Felt Pizza

Sweet Pea is 29 months old.

From: I was inspired by this cute felt pizza described on The Adventures of Bear blog.  Mine is not nearly as pretty as hers, but it does have the advantage of not requireing a sewing machine.  🙂

Material:

• Several pieces of  felt that resemble colors in a pizza (tan, red, cream, white, gray, green, brown, etc).
• Scissors.
• Bowls.
• Large Spoon.

Procedure:

• Cut the largest circle possible out of tan colored felt for the crust.
• Cut a circle out of red felt  that is just slightly smaller than the crust for the sauce.
• Cut a slightly smaller circle out of cream colored felt for the cheese.
• Cut a variety of pizza toppings from the remaining colors of felt:  Small green squares for green pepper, brown lumps for sausage, thin white strips for onions and gray for mushrooms, etc.
• Put each of the toppings in a separate bowl and set everything out for your tot.
• Tell your tot that you are going to be making a pizza and then help walk them through each of the steps.  (i.e. “We’re going to start with the crust….”)
• When you get to the toppings, demonstrate placing them one at a time on the pizza.
• After the pizza has been created, pretend to bake it and/or eat it.

Observations: Sweet Pea loved this, although she had a lot of trouble with the concept of “one at a time” when we were putting on the toppings.  At first she liked to just grab a fistful of “onions” and dump them in one small pile on the pizza.  It was a good lesson to show her how to separate each item from the bowl and lay it on the pizza.

I loved how she “spread” the tomato sauce on the crust with the back of a spoon.

We both had lots of fun with this activity. At one point Sweet Pea tried roll up the pizza and pretended to eat it like a burrito.

After we had re-assembled the pizza a few times, I suggested that Sweet Pea “bake” it in her oven.  She loved doing this too.

I would recommend this activity for other tots.   Although it did take some preparation, it wasn’t difficult.  It took me about an hour to cut out the circles and toppings, although I’m sure it would have gone faster if I wouldn’t have been watching “So You Think You Can Dance?” at the same time.

Notes from the Trenches: I wish I would have drawn lines to divide the pizza into 6 or 8 slices and then talked about putting 1 of each topping on every slice.  It would be a great one-to-one correspondence activity, and I might modify my pizza to do something like that in the future.

Rating: 3 Stars * (Fun, Independent, Frugal if you have the felt, and pretty cheap even if you have to buy it.)