Cooking with Kids

Cooking with kids gives an opportunity to spend quality time with kids. Your kids can learn a lot while cooking with you. Although cooking with kids is a bit messy, but the joy that kids feel after cooking is awesome. You can involve kids in cleaning up after cooking. If you cook with more than one kid, ask them to take turns so that they learn to share and all this cooking experience does not end up in fighting of your kids. Make it fun and a good learning experience for your kids.

While cooking kids learn new words, such as names of ingredients, words like mix, boil, whisk, melt, roll, sieve, cut, etc. and different words used in the recipe. If your kid is old enough to read words, then you can ask the kids to find a particular word on the packets, like egg, flour, sugar, butter. So the first benefit is that vocabulary of kids will increase.

Cooking can also help kids to learn and improve their mathematical skills. You can ask them to count different ingredients. You can ask them to cut one more carrot or anything that is in your recipe. This will help them to improve their counting and number recognition. Using different cutter shapes while cooking will help kids to learn shapes. Let them weigh different ingredients so that they learn about different weighing scales. Tell them about the size of the utensils you are using. Ask them which one is bigger or smaller.

It is a good physical activity for kids. Allow kids to perform all tasks on their own, except obviously the dangerous one. Let them mix, sieve, beat, roll or pour things. Let them cut things using a butter knife. All this will help to develop your kid’s motor skills. Let them feel, taste and smell things to improve use of senses.

While cooking tell kids how things change like how cake will rise because of baking powder or how chocolate melts into liquid when on heat. While cooking discuss about the origin of different ingredients like where does milk come from or which vegetables grow under the ground etc. Tell them how important different foods are to get energy and to be healthy.

Surprisingly kids will try many new things when they will cook with you. They enjoy eating what they have prepared themselves. This gives them a sense of achievement. Do try cooking with your kids. You will see that not only your kids will be happy, but there will be a  smile on your face too after seeing your kids so happy.

So enjoy cooking with kids and remember to be patient with kids………

HAPPY COOKING 🙂