Cooking With Kids

What fun activity with your child encourages fine motor skills, science, counting, fractions, measuring, weighing, budgeting, problem-solving, language, and reading? Cooking with your child improves all these skills plus many more!

Cooking with your child requires extra patience, time and cleaning but it teaches an essential life skill while still being fun. It also lets you spend great quality time that your kids will remember for a long time.

Teaching children to cook is a lost art these days.  I just finished reading the Little House on the Prairie books with our children.  They enjoyed learning how the children in the book helped their parents during that time and how the mother taught them to cook.

While learning to cook, kids feel like they are helping to contribute to the family and it is a great way to get them to try healthy foods that they might not normally try.  Studies have shown that kids that help prepare dinner are much more likely to try the healthy foods they cook.  Cooking is a great way to learn about nutrition and what ingredients really go into our meals...for instance, the kids are amazed when they see how much sugar goes into some of the desserts.

The first step is to choose a time when you will not feel rushed and pick the right recipe and right tasks for your little helpers.  You do not want the recipes to be too complicated or for your child to feel your stress when you are on a time limit.

It will help if you do some of the prep work ahead of time to prevent boredom.  A key is to allow them to do their task with assistance from you only when necessary.  Even if this means having to pick the egg shells out of the eggs after they are done!

Finally, safety is always the most important aspect when working with kids.  Make sure to stress safety in the kitchen (never touch a hot stove or hot pot, don't pick up a knife unless the child is old enough to handle it safely, etc).  It may also be helpful to have another adult or older teenager in the kitchen with you to help watch the child.

Cooking is a great way to both entertain and teach your children at the same time.  Just make sure you learn to laugh when they make a mess.  After all, teaching them to clean after themselves is also just as important.