Cooking with our kids is educational, fun and brings quality time together
The quarantine period is a great opportunity to spend quality time with our little ones and household chores like cooking can get really creative when we involve our kids!
Of course, it is not easy to involve our little ones in the cooking process. It requires patience and definitely a bit more cleanliness on our part. Dough sticks to hair, flour falls like snow on the kitchen floor, something gets spilled where it doesn't belong, especially when the kids are still very young.
However, it is worth getting into the kitchen with our kids and cooking some simple and easy recipes. This way, they are introduced to the fascinating art of cooking from a young age and at the same time create fun family memories that will stay with them for a lifetime. Even though cooking every day feels exhausting sometimes, cooking with our kids and preparing a meal makes everyone feel part of the result.
At Momizen there are many interesting cooking courses especially for children that you can sign up for:
Children Cooking Course
Online children's cooking and baking courses with Heike Güssbacher, where you and your children prepare delicious dishes together live!
Simone's cooking studio
Simone helps children aged 6 and up learn to cook in her special cooking studio. Children will love these cooking courses, cooking with their parents or hosting a special cooking birthday party!
At the same time, cooking can teach the little ones some valuable lessons:
- Counting and reading, expanding vocabulary and encouraging the development of manual skills.
- Fine sensorimotor skills through mixing the ingredients and using the different utensils
- Team spirit and working in groups to achieve a common goal through communication and mutual help during cooking time
- Curiosity and imagination. For our little ones, everything in the kitchen is a challenge. Even the cupboard with spices is a new world
- Concentration and attention to achieve a final result
- Problem solving by following the recipe, making mistakes, calculating quantities and time
- Self-confidence and the feeling of having achieved something when the meal is prepared and ready to be enjoyed
- Nutritional education through understanding quality raw materials and learning the value of good nutrition when cooking.
Depending on the age of our children, they can help us a lot with meal preparation.
- Toddlers can wash the vegetables, measure them, or add some of the ingredients in the recipe. They can also use their hand to mix and shape dough, dip or break pieces of vegetables, fruits, cookies, chocolate, etc.
- School-age children can do even more tasks. They can read the recipes aloud, crack and separate eggs, weigh 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 the kitchen can be a really dangerous place if safety measures are not taken.
Preparation is the key to a fun cooking session and depending on the age of our children we should adapt our supervision. Some principles to keep in mind when cooking with children are the following:
- Young children should always be supervised by an adult when cooking
- We should provide children with plastic knives and not let them work with metal knives
- Before we start cooking, we should gather all the necessary utensils and ingredients so that we do not have to leave our children unattended
- We should make sure that our children have washed their hands before cooking
- If something falls on the floor, we should clean it up immediately to avoid slipping
- We should try to point out that we should never put our hands near the mixer or the oven when it is in use
- We do not allow children to use the gas stove or hot kitchen surfaces alone
