Preschool-made Butter

This week our theme is "Old MacDonald's Farm". We will be learning about all sorts of different farm animals and what farmers do too. We just had a fun field trip on Friday to American West Heritage Center and got to visit all the new baby farm animals there. We held them and learned all about them - we had a blast. So we are following up with a fun week of what we have already learned on a real farm.

Can you guess that today we made our own butter! Today our emphasis was cows.....so milk and things that come from milk are an obvious choice!!

We put this activity in our messy table and the kids SHOOK and SHOOK and SHOOK!! I just put the Heavy Whipping Cream into little containers - baby food jars work nice or little tupperware containers. We had on some fun dancing music to make this a little more enjoyable at choice time.

Soon enough our Cream was becoming thicker and thicker. The kids kept asking, "Miss Chelsea, check mine, check mine! Is it butter yet?" When they are asking 5 seconds apart, the answer from the teacher will be, "Not yet, keep shaking - it will be soon".

As you are shaking, the cream will get very thick and hard to shake for a minute, then all of a sudden, the milk and cream will seperate and you will hear water sloshing around. When the kids heard this, they all thought our butter was ruined. But actually, it has just worked!!

After many tired little hands, and one tired teacher who actually had to do most of the shaking at the end ;) - we had BUTTER!! And some excited little preschoolers!!

So you'll want to pour that liquid out and then your butter will be ready! We spread ours on bread today for our snack, but you can spread it on Saltine crackers or other things. The kids LOVE IT!