When my girls were younger they wanted to be involved as much as possible in pancake day. Everything from making the pancakes to having pancake races but they were just too young, so I came up with a craft idea for them to have fun and experience pancake day as much as possible. Even after the first time we made them they still have fun with their craft pancakes and we adapt the activities to be more age-appropriate.
The first task we had to undertake was to make the pancakes. This is really simple to do and can be adapted as needed depending on the age of the child or children making them.
You will need:
- Brown/beige felt
- Glitter [optional]
- Coloured felt
- Scissors
- Glue
- Cut circles out of the brown/beige felt in advance. These will be your pancakes, so they can be any size you want. I cut them to fit in the girls toy frying pan, so they were quite small.
- Cut out various shapes of the coloured felt. These will be the toppings for the pancake. It is up to you if you want to cut out these shapes or if you would like your child to. The shape and size of these are entirely up to you. We had yellow strips for cheese, pink strips for ham, red circles for jam, purple circles for berries.
- Give the child/ren the circle felt and some glue and let them decorate their pancakes with the coloured felt pieces. We also sprinkled glitter on ours to look like sugar but how you decorate the pancakes is up to you and your child. Glitter is optional.
- The girls cooked their pancakes with their toy frying pans on their play oven. If you do not have either don’t worry. It was nice for my girls to do this as they felt like they had cooked their own pancakes but not essential to the making of the pancake.
- The girls could then practise flipping pancakes over their toy cooker.
Relax and prepare for labour from the comfort of home, suitable for all levels. Includes breathing techniques to assist in labour & postures to release tension.
The whole craft activity actually costs very little, as it is glue and felt. Felt can be found in most craft shops or online. We made these pancakes 6 years ago and still have them and the girls still play with them in their toy kitchen.
After making your toy pancakes they can then be used for a variety of pancake related fun games. The first is flipping pancakes.
The girls each had a toy frying pan and would flip the pancake and try and catch it in the pan again. This is great to encourage hand-eye coordination and is lots of fun too. They would also count how many they could do and we could talk about one more and encourage taking turns. There are other words you can use such as it is upside down or the right way up, or it landed behind you or in front of you. These can all tie into the current topics a child might be learning at school.
Our favourite game to play though was pancake racing. The girls would each take one of their pancakes they had made and place them in their toy frying pans. We would start at one end of the room and after a countdown they would run to the other end of the room flipping pancakes as they went. This was met in turn with lots of shrieks of laughter as their pancakes would inevitably end up flying around the room.
