How to Make Cooking With Your Child a Learning Experience

While most of us consider cooking a life skill that our children should learn, many of us overlook the fact that cooking isn’t just about preparing food. Sure, it’s fun to add ingredients together and get a finished product, but that’s not all it’s about. 

For kids, cooking offers not only a fun, new experience, but also some very important skills that can help them later in life. When we teach kids to cook, we encourage them to be responsible, creative, and confident adults by taking advantage of the following learning opportunities. 

Problem Solving

Following a recipe is much like solving a math problem: you must use the information and tools you have to come to the right end results. Preparing food lets children analyze the way things are carried out and understand what goes into achieving the finished product. It teaches children that they must follow certain steps to achieve their goals. 

Showing your children how each ingredient contributes to the final product also lets them understand ratios and simple math skills like addition, subtraction, and multiplication. You can make this work by tweaking the recipe to make a larger or smaller batch and allowing your little chefs to figure out how to adjust the ingredients. Consider using a kids’ monthly cooking box, as they make the process smooth by providing you with all the essential ingredients, recipes, and tools.

Responsibility

By teaching your child to clean up after carrying out a step, keep their hands clean, and use the right tools, you can help them grow into responsible adults. Cooking also teaches them the importance of being equipped to handle responsibilities that come their way. Because cooking requires a lot of work, they’ll know how to tackle multiple tasks and order them according to priority. By laying out all the rules, you can prepare them to handle complex tasks with patience.

Using the Five Senses

Cooking engages the five senses: touch, sight, hearing, smell, and taste. Figuring out when something is golden-brown, or when the smell coming from the oven is just right, or even when the dough you’re kneading is of the perfect consistency – all of these activities require the use of the various senses. By encouraging your little chef to make educated guesses, you can help them use their senses to arrive at logical decisions. You could even make a game out of it and ask them to name ingredients by smell or appearance, and see how well they remember them, or if they can make a good guess.

Creativity

Cooking doesn’t have to be just about following a recipe. Sometimes it makes sense to leave the fun part to your kids while you do the actual cooking. For example, if you prepare the cookie dough, you can let your kids shape the cookies however they want, or let them decorate a cake. By doing so, you’re helping them become more creative and artistic in a fun and engaging manner. Cooking kits for kids often come with fun tools for kids that will boost their creativity and help them get the job done. It’s also exciting to eat something you created yourself, after all, and kids are sure to enjoy it. 

Confidence

Not all recipes work out on the first try, and it’s important to let your child know that failure isn’t a bad thing — you can always figure out what went wrong and try again. By encouraging kids to look at the finished product to see why it isn’t up to par, you can help them understand their own mistakes and explore ways to correct them. Of course, when they see the food they made did turn out to be a success, they will be more confident about themselves. And when things don’t turn out as expected, they will learn to cope with failures. 

The key to confidence-building is to let them get hands-on experience with the food to allow learning to take place. While observations can be helpful, children are more likely to learn when they are handling the food themselves. Just be sure to stick around to address any safety concerns, provide guidance, and help them out as needed.

Whether you are using a kids cooking subscription to make your job easier or ingredients and tools you already have on hand, cooking with your kids is a great way to help them learn many skills that will prove to be immensely valuable later in life.