Many times, when we think about cooking and children, we can get in a bad mood, especially when one is with a pan full of oil, a pot with boiling rice that has been spent for 2 minutes and 3 children Hungry stretching your dress. Who has not ever encountered this situation?
Instead, there are other times when you can enjoy parents and children together in the kitchen. Personally, I like to involve mine whenever I am cooking, and I have discovered that he and I both learn a lot from the experience while cooking together.
I leave some of the experiences that your child will learn by cooking:
Reading in the kitchen
Even before the child knows how to read, he will be able to understand what the cookbooks indicate, especially those illustrated and those that take pictures of the recipe step by step. For encourage reading in the child, we can read the recipe out loud and explain well what we are going to prepare and how we are going to do it.To size
The kitchen is a good opportunity to teach children the different types of measures in recipes, in America, for example, socks are usually used in ounces, cups, spoons ...; In Europe, we measure by grams, kilograms, liters…. We can even give a small math class doing conversions of measures.Create vocabulary
Every recipe we cook with children can be full of new words. We can teach our children to differentiate between species, teaching them the different aromas and flavors. We can talk about special ingredients and even in the way of manufacturing some ingredients, such as milk pasteurization, beating eggs ...We can also teach them verbs applied in the kitchen, for example, "now we are going to beat the eggs, you know what it means to beat" Let them do it and teach them.
Exploring the senses
Let's help our children develop their senses: taste, sight, touch, smell and hearing. Let them taste all the ingredients, smell them and touch them, we can play to differentiate between similar ingredients, such as flour and sugar or cornstarch ...Play act
You can play that you play gastronomic characters, one of you can be the chef, the other the waiter or the diner ... It can be a very fun gameTell stories
Children may love to tell the story of the cooking experience. You can tell your son to tell him how the afternoon has gone by cooking his father (or mother, it depends on who he has cooked with), you can help him a little with the principle “Mom and I have prepared some cupcakes to take to school, I've beat the eggs for a long time and mom has added the milk little by little ”…Sciences
Cooking can be a great laboratory to learn science. The children will be able to observe how the materials change as we cook them, the food can change from solids to liquids, inflate at high temperatures, the yeast will ferment, the flavors will change, the leaves will dry ...There are foods that dissolve in contact with water (sugar, salt), there are foods that color, others that evaporate and disappear ...
Cleaning
In the kitchen, we must instill in our children that it is extremely important to clean as they cook. Apart from that it is more practical for those who cook, you have to follow some basic hygiene guidelines so as not to contaminate the food. We can also teach you that in the fridge you must always separate the different foods, and the raw ones from the cooked ones.Sing
We can sing while cooking, even recite poems or invent songs with music from other songs you know. A fun idea to do with children in the kitchen is to invent a song that has to do with the recipe we are preparing.Predictions
Let your child make predictions of what will happen next. This is a way to help them understand the cause-effects. If your child has cooked before, he will almost certainly know what will happen in the next step of the recipe. For example, put a cake in the oven, you will know that after a while, it will rise. Another example, if we beat the egg whites for a while, they will turn white and hard, even snow.Although the most important of cook with children is that you enjoy together in the kitchen. Do not expect them to learn too quickly, everything must arrive in time and everything has its process.
Do not forget to let them taste what they have cooked!
