Are you hesitant to let your child join you in the kitchen while you prepare family meals? Well, you might want to consider letting them help you once you see what a wide variety of skills your child can learn while cooking.
Cooking is a great way to improve your youngster’s motor skills because it involves a lot of complicated movements. However, even the youngest of toddlers can add ingredients, mix cold ingredients, use plastic knives and scissors to cut soft veggies and fruit and knead dough. All of these actions improve their motor skills and provide healthy fun.
If you allow your kids to be involved in the preparation of their meals and snacks, they will develop a better understanding of nutrition. They will learn about the value of eating whole foods instead of processed ones and know how to prepare their food from scratch. This childhood experience will help them gain the confidence to tackle more complicated meals in the future and even encourage them to consider cooking as a career.
Both cooking and baking require a lot of measuring weights and lengths and comparing different fractions. If you’re using foreign recipes, you might even need to convert measurements!
So, when spending time in the kitchen, your child will get plenty of opportunities to practice and learn math skills. Some recipes also require division or multiplication, especially if you want to make a meal for more or fewer people than originally intended.
You can also test and compare weight and volume if you have measuring cups and scales. While you can find all sorts of info on educational toys at Funtastic Toys, you can also let your kid into the kitchen and achieve even better results. Combination of educational toys and cooking will do wonders for your child’s math and logic skills.
The kitchen is almost like a little chemistry lab right in your home. For instance, you can easily create little experiments or talk about how baking powder and yeast make things grow and how temperatures make foods change and get safe to eat. This is something kids can take right to school and use in their chemistry classes.
Not many kids appreciate how much effort goes into preparing lunch or dinner and how much planning you need to do before and during food prep. If you let your kid into the kitchen, they will learn how to choose the right recipe, check for the ingredients, make a list for grocery shopping, wash, chop and mix foods in the correct order and set the stove (or watch you do it). It involves a lot of careful planning and time management which is an important skill they will cherish for the rest of their lives.
Safety and hygiene
Kitchens can be quite dangerous. There are drawers full of sharp tools, cupboards full of heavy pans and very hot surfaces that can seriously hurt a human.
So, the key is to teach your child how to be careful and responsible and take cooking seriously when handling dangerous items. Every parent is free to set the rules for what your kid can and can’t touch and do in the kitchen. Also, food prep hides many hygiene lessons as well—washing hands and food, peeling and handling meat and raw eggs.
Even if after you do everything right and follow the recipe to the T, you still need to wait for the meal to cook and cool before you can enjoy it. Patience and delaying of gratification will be something your kids will need to use in school, college and work.
If you ask a pro cook, they will tell you that cooking is a mixture between art and science—you need to be creative, but you also need to follow a lot of rules if you don’t want to ruin your meal. So, if you want to find one activity that will exercise your kids logical AND creative thinking, let them into the kitchen with you and watch as they learn and have so much fun.