Making Butter

A couple weeks ago, we read How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World by Marjorie Priceman.

We used our Five in a Row lessons along with a few from Homeschool Share. In the story, a little girl wants to make an apple pie but the local market is closed, so she travels the world to find the best ingredients. She went to Italy for wheat, France for eggs, Sri Lanka for cinnamon, England for milk to make butter & several other interesting locations.

Along with working on our map skills, taste-testing different kinds of apples,

and baking our very own apple pie,

we also made our own BUTTER!

I started by filling two jars half-way with heavy whipping cream. I made sure the lids were sealed TIGHT. While the girls shook them and rolled them and turned them this way and that, we talked about milk & butter & how our grandparents and great-grandparents used to make butter. They decided this way was much easier and much more fun. In the jars above, you can see they had been shaking for a while. The cream went from thick liquid to creamy like pudding to a big lump in watery milk. That’s butter!

Here, we poured the contents of the jar into a strainer with a clean bowl underneath. The photo below shows the buttermilk that was strained off. DH used it later to make biscuits.

After adding just a pinch of salt, here is the finished product–BUTTER! And it was delicious!

For more kid-friendly ideas, click here.