Kitchen delights - cooking with your preschooler at home
Contributing article by Laura Matthews, a registered nutritionist, food consultant and early years nutrition expert.
With our busy lives it can be difficult to make time to cook with little ones, but if you’re taking a pause over Christmas it could be a good time to get children involved in some food based activities around the kitchen. Offering them simple tasks builds their confidence and increases their familiarity with a wide range of foods, textures and flavours and increases the likelihood of them trying new foods at mealtimes and becoming more adventurous eaters! It’s good to talk about food away from the dining table, where the pressure to eat is removed.
Why:
Being able to cook is an important life skill as it helps teach culinary skills, food hygiene, flavours, ingredient origin, seasonality and the ability to utilise all foods and minimise food waste. Perhaps most importantly it helps aid our children with an awareness and understanding of a healthy diet and cultivates a habit that will have lifelong benefits. By starting cooking at a young age it becomes a skill they are well adapted to by adulthood.
No matter the simplicity of the task, just get them involved! It could be getting them to rinse veggies, peel onions, weigh/count ingredients (e.g. cups or teaspoons) or lay the table. Getting them familiar with simple and easy tasks first before you take on anything too challenging! Basic kitchen tasks, such as whisking, rolling & squeezing develops their fine motor skills and works on their hand-eye coordination skills too.
Cooking can support a number of curriculum subjects including maths and science, for example counting (e.g. eggs, lasagne sheets!), weighing, measuring or learning about physical processes such as melting and dissolving.
How:
Here are our top 5 cooking activities to get little hands busy in the kitchen:
Picking & tearing herbs - traditional Christmas herbs include rosemary and sage, which need their leaves picking before use. These could be used in your stuffing recipe, or to add extra flavour to soups, sauces and stews or your Christmas veggies, e.g. roast carrots, parsnips and potatoes.
Using cookie cutters - not just for biscuits, don’t forget scones, pastry and pie making too!
Using a pestle and mortar to crush garlic or seeds. Make sure to closely supervise.
Older children might like hitting the pulse button on the food processor, to see the ‘cause and effect’. Useful for making dips, breadcrumbs or blitzing flour and butter together to make pastry (always supervise throughout).
Using a salad spinner or simply rinsing vegetables.
Try to embrace a combination of both sweet and savoury recipes to broaden your little one's exposure to a wide variety of ingredients and to keep all foods on a level playing field.
Last thoughts
It can be easy to put off letting kids participate in cooking, but don’t use a lack of expensive kitchen equipment as your excuse. You don’t need a wooden learning tower - bring it down to their level. This might look like rinsing veggies in a shallow bowl of water or using cookie cutters to cut pastry on a large wooden board on the floor for ease.
Cooking can be a nice activity to share with your child and have time to bond. Don’t force it though, if they aren’t in the mood, let it go or don’t expect commitment to the activity throughout, it’s ok for them to dip in and out. Also if you are planning a cooking activity with your children, triple check you have the ingredients you need in advance, nothing spoils the motivation and excitement more than a last minute trip to the shops with the kids in tow to grab forgotten ingredients!
Put aside the mess little ones can make in the kitchen (clean as you go and make sure all participants wash hands and wear an apron!), it’s all part of the experience and their learning journey.
At Two Hands Preschool we have a dedicated children’s cooking area. Our days begin with the children coming together to follow a simple recipe together and we always ensure it is something they can enjoy later for snack. We repeat the same recipe regularly until the class is ready to move onto a new one. We also involve them in growing what we can in our garden and try to include our produce in our recipes.
