Children and cooking
Small children are often keen to do what you are doing. Involve children in the preparation of their food, make this involvement fun and you will be fostering the development of the following positive outcomes:
- Providing them the opportunity to begin accepting responsibility for their own eating habits
- Providing them with a wonderful sense of achievement
- Perhaps even enticing them to try foods they have previously rejected.
- Preparing and cooking food involves all kinds of skills - both social skills and physical skills:
- Self responsibility
- Scrubbing, tearing, dipping
- Pouring, mixing, spreading, shaking
- Wiping, washing, peeling, cutting, rolling, mashing, grating
It also develops their language and mathematical skills as they learn different words (for doing things, like those listed above, as well as names of ingredients) and measure ingredients.
Cooking with children is not something for the spur of the moment; it requires a little planning. Think ahead about the recipe, start simple, something like scrambled egg, or pikelets, or maybe something that doesn't require cooking, like fruit salad.
Early childhood education services that run cooking sessions with children regularly often write out the recipes so that the children can follow the method without reading. Pictures are used for each step.
Safety
Steps that involve heating, cutting or grating, should be carefully supervised. Allow lots of time to prepare something and let the children do as much as they can themselves.
Hygiene
It is very important that the adults provide role-modelling not only of the food preparation techniques but also the food hygiene practices. Make sure children wash their hands properly (with soap) and also dry their hands thoroughly before embarking on food preparation. Hand washing also needs to be repeated after visits to the toilet, licking fingers and nose blowing.
