How Cooking with Children Helps Develop Key Skills

Having children help with cooking or baking in the kitchen is a great way to strengthen key skills at any age. From basic counting to fine motor skills, the kitchen presents an endless source of learning opportunities, as well as tasty treats!

Here’s how having children help out in the kitchen can help develop those life skills that they will carry with them for the rest of their lives! 

Key skills children can develop in the kitchen

Counting 

Following a recipe is a perfect way to learn mathematical concepts of any level. After all, the start of every recipe involves a list of ingredients with units of measurement! 

Young children can help count out cups of flour, collect a certain number of eggs or count the number of cupcake liners as they place them in the pans. Older children can measure out fractions of whole measurements or figure out how to double a recipe. Either way, these are core mathematical concepts that they will no doubt enjoy learning!

Reading & comprehension

From sounding out words to identifying ingredients to comprehending complex recipes, recipes are perfect for not just basic reading, but understanding how the words and instructions translate to real-life actions. Reading the ingredient list leads to counting the ingredients, which leads to fine-motor skills and, at the end, the great satisfaction of the final product!

Language

While baking and cooking, children may come across words and phrases that they’d rarely come across outside of the kitchen. Find a recipe from another country to learn about new types of food, or try baking something complex to learn new actions and phrases.  

Fine motor skills

Baking and cooking is an excellent opportunity to practice fine motor skills at all ages. This is especially true when it comes to decorating cookies, cutting vegetables or cracking eggs. 

Even if younger children participate in only a few steps of the recipe, practicing new fine motor skills will come in handy for more advanced skills later on in life, like writing, coloring or using scissors.

Here are some ways you can include your children in strengthening fine motor skills while cooking and baking.

• Rolling cookie dough
• Cutting out cookie shapes
• Sprinkling sprinkles on cupcakes
• Scooping flour into measuring cups
• Pouring liquids
• Pulling leaves off herbs
• Separating eggs
• Sifting flour
• Stirring batter
• Cutting vegetables
• Spreading butter
• Washing fruits and vegetables
• Setting the table

Science

Baking and cooking is all science! Recipes use a carefully-constructed combination of chemical  reactions, heat and movement to create the delicious treats and dishes we enjoy at the end, so it’s a perfect way to show children how we use scientific concepts in our everyday lives.

For example, heat changes the structure and color of things. Heating up butter makes it runny, while putting it in the fridge hardens it up. Putting runny batter in an oven turns it into a crumbly cake, and too much heat can burn cookies. 

Of course, you can adapt the level of explanation for different ages. Younger children may only need to start with the concepts of hot and cold, while older children can learn how mixing egg whites can turn them stiff and fluffy. 

Patience

Patience is a virtue, especially in a kitchen, and there are certainly many opportunities to learn and practice patience while baking and cooking. 

Watching a cake bake is surely the greatest test of patience for a child; at least, it was for me! Patience isn’t just about waiting for the final dish to cook, but it’s also about patience after making a mistake, or patience when waiting to do a task in the correct order. After doing all the work measuring, reading and focusing on fine motor skills, the long wait for the cookies to bake or the cake to set teaches children to be okay with waiting. The earlier children learn patience, the better off they will be when it comes to being patient in other areas in life.  

Healthy eating

It’s shown that children are more likely to be interested in food if they are involved in its preparation. And, when it comes to encouraging healthy eating habits, cooking with children is a perfect opportunity to strengthen those habits.  

Show children that it’s not just easy to cook healthy meals, but that it’s also fun and tasty! They will carry those skills through their whole lives and, when they eventually leave the nest (which will never happen, right parents?), they will be more likely to cook healthy food for themselves when they’re alone. 

Confidence

Involving children in the cooking process is an excellent way to instill those valuable senses of self confidence. Whether they helped stir a mixture, set a table or decorated a cake, children deeply value seeing their hard work be praised and enjoyed by their families. It’s a wonderful learning opportunity for the most shy of children to the most outgoing, and it teaches both responsibility and hard work.

Whether you’re helping your toddler stir a mixture or guiding your middle-schooler through making an omelet, having children help with cooking and baking is an excellent way to teach both valuable life skills and helpful attitudes. 

Bon appetit!

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Features photo courtesy Pixabay/severyanka