Cooking with kids— you either love it or you don’t. The spilled ingredients, eggshells in the bowl, and general chaos in the kitchen mixed with family bonding time and making memories can make for a grand adventure. Memorable, yes. Potentially stressful, also yes. But mixed in with all the heartwarming memory making and chaos, there are teaching and learning opportunities a plenty.
How can cooking with kids provide learning moments, you might ask? Well, first, there’s math involved with all the measuring, and if you are sizing up or down a recipe, there’s the math needed to recalculate how much of each ingredient you will need. This is when you’ll need to pull up the “fractions” file that’s been stored in your mind since 8th grade algebra— you know, the one you didn’t think you’d have to use much? Cooking and baking provide ample opportunities to dust off your fraction knowledge and put it to work!
Second, cooking and baking can teach real life, hard skills. Everyone is going to need to know how to cook and bake at some point in their lives, so why not start as a child? Keeping tasks within your child’s capabilities and keeping things age appropriate is always a good idea to keep the experience safe for everyone. I’ll be forever thankful for parents who let me help in the kitchen from a young age. Now as a mom with my own children, I can do the same for my kids in hopes that they will have at least a fundamental understanding of basic cooking skills by the time they are living on their own.
As kids get older, they also become able to read and follow a recipe. This skill can transfer over to many other areas, as a recipe is basically an “instruction manual” of sorts. Learning how to read and follow step by step instructions will help them as they grow up and become adults. They will learn the importance of following the order of instructions to achieve a desired result.
Cooking and baking also open the door for discussions of what to do if something doesn’t go as planned. Was the gravy too runny or too lumpy? Talk about why and what can cause those problems to happen. Were your cookies flat as a pancake and crispy rather than soft and fluffy? Together, research and talk about the circumstances that might create flat cookies. Beyond that, it becomes an excellent problem solving opportunity as you work together to figure out how to solve the issue and create the desired result.
Lastly, but certainly not least, cooking and baking together provides parents and children opportunities to bond by working together and making memories together. This helps create a sense of love and support that gives children confidence. Children also feel a sense of accomplishment and pride as they see (and taste!) the result of their hard work. This confidence and sense of pride can carry over into other areas of their life, such as school, sports, music, and even social interactions.
So while baking and cooking together might not seem like an opportunity filled with moments of learning, it really is. This helps to confirm what I already believe to be true— there are opportunities for learning and growth in everything we do, no matter how mundane and simple the task. Learning doesn’t just happen in the classroom; it happens all around us, often in the most unexpected places.