the giant jam sandwich

Remember this? My giant loaf of bread? This is why I made it:

The Giant Jam Sandwich by John Vernon Lord, 1975. This is a book I read a lot as a little girl. I loved the illustrations and was fascinated by the story. 

One hot summer in Itching Down,

Four million wasps flew into town.

They drove the picnickers away,

They chased the farmers from their hay,

They stung Lord Swell on his fat bald pate,

They dived and hummed and buzzed and ate,

And the noisy, nasty nuisance grew

Till the villagers cried, "What can we do?"

So the villagers decide that since wasps love jam, they would build a giant loaf of bread and spread strawberry jam on it and lure the wasps to the jam and as soon as they land the plan is to splat the top slice of bread down on top of the wasps, sticking them to the jam and smashing them inside.

The story ends with just three wasps getting away, and the birds carrying off the giant sandwich to "have a feast for a hundred weeks". In my opinion, this is a must have book for little children. Check it out for yourself at your local library in the children's picture books.

So onto the "meat" of this post. This was how we spent one of our recent dark rainy days indoors. We constructed a giant loaf of bread. I made luscious bread and put all of the dough, minus 2 regular sized loaves into a disposable roasting pan. The dimensions were approximately 15 X 11 and 4 inches deep. I think. If I ever do this again, I will go ahead and put all the dough in the roasting pan. I was worried about it being too much, but it could've definitely been a lot taller. I was worried about the temperature and the amount of time to cook it, but it was decided to keep it at the standard temperature given in the recipe, but cook it 15-20 minutes longer. I covered the top with tinfoil so that it wouldn't get too dark on top. It worked! It was one giant luscious loaf.

We didn't have our own homemade strawberry jam, but we used a GIANT bottle of organic strawberry jam from Costco. We spread a nice thick layer across a thick slice of our bread.

Luckily, the Dinoco chopper was on hand to help carry the top slice of bread that we would be "splatting" on top.

splat!

Mmmmm.

We were brainstorming what to do for wasps, and while browsing at the grocery store we found Honey Maid Honey Bees. Perfect. So the flew in and landed on top of the bread. (the kids decided that they didn't actually want them to be inside the sandwich. Wimps.

I'm thinking these are some happy looking "wasps".

The kids loved their snack and they loved making the book come alive. We've done this with other books. It is a lot of fun. Here's some of the ones we posted about.

James and the Giant Peach

Tacky the Penguin

Matilda and How to Eat Fried Worms

While looking for images of the story, I found this homeschool list of activities for the Giant Jam Sandwich.