Worksheets do not have to be boring! Although we started our unit study on Rocks and Soil with a few worksheets, I decided to add an extra bit of sweet fun at the end of our unit, which included a baking lesson (as baking is a Science after all) with this layers of the soil cake!
We baked a basic sheet cake which I divided into two so each of the boys would have his on piece of “soil”to decorate.
Easy Peasy Quick Cake Recipe
1 1/2 cups self-raising flour
1 tsp baking powder
pinch of salt
3/4 cup sugar
2 eggs
1/2 cup oil
1/2 cup milk
5ml vanilla essence
Preheat oven to 180 degrees. Mix dry ingredients. Beat eggs lightly and add oil, milk, vanilla essence. Add liquid to the dry ingredients and mix well. Spoon evenly into greased baking pan +- 30cm x 20cm x 5cm. Bake 20-25 minutes and cool completely before icing.
We iced the basic cake with different shades of brown icing sugar, caramel condensed milk, and ended with green icing at the top. The green represents the plant material and the very dark brown (add extra cocoa powder to your icing) the top soil. Cover cake completely with the different shades of icing before creating the “Soil” layers. To add texture, anything edible goes! We used different types of biscuits, broken into smaller pieces, Chrunchie chocolate, Whispers, Peppermint Crisp and Bar One. For the finishing touches, a few plastic insects rounded it off quite well. My youngest enjoyed giving the insects a bubbly “bath” first.
We made the tags with coloured popsicle sticks, cardboard and the trusted Prestik. Using Prestik instead of glue means we can use the sticks again and I’m a huge supporter of re-use and recycle! The Rocks and Soil Unit study is available from www.education.com
All in all it was a sweet success as they remembered the layers of soil when it came to question worksheets!
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