Baking with my students has brought so much joy into our class community I thought I would share how I got this project up and running and how it is going now.
You will need:
Time and interest – I spent several hours testing recipes, finding machines and planning this project. The success of this project is in large part because I spent this time and believed I could get this done, I like baking and don’t mind getting messy in the kitchen. When I started this project, it was largely self funded, now that the kids are bringing home so many loaves of bread, it is not unusual for them to come to school with a bag of flour or another donation, additionally my principal and school district have been of tremendous support to me now that I have more boldly shared my work.
Bread machines – These are usually available at second hand stores. I didn’t pay more than $12 for any of my machines, I purchased 7 machines and of those 5 worked. The $80 I spent on those machines is what one machine costs new. You can test the machines by plugging them in and selecting a dough cycle, make sure the mechanism turns.
Flour – For a classroom of 18 students we are using about 15 lbs of flour a week. You can get a bulk bag at the grocery store or Costco or Sam’s club for $7 – $10.
A recipe – King Arthur Flour has never let me down with their recipes and we use them for most of our in school baking. Their Easy as can be Bread Machine recipe has become our signature recipe.
Other Ingredients – Of course you need all the other ingredients for your recipe. We use about a pound of butter a week ($3), sugar ($2) a regular bag will last you a while, bulk yeast ($7), milk and water.
Measuring cups and spoons – I bought several sets. ($3 – $4 each).
Oven mitts – I also bought sets of these. ($12 for 8 mitts)
Procedure:
Week 1: Bake, bake bake! I was fortunate enough to have a reduced class size on our first day of baking, so everyone baked a bread and took it home, with my second group I was able to have half the group bake one day and the other half bake the next.
Week 2: Bake some more, and look for new recipes too. I contacted my local librarian and they helped me check out a variety of cookbooks for kids and books about bread, we started a bread brainstorming board where kids added their bread ideas to it. Students were offered the choice to bake either cinnamon raisin bread or basic. Additionally we looked at the surplus of cheese sticks from breakfast and wondered if we could make a bread out of them.
Week 3: Prototype some ideas to share our bread with our community. While we continued to bake and bake, this week it was a banana quick bread (thanks to a family who donated 60 bananas for us, also a great math lesson). We loved our bread so much that the kids wanted to start sharing it with other teachers at our school. I collected every cardboard box I could get my hands on to support this.
Week 4: Prototype and virtual field trip. This was a busy week for us, the students were busy creating a variety of prototypes, we continued to bake, creating a garlic bread to use the cheese sticks, and we took a virtual field trip to a bread company to see how they operate. The read aloud in this activity inspired us to make pretzels as a class.
Week 5: An interview and a great read aloud! We read Frybread: A Native American Family Story by Kevin Noble Maillard. We also interviewed bakers who are opening a new bakery in our town, after reading an article about them in the paper I reached out to them and they were gracious enough to lend us some of their time.
View this post on Instagram
The next few weeks: As our class came together for full time face to face learning, the students have gained more agency in their bread baking, becoming more comfortable and confident in baking by themselves. I have “hired” a few baking managers who schedule the bakers for the day and make sure everyone gets to bake one loaf every week. I also hired some inventory managers to notify me when the supplies are running low. I have, through donations, acquired 6 more working machines and these managers helped me label all of the machines and buckets. Another elementary school in our district is going to help us turn our prototypes into reality, we have a bread cart and spice rack coming our way. We have made 2 tutorials and will be sharing them with another class at school, they are borrowing some machines and giving baking a try as part of their writing unit. Of course, we continue to bake and bake and bake, we left for spring break at 147 loaves baked! Stay tuned, we have some exciting things planned for April and May!
If you start your own bread project let me know about your successes!
Comments are disabled.