I am neither a baker nor a teacher. I am a mom and like so many people, I am trying to work full-time while making sure my kids learn something or just have a shorter #CovidSlide. When my kids were doing this on frickin’ day 3 before 10am, I knew I had to try to do something different or else none of us would survive.

I’ve been wanting to try Mark Bittman’s No-Knead Bread recipe but never had the time or true motivation. Funny how children literally bouncing off the walls will focus the mind.

I decided to put off working for a while and start making the No-Knead Bread with my 8 year old. It was surprisingly easy! The hands-on time is only about 20 minutes; all the rise time takes around 20 hands-free hours. We had fun making the recipe and I managed to incorporate a tiny bit of learning into the process.

Science: What is yeast? How does it work? Where does it come from?

Math: Have your child do the measurements and figure out how to get to 1 and 5/8 cups of water for the first step. We drew a little diagram split into 8 parts and filled in 5 to get a visual of 5/8ths and then figured out which measuring cups we needed to use.

Telling Time: We’re working on helping our daughter to be able to tell both digital time (“One-twenty-five”) and analog time (“Twenty-five after one” or “fifteen to six”). We used the many rise opportunities in the recipe to work on telling time: What is time is 18 hours from now? 15 minutes from now? 2 hours from now, and so on.

Much to my delight, the bread came out beautifully and it tasted delicious! You can check out this short video below that shows our process and yummy results!