Surely is quicker and less messy to do it yourself?
While the above statement can sometimes be true (!!) there are so many reasons why cooking with kids is super important. Here are some of the ways in which cooking can help to enhance children’s learning.
Cooking helps to develop fine motor skills. Stirring the ingredients, rubbing in butter, chopping vegetables and rolling out pastry. These actions all help to strengthen little hands and fingers. This will help younger children to be able to pick a pen up and start to mark-make and form their first letters and numbers.
Cooking is great for enabling children to practise their practical maths skills such as weighing and measuring ingredients. You can introduce children to a variety of scales such as digital skills, balance scales, or scales with weights on and encourage them to use lots of mathematical language such as ‘heaviest’ and ‘lightest’ when they are exploring the scales and the ingredients. When using the scales in a recipe, you’re actually applying maths to a real purpose and children are motivated to weigh and measure because they are engaged in a meaningful activity. With younger children, it’s good to encourage them to scoop out the ingredients, measuring out the herbs, spices and flavourings and you can show them all the different spoons such as a teaspoon, dessertspoon and a tablespoon. Cooking encourages children to see the difference in size and weight when applying their maths to a practical and fun activity. Cooking also helps children to develop an awareness of time. Talking to children about how long things need to go into the oven can help children get a sense of time. Use a timer on your phone, on your oven or grab a sand timer which clearly shows how much time has passed and how much time is left to go. It’s a great visual resource!
It promotes really good communication and language skills. When you’re cooking with your children, you can talk to them about all the different ingredients that they are using. It’s a great opportunity to have a really good sensory experience, not just for young children but also with older children too. Children might be cooking with ingredients they’ve never used or tried before. It’s great to encourage children to use the whole of their senses to explore the ingredients. For example, spices are a good opportunity to explore scent. Have they ever used it before? What does it remind them of? Are there certain times of the year that are associated with different spices? This really helps children to get curious and to develop their communication and language skills.
Cooking with kids also helps to develop and strengthen reading skills. Reading through a recipe is a way of applying skills practically in a meaningful way. If we want to make a delicious bake, we really do need to add the ingredients in the right order and cook them for the correct amount of time. It’s really important for children to read the recipe thoroughly at the start so they know what they are doing. Exposure to these type of texts with the short verbs such as ‘Cut’, ‘Chop’, ‘Stir’, ‘Mix’, makes it much easier for children to write their own recipes, for example at school, as part of a literacy class. Reading recipes at home will help to prepare children for this as they will be familiar with these type of texts and will be able to replicate and assimilate them in the future. It can also help a reluctant reader to want to read. Some children aren’t that confident with reading or maybe just haven’t found the book that ‘lights them up’. Reading a recipe is great as it’s in a really meaningful context. Older children need to read the recipe in order to make the bake which is a great motivating factor as they know that the bake they will create and the experience they will have will really make it worth-while to read that recipe.
Cooking with kids helps to boost their self-confidence. Not only as a result of strengthening their knowledge and cookery skills but also in how proud they feel when they see the end result. Children get a huge boost when they see what they have created. It’s very visual and quite instant – they don’t have to wait weeks to see the results. It gives the children a real sense of achievement when they see that they’ve been able to transform a few basic ingredients into something really tasty that they can share with their family. It’s those comments and compliments from family members that really help children’s confidence grow. Cooking with kids really is ‘magic’, seeing how a few simple ingredients can be transformed into something tasty that the whole family can enjoy is such a huge boost to a child’s self-confidence. Especially when they see family members enjoying the food and having second helpings! Cooking is also something that you can get better with over time. Children can improve on their bakes and get more confident around the kitchen. They can see that they are improving in a very visual way; they can see their bakes and taste them and see that their skills are improving.
Cooking with kids teaches them about food. It helps children to use a variety of different ingredients with new flavours, new textures and new tastes. Even if your child has a real preference for certain foods, encouraging your child to cook with you and to handle new ingredients can really help with this.
Cooking with kids is teaches them a life skill. Once they have mastered the basics, as they get older, they’ll be able to cook for themselves, their friends and one day their own families. Cooking from scratch is often healthier, cheaper and more environmentally friendly than grabbing a convenience meal or eating out. A love of cooking can promote feelings of wellbeing (especially if someone offers to do the washing up afterwards!)
We hope you’ve found this helpful! We’d love to hear about your experiences of cooking with your kids. What do you and your kids most enjoy cooking?
