Are you looking for a cool tasty summer treat that you can do with your pre-schoolers? This is a fun one that encourages them to eat fruit and teaches them about our country’s colors.
I enjoyed doing this project with my children because it was hands-on, but had nothing they could hurt themselves on. Plus, they get to eat the results, they had fun learning about colors, and they could use sprinkles!
For this project you will need white chocolate and fresh strawberries. You can use frozen strawberries but they get a little mushy when they defrost and they really don’t work as well. If you live in an area where you can’t find fresh ones, you can go ahead and try it with frozen ones. But if you have the opportunity use fresh ones you should definitely do that. Try to get nice big ones so they fit well in the kid’s little hands; they’ll be able to hold onto them better that way.
White chocolate chips will be on the baking aisle, right near to the regular chocolate chips. They look just like chocolate chips except they are literally white. They still taste like chocolate; different than milk chocolate, but still a good taste.
You should melt your white chocolate chips in a double boiler if you have one. If you don’t have a double boiler use can use a small bowl sitting in a sauce pan with water in the sauce pan and the chips in the bowl above it. You will let the water boil and just keep stirring the chips. The heat from the boiling water underneath them the bowl will heat the chocolate. If you have access to a microwave you can put the chips in microwave safe bowl, and microwave them about every 15 seconds, stirring them in between. Don’t run them longer that 15 seconds in a row, because they can start to scorch and burning chocolate smells really, really awful.
Once your chocolate is melted, put it in a regular cereal bowl because the bowl that you melted it in is going to be very, very hot and you don’t want the children to touch that. The chocolate itself won’t seem terribly hot after the first couple of minutes, but it will still be warm enough to work with. It still will be pretty liquidy.
Have the kids hold the strawberries. If they have a stem on them they can hold them by the stem, otherwise you might want to use toothpicks or BBQ skewers. Those little wooden sticks like you use for shish-ka-bob work well, too. Anything like that to help them hold onto it. You can even use a plastic fork, if you push it kind of sideways through the top of the strawberries, so that the kids will be able to dip the bottoms in without getting the forks messy.
Have them dip the strawberries about 2/3 of the way down. (This is a great opportunity to talk about math!) Then, while the white chocolate is still wet have them roll them in blue sugar sprinkles. That way they have red strawberries, white stripes from the white chocolate, and blue from the sprinkles. Red, white and blue!
If the kids just wave them around a little bit in the air, the chocolate will start to harden right away and then they should be able to set them down without smearing them. If they still seem a little bit wet try setting them down on wax paper. The white chocolate won’t adhere very well to the wax paper and once they are totally dry you’ll be able to peel them up.
You can do a whole batch of Patriotic Strawberries and save them for a family picnic or you can eat them right as you do them. Either way it’s a fun treat, the strawberries are good for them, a little sugar treat isn’t too bad for them, and it’s a fun Fourth of July project that your kids will enjoy and remember doing with you.
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