The Hole Story of the Doughnut: Tasty History
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The Hole Story of the Doughnut is an intriguing title. My family loves doughnuts, but we knew nothing about the history behind the tasty treat. This book and related activities changed all of that.
Do your kids like doughnuts? Mine do! They ask for a trip to our local doughnut shop every single weekend. We don’t necessarily go that often, but that doesn’t stop them from asking.
I look for teaching opportunities anywhere I can find them. That is why I knew we needed a few doughnut activities when I saw The Hole Story of the Doughnut sitting on the shelf at my library.
The Hole Story of the Doughnut Activities
Read the story
The first step of any book and activity combination should be to actually read the story. This step is critical because it ties all of the activities together. The Hole Story of the Doughnut is a fairly short story about Captain Hanson, a sailor from the 1800’s who is credited with inventing the doughnut.
- Hardcover Book
Last update on 2026-10-02 / Affiliate links / Images from Amazon Product Advertising API
The author of The Hole Story of the Doughnut, Pat Miller, has a YouTube video of herself reading the book. This is a great alternative to reading it aloud yourself.
Make doughnuts
Making doughnuts was a lot of fun! We chose to use a gluten-free recipe and bake our doughnuts with a doughnut pan rather than fry them, like in the story, but that didn’t take away any of the fun.
This recipe from Paleomg.com is easy, quick, and delicious. We set up a doughnut topping station so everyone could choose their favorite toppings. We had frosting, chocolate chips, coconut flakes, caramel sauce, cinnamon and sugar, melted chocolate, and sprinkles.
The doughnuts themselves were healthy, but our toppings were definitely a treat.
This really didn’t take as long as I thought it would. I think this might be our new go-to weekend treat breakfast.
Related: Christmas Doughnut Bar
Compound word building
“Doughnut” might be one of the most delicious compound words in the English language.
In this activity, the kids combined two doughnut halves to build compound words. I printed out 10 doughnuts and then wrote both parts of a compound word on each one.
To make the activity self-checking, I wrote numbers lightly on the back of each doughnut. For example, on the butterfly doughnut, I wrote 1 on the back of both the “butter” and “fly” halves. Then, I laminated the doughnuts for extra durability. A child knows they have built the words correctly if the numbers on both halves match when they flip the cards over.
You can print these Doughnut templates at home. I left the doughnuts blank so you can customize the doughnuts with any compound words you choose.
Play doughnut shop
Opening a pretend doughnut shop is a wonderful way to practice math skills. I gave the kids a copy of the Doughnut Shop Menu and invited them to make play-dough doughnuts to match the menu.
We used play money to take turns ordering and making change. This is a fun way to practice addition, multiplication, subtraction, and money skills.
The Doughnut Shop Menu is available for you to download and print.
These materials are great even after your kids have read the story and completed the activities. I keep materials like this to add to my boredom-busting baskets.
These types of skills (compound words, homophones, money, etc.) often show up in our lessons, so it is handy to have materials ready to go for a little extra practice.
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