Cooking with our kids is educational, fun and quality time together
Quarantine time is a great opportunity to spend quality time with our little one, and household chores such as cooking can get really creative when we involve our children!
Certainly involving our little ones in the cooking process is not a simple matter. It takes patience, and definitely a little extra cleaning on our part. Dough will stick to their hair, flour will fall like snow on the kitchen floor, something will spill where it should not, especially when the children are still very young.
However, it is worthwhile to go into the kitchen with our children and make some simple and easy recipes. This way they will begin to get involved in the fascinating art of cooking from a young age while creating fun family memories that will accompany them throughout their lives. Even when everyday cooking feels tiring sometimes, cooking with our children and preparing a meal makes everyone feel part of the result.
There are a lot of interesting cooking courses in Momizen especially designed for children you can enroll:
Children Cooking Course
Online children cooking and baking courses with Heike Güßbacher where you and your children prepare live together delicious dishes!
Simone's cooking studio
Simone helps children from 6 years of age to learn how to cook at her special cooking studio. Kids will love those cooking courses, cook with their parents or throw a special cooking birthday party!
At the same time, cooking can give some valuable lessons to our little ones:
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Counting and reading, while enriching vocabulary and enhancing the development of manual skills.
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Fine sensorimotor skills through mixing the ingredients and using the various utensils
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Team spirit and working in groups in order to achieve a common goal through communication and mutual help during cooking time
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Curiosity and imagination. For our little ones, everything in the kitchen is a challenge. Even the cupboard with spices is a new world
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Focus and attention in order to achieve an end result
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Problem solving through following the recipe, making mistakes, calculating quantities and time
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Self confidence and the feeling of accomplishment once the meal is prepared and ready to enjoy
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Nutritional education through understanding of quality raw materials and learning the value of good nutrition while cooking
Depending on our children’s age they can do a lot to help us with the preparation of our meal.
Toddlers can wash the vegetables, measure or add some of the ingredients in the recipe. They can also use their hand to mix and shape dough, dive or brake pieces of veggies, fruits, biscuits, chocolate etc.
School age children can do even more tasks. They can read the recipes out loud, break and separate eggs, weight and measure ingredients, operate the electric mixer (under your supervision), or chop vegetables and fruits with a plastic knife.
Safety rules
We should never forget that kitchens can be really dangerous places if there are no safety measures taken.
Preparation is key to a fun cooking session and depending on our children’s age we should adjust our supervision. Some principles to keep in mind while cooking with kids are the following:
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Toddlers should always be supervised by an adult when cooking
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We should be equipped with plastic knives for children and not let them use metal ones
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Before beginning to cook, we should gather all the necessary utensils and ingredients, so that we do not have to leave our children unattended
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We should make sure that our children have washed their hands before cooking
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If something falls on the floor, we clean it immediately, to avoid slipping
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We should try to emphasize that we never put our hands near the mixer or the oven when it is in operation
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We do not allow children to use the gas stove or the hot kitchen surfaces, alone
So don’t hesitate and cook all together as a family! Keep it fun and you will all have a great and creative time with a nice meal at the end!
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