Ideas and resources
The kids are going to love playing with this homemade floam and it is so easy to make. You will need Borax which I know is a little hard to find in some countries. Once you find all your ingredients you can use the extra supplies to make a ton of other play materials like slime or homemade bouncy balls.
Or try this one – easy slime recipe with a thick, putty-like, sticky slime oozes its way out of simple materials you probably have at home.
When my daughter was young she loved the PBS show “Peg + Cat,” and if you’ve got a fan of that show in your house this activity will be even better, but it doesn’t matter if your kids don’t already know these characters to learn about fractions with pizza.
There’s an episode of “Peg + Cat” where they are working in a pizza place and have to divide pies to put different kinds of toppings of different parts of the pie (there’s also an online game with the same concept, which I can’t believe still exists because my kiddo played it years ago).
Inspired by the episode and a companion book, Nature Homeschool developed an activity for learning about fractions and entrepreneurship using pizza. They developed a pizza shop and used the printables and teaching guide from Teacher Vision to learn more about fractions using pizza as the foundation. Their post also has a pizza order form printable you can use when you role play a pizza shop.
The Inspiration Edit also has some cute printable worksheets using a pizza to learn about fractions. And Life Over Cs has some fun printable pizza fraction activities, such as the printable fraction memory game shown here.
If you want to increase the pretend play factor with this one, you can make a pizza and toppings out of paper, cardboard or felt. Or use a paper plate as your crust and simple shapes cut out of paper to be toppings. The pretend play pizza making kit from Glued to My Crafts uses an individual slice, but you could do the same thing with a whole pie’s worth of slices.
Kids Craft Room has another fun pizza play food idea, this time using salt dough for the crust. The toppings are made out of felt so you can practice putting different toppings on a fraction of the pizza and learn as you play.
Looks like fun. But using styrofoam makes this an environmental bugger. The styrofoam will be with us long after all of our kids grow up and their kids grow up… I applaud your diy attitude and hope you’ll use it to find another recipe.