Queen of Hearts jam tart play dough recipe

We took our favourite play dough recipe and transformed it into some fun messy play, making jam tarts for the Queen of Hearts in our Valentine bakery.

Jam tart play dough recipe

   

Then I set out some bakery equipment for the children to use in their play: rolling pins, cookie cutters, silicone cake cases and muffin tins.

I’m using every opportunity to add in words to our play and this written invitation gave the children a little reading practice – it’s quite exciting to  get a note from the queen! {Click the photo below and you can print the invitation}

I also gave them a set of bakery order sheets along with some pencils – red and pink of course – so they would write down their orders. {Click the image below if you’d like to print some sheets too}

 

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Adding in these extra little elements is a fun and gentle way to encourage the children to read, write and explore maths as they play. It shows them that these ‘school’ skills have real and practical importance in life.

Providing a variety of cookie cutters is a very easy way to include a maths lesson in their play, letting them explore shape and size. They worked out they needed a big cookie cutter for the base of their jam tarts, and a small one if they wanted to make a lid.

They practised using a rolling pin…

and created a menu of imaginary cakes, pies and biscuits.

Of course, they’re chatting all the time they play, pretending to take orders and work out recipes.

And the addition of some favourite small world characters gave them plenty of customers to serve.

Even slicing the cakes into fair shares is a playful way to work on fractions. Of course, then children don’t know this was a maths lesson – they just thought it was super fun!