Teaching Together: 15 Bean Soup

I picked up a bag of 15 Bean Soup at the store because I thought Olive would really enjoy pretending to make her own soup.  She loves cooking with me and I wanted to give her a chance to cook for me.  The beans cost about $3 and provided HOURS worth of learning opportunities for her.  This teacher mama loved planning a fun preschool activity for home.

 I set everything up as an invitation for her to find.

She saw it sitting on the coffee table and her eyes lit up.

I told her it was for her so she dug right in.

 She immediately announced, "I baking soup!" and started scooping beans into her owl.  She was hesitant to try out the different spoons so I kept offering her a different one to try.  It was fun to see her figure out which spoons were best for scooping and which ones were troublesome.  She offered me some soup and warned me that "It's berry hot!" so I blew on it.  She wanted me to scoop beans with her and she kept saying, "Come on Mama!"  She ran to the kitchen to get herself a bib when she declared things were getting messy!  It was really entertaining to watch her learn.

Learning that took place:

We counted beans,

talked about size - bigger & smaller

colors

pretend play

trial and error with spoons

bury objects in the beans for her to find

talked about the different noises the beans made falling into glass vs. plastic

worked on fine motor skills 

and lots of imagination.

Olive is two and I think you could easily do this with older kids, too.

You could teach them about measuring, sizes, capacity and recipes.

 I guessed that this learning activity would grab her attention for 30 minutes or so.  Boy was I wrong!  She played with this for HOURS.  I had to make her stop for lunch and then the first thing she requested after her nap was her beans!  We made soup for several days straight and she had a blast.  She never tried to eat the beans and really didn't make much of a mess.  I put out a place mat for her and only found a few stray beans on the floor when we were done.

I plan to pull out the beans again and have her sort them into an ice try by color and by size, 

see how she'd transfer them to an egg carton, 

put them into containers with lids to make our own musical instruments

and talk about colors and try to find all 15 different beans.  

Can you think of any other learning activities we could do with our 15 Bean Soup?

Linking up with a brand new link up this week called Teaching Together