I Can Taste (Jesus turns water into wine)

Same format as usual play activities relating to the story theme, this week the theme was "I Can Taste". We are still using the Tiddlywinks Blue Book, so our themes are set out and there are a wonderful selection of activity ideas in the book but I prefer to choose my ideas and then go and have look to see if there are any alternatives/ additions in the book that may be appropriate. This time (like often) we were pretty much on the same line.

Firstly milk shake cafe, this was perfect as we already had this up at home, a favourite activity!

There are some printouts that I created available on the TES Website (free joining), to support the role play.

I think I made more of an emphasis on the event being a wedding and provided some wedding dress up materials.

Including these flower girl posy rings, there's more on them at alljoinin blog

I downloaded the wedding march onto my iphone, but this was too quite and needed me to operate. I wish I had have used our mozart cube instead!

The trusty Mr Face, to particularly look at mouths.

Water play with jugs and cups, adding colouring during play for children to observe the change. Maybe use red like wine?

Juicing oranges (the orange theme on right entirely accidental) We used a picnic knife to cut - this is serrated enough to cut orange but not skin (I hope!) I placed the juicers onto non slip kitchen mats, to support little hands.

We made Banana Milk shake (VERY SIMPLY), and here is the recipe I created. It got rather wet afterwards from a spilt drink hence the state in the picture.

We actually used sweetened soya milk so we didn't need any extra sweetener. But if you were using cows milk or unsweetened maybe you would, or maybe add some banana yoghurt. This went down SOOO well!

For one of our response options we decorated cakes, like they may have at a wedding (another opportunity to talk about taste, weddings, and changes). It actually ended up that all the children wanted to decorate cakes and we didn't do any other response activity as we ran out of time, probably because we spent sooooo looooong tasting our orange juice and milk shake in the circle time (didn't anticipate that being so successful). Note I used these silver spoon icing tubes (I was very busy that weekend and was doing everything to make my life easier and it was 3-4-2 offer), not entirely brilliant for little hands they required rather intense squeezing!

I will follow up with how I chose to tell the story shortly