Baking Bread With Children: The Waldorf Bread Day at Home

Pick one morning a week for bread and keep to it. Mix the dough while your child watches or helps, then give them a small ball to knead. Shape rolls together, leave them to rise while your child plays, and bake them in time for snack. A toddler can tip and stir, a kindergarten child can knead and shape, and by grade 3 your child can do the weighing too. The waiting while the dough rises is part of it, not something to hurry.

Why Waldorf families bake bread every week

Walk into a Waldorf kindergarten on bread day and you'll often smell it before you see it. A bowl of dough sits under a cloth while the children play. Later they sit at the table with a lump each, pushing and folding. By snack time the rolls come out of the oven, a little lopsided, and the children eat what they made.

Waldorf kindergarten teachers do real work like baking in front of the children, because young children learn by imitating it. Bright Water Waldorf School describes its teachers sweeping, mending and cooking so the children can join in. The Denver Waldorf School bakes every week for snack, so the children see how their food is made and have a hand in shaping it. At Ashwood Waldorf School in Maine, the children know the days of the week by their food: rice day, soup day, bread day. The names of the days are abstract to a 4-year-old. A day that smells of bread isn't.

At home, the same thing works. Bread day becomes one of the fixed points of your week, like the painting day or the washing day. Our guide to the Waldorf daily rhythm shows how one activity per weekday sits on top of the same daily shape.

What the hands learn

The Steiner Connection, a Waldorf teacher's site, describes kneading as work for the whole hand. Your child pushes into something that pushes back, and slowly learns how much pressure the dough needs. Squeezing makes a sticky mess. A steady push and fold makes it smooth.

The Waldorf School of Cape Cod adds a few more: measuring is early number work, a recipe is a sequence of steps to follow, and two rises ask for patience. Kimberton Waldorf School calls bread-making a human activity that connects us to the earth, and notes that to a young child it's all play.

None of this needs explaining to your child. They just bake.

A simple bread recipe for baking with children

This is a plain yeasted dough made from standard proportions. It forgives a lot of small hands and bakes well as rolls.

For about 12 small rolls:

• 500 g (about 4 cups) strong white bread flour, or half white and half wholemeal
• 1 teaspoon salt (about 8 to 10 g)
• 1 sachet (7 g, or 2¼ teaspoons) instant or active dry yeast
• 1 tablespoon honey
• 2 tablespoons olive oil or sunflower oil
• about 300 ml (1¼ cups) warm water, warm to the inside of your wrist

How to make it:

1. Wake the yeast. Stir the honey into the warm water and sprinkle the yeast over. Leave it a few minutes until it froths. Your child can watch the bubbles come.
2. Mix. Put the flour and salt in a big bowl. Pour in the yeast water and the oil and stir with a wooden spoon until it comes together. Add a little more flour if it clings to everything, or a splash more water if it's dry.
3. Knead. Tip the dough onto a floured table and knead for about 10 minutes, until it's smooth and springs back when you poke it. Do the sticky first few minutes yourself.
4. First rise. Put the dough back in the bowl, cover it with a damp cloth and leave it somewhere warm. It usually takes 30 to 60 minutes to about double.
5. Shape. Knock the air out gently and cut the dough into about 12 pieces. Everyone shapes their own.
6. Second rise. Set the rolls on a lined tray with space between them, cover and leave for 15 to 30 minutes.
7. Bake. Bake at about 200°C (400°F) for 15 to 20 minutes, until golden and hollow-sounding when tapped underneath. Let them cool for 10 minutes before anyone bites in.

Several Waldorf kindergarten recipes follow this same shape. Kimberton's bread buns, for example, rise for 30 to 60 minutes, then rise again as shaped buns before a short bake.

What each age can do on bread day

Your child's part grows with them. You stay at the oven at every age.

