Cooking is not only a fun, engaging activity for children but one that has been used for years as an important teaching and development tools for young children. Cooking can help young children explore mathematics concepts, build language, and daily practical skills, creating opportunities to develop their creative and thinking skills.
Cognitive Development
Cooking inspires children's curiosity, thinking, and problem-solving, offering new opportunities to make predictions and observations.
"Why do cake rises?"
"How do egg whites turn from this clear, sticky stuff into glossy white peaks?"
When you think about it, baking is a pretty cool science lesson. But the best thing is, you don't actually have to teach, the activity does it for you.
Additionally, cooking offers authentic opportunities to understand and apply their knowledge of measuring, counting, numbers, and one-to-one correspondence. Understanding measurement and numbers are made simple when cooking. Whether you're cutting a Pizza in half or just measuring out cups of flour, it's a great way to give your kids a jump start on math skills. Cooking may help children see that math has a practical application in the real world – perhaps it’s not as abstract as they think!
Language Development
With its own vocabulary, cooking is a great opportunity for language development. Take advantage of opportunities for children to match pictures to words and articulate questions inspired by their new experiences.
Social-Emotional Development
Hands-on cooking activities help children develop pride and confidence in their skills and abilities. The act of following a recipe can encourage self-direction and independence, while also teaching children to follow sequencing of steps and instructions and use thinking skills to problem solve.
Physical Development
Chopping, squeezing, spreading, and mixing are all cooking skills that help develop a child's small muscle control (fine motor skills) and eye-hand coordination. It's impossible to separate hands-on cooking activities from physical development for young children.
Taska Children's World very own children picnic, our children love tasting their handiwork!
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