Baking + Books = Kitchen Adventures! {Poppins Book Nook}

Here we are at the end of November. Can you even believe that 2014 is almost gone? Since it is November, it's also the last month of the year for Poppins Book Nook. We finished off a great year with the theme IN THE KITCHEN. This theme is a great one for this time of year, as I know I am in the kitchen much more often. This month we read some great books revolving around the kitchen and I had helpers assisting me bake some yummy things!

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At first I was a bit befuddled as to what books related to the kitchen. But as I started thinking about it, I decided that if the book was about food or the making of it played a dominate role, then it worked. I went to the library and just started browsing titles...there are quite a lot about food in the children's section, did you know that?! LOL! I stayed away from the obvious ones (Green Eggs and Ham and Stone Soup for example) and tried to venture into some new ones. 

Here are the books that we read over the course of the month:

Thunder Cake

by Patricia Polacco

Grandma consoles her frightened granddaughter by telling her that the dark clouds of the impending storm are nothing more than the ingredients for a Thunder Cake. 

This is a great book to use with a day in the kitchen! The colors of the illustrations are fun and the story is interesting. My boys enjoyed it very much and laughed at some of the unusual ingredients. There is a recipe in the back for making your own Thunder Cake, and there is a great lapbook available for you to use with it.

How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World
by Marjorie Priceman

An apple pie is easy to make...if the market is open. But if the market is closed, the world becomes your grocery store. This deliciously silly recipe for apple pie takes readers around the globe to gather ingredients. 

We love this book! It is so much fun to travel the globe and seek the different ingredients in this book. The illustrations are so beautiful! We like using our globe and finding the different places that she travels. The favorite though is Sri Lanka. The boys loved learning about cinnamon. It's one of our favorite spices in general. We examined some cinnamon sticks and tried to think of it as bark on trees.

This book is also part of the Five In A Row program which we have done in the past. This means there are a LOT of resources for it, including various lapbooks and activities which you can easily find with a search on Pinterest.

The Gingerbread Man
by Karen Schmidt

Run Run Run, Fast As you Can...Can't Catch Me, I'm the gingerbread man!

Everyone knows this book! But it was a fun one to read to Baby Britches for the first time. He loved being able to sing the chorus with me. We are going to be making some gingerbread men once I have found a good recipe. I really want to have one that works like sugar cookies, but tastes like ginger or molasses. I'm still looking around. If you happen to know of a great one to use, please link it up in the comments for me!

A Tangle of Knots
by Lisa Graff

In a slightly magical world where everyone has a Talent, eleven-year-old Cady is an orphan with a phenomenal Talent for cake baking. But little does she know that fate has set her on a journey from the moment she was born and it might end in peanut butter cupcakes.

I included this great chapter book because the main character is a hard core baker and spends a lot of the time planning out cakes and cake flavors for people. There is also a secret recipe for the worlds best peanut butter on the loose. I desperately wanted to eat cake after reading this book! There are even cake recipes in the back of the book for some of the fun flavors mentioned in the book.

Cranberry Thanksgiving
by Wendy Devlin

Every year Grandmother invited a guest for Thanksgiving dinner and allowed Maggie to do the same. "Ask someone poor or lonely," she always said. Thanksgiving was Grandmother's favorite day of the year. The cooking was done and her famous cranberry bread was cooling on a wooden board. But she wasn't happy to find out Maggie had invited the unsavory Mr. Whiskers to dinner. Would her secret cranberry bread recipe be safe with him in the house? 

This book is a tradition for us for this time of year. It's just such a fun story and the boys love it while I read it out loud. We did a great cranberry themed unit using the Cranberry Thanksgiving lapbook unit from homeschoolshare.com. One of the funnest things is doing bouncing cranberry tests. Have you done those before? We also tasted them. We discovered we aren't huge fans. Reading this book was a great time to re-watch our cranberry farm videos from Curiosity Quest. I think that this week, we will try making some cranberry bread like the book.

We had fun in the kitchen this month making various goodies...Baby Britches helps me more than Little Britches in the kitchen.

My best homemade biscuits recipe

The first three layer cake I ever made began here...

And it ended beautifully here

I was tickled to death to have adventures in baking this month. This three layer cake was the best and tasted so incredibly good. It was my biggest baking adventure yet! This cake recipe is the BEST--and I mean THE BEST and very old fashioned in taste.

It's fun to mix books with the kitchen. There are SO many books out there all about food or baking or spending time in the kitchen! I hope you will check out a few of these!

Feed Our Small World:A Cookbook for Kids Giveaway! 

Every month the Poppins Book Nook group will be offering readers a chance to win a brand new storybook or product that ties in with our theme for the month. This month one lucky entrant will win a copy of the book Feed Our Small World: A Cookbook for Kids for the theme of To The Kitchen!

Entrants must be 18 years or older and reside in a country that receives U.S. Postal mail. This giveaway is brought to you by the company Enchanted Homeschooling Mom who is owner and founder of the Poppins Book Nook. By entering this giveaway you are also acknowledging that you have read and agree to all of the Rafflecopter terms and conditions as well as Enchanted Homeschooling Mom's disclosures found here {http://enchantedhomeschoolingmom.org/disclosures/}.

Just enter the Rafflecopter below to win:
a Rafflecopter giveaway

The wonderful bloggers that participate in the Poppins Book Nook are:

Enchanted Homeschooling Mom ~ 3 Dinosaurs ~ To the Moon and Back ~ Planet Smarty Pants ~ Farm Fresh Adventures ~ Growing in God's Grace ~ Chestnut Grove Academy ~ Learning and Growing the Piwi Way ~ The Usual Mayhem~ Preschool Powol Packets ~ Monsters Ed Homeschool Academy ~ Adventures in Mommydom ~Teach Beside Me ~ Life with Moore Babies ~ Kathy's Cluttered Mind ~ Are We There Yet? ~ Our Crafts N Things ~Hopkins Homeschool ~ ABC Creative Learning ~ Joy Focused Learning ~ P is for Preschooler ~ My Bright Firefly ~A Mommy's Adventures ~ Inspiring 2 New Hampshire Children ~ World for Learning ~ Ever After in the Woods ~Golden Grasses ~ A glimpse of our life ~ Journey to Excellence ~ Happy Little Homemaker ~ Little Homeschool Blessings ~ Raventhreads ~ Tots and Me ~ As We Walk Along The Road ~ Stir the Wonder ~ For This Season ~Where Imagination Grows ~ The Canadian Homeschooler ~ School Time Snippets ~ Peakle Pie ~ A Moment in our World ~ Every Bed of Roses ~ Finchnwren ~ At Home Where Life Happens ~ The Library Adventure ~ Embracing Destiny ~ Day by Day in our World ~ Our Homeschool Studio ~ A Peace of Mind ~ Thou Shall Not Whine ~ SAHM I am  ~ Simple Living Mama

Have you written about ways you used books and cooking? Maybe you enjoyed exploring a cookbook with your family? Please feel free to link up this month:

An InLinkz Link-up

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Thanks for joining us this month! We will be taking December off to enjoy more time with our families, but don't forget to join us again in January for a new year and another book club theme!