Thinking Thursdays: Pizza & pasta (Learning about Italy)

I started off rather excited about learning about Italy, since there were so many areas we could explore! But the week was a tough one with Junior J not eating or sleeping well, so we ended up doing only a couple of activities related to the books we read, but had loads of free play instead.

We did:

:: Watch videos of Vivaldi's Four Seasons (get the videos here), as well as a couple of videos of the group Stomp (like this one) to get across the idea of finding music in everyday sounds, and making music with everyday objects.

:: Have pasta parties, where Junior J had the happy problem of trying to be fair to his dinosaurs and giving them the same amount of pasta (a sort of introduction to division):

:: Make pizzas, both the play-food versions...

Junior J glued on various shapes cut out from construction paper.
These were then laminated and cut out as play food!

I smudged some brown ink at the edges to give it an "oven-baked" appearance... and we cut them into half, thirds and quarters, to introduce fractions to the boy.  The dinosaurs ate them all!

... as well as real edible ones:

Junior J kneading the dough with Papa.  He was waiting for his turn to do his own mini-pizza!

And of course, we also built our mini Venice which was promptly overrun by dinosaurs!