Even though the food items are sometime plastic, using cooking to teach preschoolers has real life rewards. Recipes provide early learning skills for reading, counting and math. Preschoolers learn how to identify objects and what distinguishes them from other items. They also learn how to sort things into groups of related items. They learn safety, speed and rhythm, and exercise tiny limbs to build dexterity. There are very interesting and valuable “teachable moments” that take place, even when you’re teaching a preschooler how to make something as simple as a smoothie.
Early Reading Development
Take a tip from your child’s preschool teacher to teach early reading skills. Preschool educators use fun recipes that are easy for children to understand. The teachers let them follow along and participate in the preparation. They learn to identify the words on the recipe with the appropriate food items and the ingredients. In the process, preschoolers develop important visual connections to associate words that help build reading development and comprehension skills. Try these same principles at home to continue educating your child. Use Cooking to Teach Math
Using cooking and recipes also helps preschoolers learn math skills. For example, they get to count out how many cups of milk are needed to make a smoothie, how many strawberries and so on. They also learn measurements by practicing things like learning when the milk they pour reaches the mark for one-half cup.
Teach Your Child to Identify and Sort Objects
Use cooking utensils, plastic food and other items to teach your child how to identify like objectives and those that are not similar. This is a highly instructive learning technique used by preschool educators. Gather an assortment of and quantities of food items together in one big pile or basket, and have the children retrieve the items as you call the item by name. This technique incorporates the development of word association skills that teach preschoolers how to identify objects appropriately and sort them from other objects.
Speed, Rhythm and Dexterity
Cooking can be effectively used to teach preschoolers about speed. Parents and educators can use recipes that call to mix something fast or slow, and challenge the child to use judgment to determine when something is at medium speed. Kids also learn rhythm in the process and build the dexterity of the use of their arms, hands and fingers.
Safety
Cooking is also a great tool to help teach your child about safety. The child can learn when things are hot, and how to handle hot foods safely and how to allow foods to cool down before they eat them. You can also use cooking and meal preparation as a way to introduce your child to the importance of hand washing.
Using Eating Utensils
Tiny hands learn the difference between eating utensils and how to use them properly. They also get to experiment with cooking utensils and learn the difference between sizes, use and how they are different from eating utensils.
Healthy Eating
A great long-term benefit of using cooking to teach preschoolers is teaching them how to eat healthy. Most preschool kid-size stoves and ovens come with an assortment of plastic foods that include meats, vegetables and desserts. Educators take the opportunity to teach children while they are young to appreciate making dishes that combine the basic food groups and prepare a balanced meal. Parents can maximize opportunities for “teachable moments” that can be transferred to the “real food” dinner table and build healthy eating habits.