On the week leading up to the Easter weekend, we practised making hot cross buns. This was quite a process and took us all day.

First we had to mix the yeast with milk, sugar and flour. Kaiako Rie explained to ngā tamariki that yeast makes the dough grow bigger when heat is added. We could start to see this work when we added warm milk to the yeast and watched it get frothy.

Tamariki then took turns rubbing butter into the flour. After adding the yeast mixture to the dry ingredients, tamariki did some more mixing to make a dough and left this in a warm place to rise. Everyone was surprised to see how much bigger the dough now was. Luckily this was put into a bigger bowl!

Everyone had fun punching the dough (that’s what the recipe said to do) and then we rolled this into small balls. More waiting as the buns rose, luckily just in time to get cooked before home time!

Lots of opportunities for tamariki to work collaboratively, practise waiting and to kōrero about what they were doing and what was happening.