Monica, a former elementary school teacher, parent of a 2.5-year-old, and dear friend, turned us onto the idea of making butter in a jar. The process is simple and is a fun way to demonstrate to little ones what, exactly, butter is. It's actually pretty surprising even to adults: Shake heavy cream in a jar, wait as it whips, thickens, and separates into butter and buttermilk, drain the buttermilk several times, and press it out between a couple of cutting boards.
I've set up a
Flickr photo set with 12 images documenting the process with step-by-step instructions. Your child will be amazed and will never forget where butter comes from.
This post from the ZRecs Archives was originally published on March 16, 2007. Z was, geez, about two and a half. It was Christy who got us thinking about this post again.
What a fun looking project! I’m so glad you reposted it now that Ranger’s big enough to help.
This will be a fun summer project.
I thought it was “Make Your Own Peanut Butter”. This is cool. Thanks for sharing. :)
Isn’t it the coolest thing since sliced bread? At the very least it’s a cool thing to spread on sliced bread! I can see us doing this over and over. We’re going on vacation soon, and I’m sure that Ladybug is going to want to show her great-grandparents how this works! (Not that they don’t already know...)
So have you tried adding the salt in the beginning? I did this eons ago at Girl Scout camp but can’t remember if we added the salt at the beginning or end…