Making Pretzel "Sand"

One of G’s books (Shells! Shells! Shells! by Nancy Elizabeth Wallace) describes sand as tiny pieces of rocks and shells. When we were at the beach, G was looking at the sand, trying to picture the rocks and shells that were crushed down to form the tiny grains of sand in his hand. When we got back to the beach house, for our afternoon snack, I decided we could make pretzel sand. After we made the pretzel sand, we would roll pieces of banana in peanut butter, and coat it with the pretzels.

I got out our supplies- bananas, peanut butter, pretzels, ziplock bag, straws (to spear the bananas), and honey. As I set up, we talked about how the sand is formed – weather and waves wearing down rocks and shells; other rocks and shells pounding against the pieces, further breaking them down and polishing/smoothing out the grains. 

I cut up the bananas into about 2 inch chunks, cut the straws into 3 pieces each. Then I brought out the props – 2 big clam shells and 2 rocks we had picked up walking along the beach earlier that morning. I gave the kids each 1 clam shell and one rock and let them go crazy smashing the pretzels. Because we wanted to eat the pretzel fragments eventually, I didn’t use water as a way to break the pretzels, but, come to think of it, that might be a fun thing to try with the remaining pretzel crumbs.

They both had so much fun crushing the pretzels.  I even got in on some of the crushing action.

Once we had fairly small pretzel pieces, I laid out 3 plates- 1 each for pretzel pieces, peanut butter, and bananas.

I speared a banana with a straw…

Rolled it in peanut butter….

Rolled it in pretzel crumbs.

And then we enjoyed them! 

We also tried these later drizzled with honey and also frozen. Both were equally tasty!

G started out helping me roll the bananas, but he quickly decided that he would rather build banana sculptures using the cut up straw. His creation is below. He also decided that it would be fun to crush some banana with his rock.Turns out, banana becomes a lot mushier when squished than the pretzel did!