Last post I wrote about Camp Rainbow, our loosely-gathered group of parents and kids who get together for themed fun during the summer. (Click HERE for that post.) During the "Careers and Jobs" theme last week, we decided to meet for lunch at Your Pie, a small chain pizzeria where they make personal-sized pizzas while you watch. After everybody ordered, we read aloud the non-fiction picture book Pizza Man by Marjorie Pillar (from our local library).
I called a couple of days in advance and asked if the kiddos might have a tour. The Your Pie staff were fabulous! They let the kids peek behind the counter and into storage areas, explaining how a restaurant works and answering their questions.
We lifted the kiddos up so they could see into the huge brick oven...
They even experienced the cold of the walk-in fridge.
Then the staff got out some extra dough and let the kids work with it. First the kiddos got to help hand-mix the bowl of semolina and fine cornmeal that keeps the pizzas from sticking.
The kids even got to try their hand at shaping and hand-tossing dough!
After leaving Your Pie, the group headed back to our place where we had a make-believe pizza kitchen set up for play. Here's our brick oven -- a cardboard box with a couple of red light sticks at the back. And the folks at Your Pie were so nice to give us some clean pizza boxes.
One of the moms cut circles of cream-colored quilted fabric to serve as crusts. (She even made them into four slices each and hemmed them!) Dark red fabric cut into wedges with pinking shears were pizza sauce to go on top.
Other moms helped cut toppings out of felt -- pepperoni, black olives, sausage, green pepper strips, pineapple pieces, and tomato slices.
(The mom who made the pineapple and tomatoes really knocked it out of the park. She added large stitches of embroidery thread for the pineapple and then glued together two layers/colors of felt for the tomatoes, trimming shapes out of the top layer with tiny scissors. She said she found lots of instructions for felt food on the web.) Not pictured: Small strips of cream-colored felt worked for shredded cheese.
In addition to the pizza kitchen (pictured above), we had a call center with a toy cash register, play money, and some check-box pizza order forms I created on my computer. We also had a real (but non-working) phone and a couple of computer keyboards that I found at Goodwill.
Even with a malfunctioning chef's hat, Eli was a happy Pizza Man!
Thanks, friends. And thanks, Your Pie!
One Mama's Two Cents:
Our pizza day felt like a real success. Book + tour + play = learning.
The play session got chaotic sometimes and the moms were kept busy deconstructing pizzas to refill the ingredient bins, but everybody had a great time. I think part of the success was that each mom talked to their kid(s) in advance about giving the pizza parlor game a try. The moms agreed that we'd try to keep the kids on task for ten minutes. After that, kids who were less interested could quietly drift downstairs to the playroom. (In preparing for the afternoon, I hid most of the other toys in our upstairs area but also locked the door to Eli's bedroom.) Most of the kids played for at least a half hour and some were still at it when folks had to disperse to head home. We had seven kids (ages 3 to 11), and that was a good number. If we do similar playdays in the future and our group has grown, we may have to limit it (first-come, first-served reservations) just to make sure it doesn't get too chaotic.
We've saved our pizza-making pieces so we can do the pizza parlor again later this summer. Once the summer is over, each family can take a pizza box and fabric fixings to play at home.
I think it was novel and fun for the kids to have a make-believe game created and set up by the parents. Usually kids either get a store-bought type of play set or create their own play set on the fly. The latter is fantastic and the way it should be most of the time! We certainly let the kids adjust things the way they wanted in the home pizza parlor. Still, what stood out about our pizza game is that this time the mamas modeled play ideas for the kiddos. It was refreshing fun for everybody.
Note: The idea for the home pizza parlor came from the Boonshoft Discovery Center in Dayton, OH. Click HERE for a blog post about it.
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