The kitchen isn’t just a great place to teach your children about healthy eating habits, it is also a place to learn about mathematics, science, reading, language and art! Here are a few of my favorite ways to incorporate learning into cooking.
1. Help young children be independent in the kitchen by giving them their own pot and spoon and a smaller version of your mixing bowl.
2. Talk about where ingredients come from and look on a map to see how far it has come.
3. Read the cookbook with them running your fingertip under each word slowly to show them learning new recipes involves reading. Point to the pictures and relate it to the real things to develop their visual literacy.
4. When you are next shopping for your kitchen, choose a measuring jug and scales with numbers that 3 and 4 year olds can learn to recognise.
5. Create enthusiasm for food by using descriptive words you like – plum purple, a dollop of cream, rhymes they can repeat like yummy-scrummy, finger-lickin’ good!
6. Make domestic tasks fun by inventing your own words sometimes – after my son learnt the new word ‘dishwasher’ he loved to play with this word and its word associations in English and German by calling it a wash-disher, as word play is a family favourite in our household.
7. Allow them to press buttons on machinery with your supervision – to increase their understanding of the bigger world where electricity is useful and electrical equipment needs careful handling.
-Monica Shah Zeeman
