Exploring Corn

When we were at Darts Farm for our food origins trip, we picked up some ears of corn to have a good play with, and today was a great day for it! Daddy was home today, so we enjoyed some time doing it as a family.

 

It was a simple start, simply handing an ear of corn over and excitedly asking “what is it?!” and encouraging him to start pulling at the leaves so he could explore the different textures of the leaves and ‘discover’ the corn underneath it himself as he pulled away the layers.

Lots of sensations, the rough veins of the leaves and the great rustling noise of pulling back the leaves, the fine, slithering threads and the shiny, cobblestone corn tightly packed together.

“Weh-woh!”

He recognised it as the same vegetable he has eaten for dinner and had a good chomp.

We cut it into pieces, and put one good chunk of it into water so we could show him a piece of the same vegetable he had stripped cooking. We carefully let him give it a good prod in the water, then as it began spinning as the water starting boiling, we all watched in fascination! Corn dancing in water! How neat!

Squirrels little chicken joined us in our cooking corn observation, and we ended up having a few moments of good old fashioned family cockerel crowing. Many giggles ensued.

Once we finished cooking the corn, we introduced a different form of corn- dried corn for popping! We shredded some corn from the ear and put some popping corn beside it and described to Squirrel how they were the same, a concept we have communicated a lot recently, and the little sounds of acknowledgement and interest seemed to suggest he was on the same page as us. He helped us put some popping corn into a pan, then we all watched as it jumped and burst.

Same, same, samey-same!

We put the two parts of the corn together, and explored the cooked and the uncooked for differences! We found that the colours, textures and firmness were completely different!

We tried cutting them in half for Squirrel to explore further, and suddenly it became a puzzle! He spent some time lining it up where each part should be, stacking them and placing the centres back together before removing them again and investigating them closely.

We also did some taste testing between both the cooked and the uncooked, a great comparing game to look at the different sensory differences!

Homnomnom. He much preferred the cooked parts!
The cockerel soon joined him in more playing with all the different parts from the whole process.
Parts got matched up, bits got rolled in the leaves, cockerel made a nest in the stringy parts, and Squirrel munched through the popcorn.

We are very much enjoying doing this exploratory type of activity with many more vegetables throughout our harvest unit- especially pumpkins!

This post is for Unit 2, Autumn & Harvest.