Baking cookies and poems

I heard in the news this week that it is so hot this summer a woman in New Hampshire actually baked cookies on the dashboard of her car! She placed two trays of cookie dough on the dashboard of her car while the outside temperature was in the high 90’s, but the temperature inside the car was around 200 degrees. Voila! Fresh baked cookies. She said that an extra benefit was how wonderful her car smelled afterward.

I was reminded of a fun poem I have often used with kids entitled, "Nutty Chocolate Cookies” by Pauline Watson. This is an actual recipe turned into a poem that has a strong rhythm, rhyme, and easy to follow sequence. Kids love to join in on the read aloud. In fact, I have found that you can even SING the poem to the tune of the old folk song, “She’ll be comin’ ‘round the mountain,” if you’re feeling really adventurous. (More on singing poems another time!) You’ll find the recipe-poem “Nutty Chocolate Cookies” in the wonderful resource book, THE POETRY BREAK, by Caroline Feller Bauer. I highly recommend her book for a multitude of creative ways to present poems to children.

So… find the poem, gather the ingredients, sing the poem, mix the cookies, and then bake them on the dashboard of your car! Eat the cookies and enjoy the poem all over again. What a fun summer memory that would be for kids.