantry that contained whole grains. Here’s the list of Whole Grain Words to look for that we used that you can use with your little ones!
 Whole Grains and Refined Grains Game
 

What is a Portion?  
Now that my own child is 5 years old I felt it was time for her to learn about how to read the label on boxes and understand what a “Portion Size” is.  We took some of our favorite snacks and read the label and served them into containers to truly understand what is in a serving.  I think it was a great learning opportunity for her to visually comprehend how much she needs of some of her favorite snacks.  And to understand that at least half of our grains each day should be from the Whole Grains group.

Grains Group Activities
Word Search from Nourish Interactive
Coloring Sheet of the Grains Group
Sort the Grains
Let’s Make Bread
Whole Grain Picture and Word Sort

Here’s an additional Little Hands that Cook with Books Lesson about the Grains Group!
Teddy Bear Biscuits
Teddy Bear Food Group Book with Printable Words

We brought our Heart Breadsticks to a Valentine’s Day Playdate.  The kids loved them, even my baby girl!

Next time we’re going to learn how is flour made and how bread is made?  Who better to teach us than The Little Red Hen. Until then enjoy…

Happy Valentine’s Day, Mouse  by Laura Numeroff

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Little Hands that Cook with Books: Alphabet Soup

 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.

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  1. I 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.

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