Build Your Own Pizza (How to Entertain Children #2)

So, you have to not only find a project for six boys 5 to 9 years old, but you also have to provide them with a snack. How about combining the project and the snack? - build your own pizzas.

This is the idea I came up the final time I hosted a meeting for the fathers and sons YMCA Adventure Guides (formerly known as the Indian Guides). It's a father-son program where once a month there would be a meeting at a member's house. For every meeting, some creative group activity would be done. One year when I hosted, the project was making rubberband-powered spool cars. For 2013 it was pizza.

• Get Trader Joe's ready-made pizza dough. Each packet of dough can make three small pizzas
• Get a selection of pizza toppings. From Trader Joe's (mostly) I also bought shredded cheese, red sauce, white sauce, pesto, pepperoni, pancetta, mushrooms, chicken, spinach and red pepper. Place the toppings on the table where the pizza making will occur.
  
• Split each bag of pizza dough into three approximately equal pieces.
• With a rolling pin, roll each piece of dough into rectangle about 4" by 8".
• Place each piece of dough on its own sheet of parchment paper.

  

  Note regular and whole wheat pizza dough. The kids were not interested in the whole wheat.

  
  
• Pre-heat the oven.
• Give each child their own rectangle of dough and let them top it however they like.
• Put the pizzas on cookie sheets (a cookie sheet can take three of the pizzas).
• Bake as directed on the pizza dough bags.

Finally, for no particular reason, a squirrel eating an apple just outside our dining room as I was putting out everything for the pizza making: