Life School Lesson - Vegetable Soup

Today we had a fun day of school!!  We did school through a life lesson of making Vegetable Soup!

I originally thought of the idea as I was preparing our current Science lessons that are on Plants (from the book What Your Kindergartner Needs To Know).  The final lesson was talking about the different plants that we eat.  I saw in the Everything For Fall book a recipe for Vegetable Soup and thought this would be fun to close out our science lessons.

As I started preparing the lesson I realized that more than Science could be taught with this lesson...I started seeing how math, health, and even phonics could be taught as well!!  So I decided for the day instead of going to our classroom for school we would go to the kitchen instead!

Here is how the lesson went:

1) I put all the vegetables that we would need for the soup all in the same basket.  This way Seth would have to recognize the right vegetable to pull out when it was time to add it to the soup.

2) I made a recipe book for us to go through (I have provided pdf links for the book below if you would like to print it off and use it as well).  I laminated the pages and binded them with a ribbon.

3) The first step involves washing your hands (to put a health lesson in the mix).  All of the steps involving the vegetables also involve washing the vegetables.

Here are the boys washing their hands!

 

 

3) Each step states what to do with each vegetable.  At the bottom of the page is a picture of the vegetable...the picture shows the number of that vegetable that is needed.  So, as a math lesson, Seth had to count the number of the vegetable that was on that page.  He then had to go find that many of that vegetable out of the basket and wash it in the sink.

Mommy would do the cutting part and then Seth would put the cut veggies into the crock pot.  (actually Aaron really liked this part!)

While we were washing and cutting the veggies we would talk about what letter that veggie started with (the phonics lesson).

4) We then counted out and added all the other ingredients to the soup and plugged in the crock pot and let it cook all day!
 *Note - to finish out the soup I thawed out a couple of steaks....then about an hour before we were ready to serve the soup I pounded the steaks with a meat mallot (to make it super tender) and cooked it on the countertop grill, then cut it into pieces and added it to the soup!

Granny and PaPa got to be the consumers of our yummy soup!

We also made banana bread.  I typed out the recipe with pictures so that Seth could help me read it.  He and Aaron really had fun making this! I also have a pdf link below to the recipe for the banana bread.

Here is Seth putting the butter in a bowl to soften in the microwave.

 Seth watching the batter as it was mixing.

 Seth and Aaron working hard on their banana bread.  (they remembered halfway through that they had chef hats to wear - LOL!)

Aaron mixing the dry ingredients.

And that, my friend, is what you call LIFE SCHOOL!!!  :-)

Here are the PDF links for the recipe book if you would like to print it out.  I know I have gotten a lot of resources from other blogs (letting other moms do the work) so I decided it was now my time to make a resource available for other moms to have!!

(there are 2 steps per page below.  I cut them out to where each step was a single page.  I laminated each page and then bound them as a book with ribbon.

Parent's Note
Recipe Page 1
Recipe Page 2
Recipe Page 3
Recipe Page 4
Recipe Page 5
Recipe Page 6
Recipe Page 7



Banana Bread Recipe