Toddlers (about 2 and 3)

Let them tip a cup of flour into the bowl, stir, and watch the yeast bubble. Give them a ball of kneaded dough to pat, poke and punch. Child of the Redwoods, a homeschooling site, lists much the same for toddlers: dumping the yeast in, stirring the dry ingredients, mashing and punching the dough. Five minutes of this is plenty.

Kindergarten (about 4 to 6)

This is the age of the Waldorf bread day proper. The Steiner Connection describes the adult kneading the dough first, then breaking off a small ball for each child and showing the kneading with their own hands while everyone sings. Your child can:

• knead their own ball
• roll it into a snake, a snail, a round roll or a little knot
• press in a few seeds or make a pattern with a fork
• set the table while the rolls bake

For songs, the Steiner Connection mentions "Pat-a-Cake" and "Hot, Brown Loaf" from Shea Darian's book Seven Times the Sun. Any rhyme you both know will do, as long as it's the same one each week.

Grades 1 and 2 (about 6 to 8)

Your child can count spoonfuls, pour the water, and knead for longer. Try a three-strand braid: roll three snakes, pinch them together at one end and plait. It's the same over-and-under your child may already know from finger knitting or plaiting hair.

Grade 3 (about 8 and 9)

Now your child can weigh the flour, measure the water and mix the whole dough, with you close by. Bread fits the grade 3 year well. It's the classic thread of the farming block, where your child follows wheat from the field to the table. It's also a natural end to the measurement block: 500 grams in their own bowl means more than a page of sums. At Ashwood, the grade 3 children visit farms and plant the school garden, and the younger classes grind wheat into flour for bread. If you can find wheat berries, grind a handful with a pestle and mortar and add it to the dough. Our grade 3 curriculum guide shows where these blocks sit in the year.

A bread morning, hour by hour

Bread takes most of a morning, but only about 30 minutes of it is hands-on. Child of the Redwoods puts it the same way: most of a day on the calendar, half an hour of actual work. Here's one way to fit it round an ordinary morning:

• 8:45 Mix the dough after breakfast. Cover it and set it somewhere warm.
• 9:00 Morning circle and the rest of your usual morning.
• 9:45 Knead your child's ball together. Shape the rolls.
• 10:15 Rolls rise while your child plays outside.
• 10:30 Into the oven. Tidy the table together and sweep up the flour.
• 10:50 Snack: warm rolls with butter.

If the dough is slow, let it be slow. A cool kitchen can double the rising time, and the rolls still bake. Dough can also rise overnight in the fridge if your mornings are short.

Keeping it safe

The US Food and Drug Administration says raw flour can carry harmful bacteria, and that only baking makes it safe to eat. It advises not letting children taste raw dough or use it as play clay. So:

• Wash hands with soap before you start and again when the dough goes in the oven.
• No licking fingers or nibbling the dough. Make it part of the song if you need to.
• Use cooked play dough for play. Bread dough is for baking.
• You do the oven, every time. Your child can watch through the glass.

Bread through the festival year

Once the weekly loaf is easy, let the bread follow the seasons. At Michaelmas many Waldorf families bake a dragon bread, and the Harvest festival calls for a loaf from new grain. Before Christmas, children can shape the dough into little wreaths or stars, and in spring there's May Day bread with a braid of flowers. The plain dough above works as the base for most of them. All the festivals, with their own recipes, are in the festival year.

If you're looking for more to do in the kitchen together, our article on cooking with children covers soup day, chopping and the tasks each age can take on.

Starpath's grade 3 Farming and Occupations block opens with a loaf of bread on the table and follows it back to the field. If you want the whole year planned out, our comparison of the best Waldorf homeschool curriculum for grade 3 sets the options side by side.

A week to try

• Monday: buy flour and yeast together. Let your child carry the bag.
• Tuesday: tell a short story about a grain of wheat in a field.
• Wednesday: bread day. Mix, knead, shape and bake rolls for snack.
• Thursday: use the last rolls for lunch, with butter or soup.
• Next Wednesday: do it again, the same way. By the third week, your child may start getting the bowl out before you ask.