Kids love to cook and the weekend is a great time to slow down and let the kids be involved in making meals, or making their own snacks to keep them happy through the day. Kids will enjoy making simple things such as cheese on toast, cutting up a salad or fruit salad or threading fruit pieces on a skewer for a healthy snack. Try making a face on a mini muffin pizza or chopping some veggies to add to noodles and cheese. Cooking is a good way to get fussy eaters to try new foods.
If you want to be more adventurous here are some websites with kid friendly recipes:
Heart foundation healthy kids recipes
Taste.com.au kid friendly recipes
Kids spot kitchen easy kids recipes
Fresh for kids autumn recipes - healthy seasonal recipes for the colder weather
Make sure you take the chance for your child to learn while you cook. The links in this section will take to to more ideas about learning activities that you can download and use as you cook. Young children can learn vocabulary such the names of foods, but also describing words and concepts as you talk about the colour, shape, feel, smell and taste of foods as you cook. For example cutting a cucumber you can talk about the colour on the inside and the outside and cut it into long and short pieces as well as different shapes. Cooking is great for teaching action words as you chop, peel, slice, stir, wash etc.
Kids can use cooking to understand and develop procedures. Procedures relate to science based subjects and are about being able to describe, in order, the steps to a goal. Older kids can take photos of the food at each stage as they cook and at the end print and cut out the pictures and put them in order, then write out the sequence as a recipe. They could make their own recipe book with photos of the finished product and perhaps reviews by the adults acting as Masterchef judges. Younger kids will enjoy pictures of themselves doing things at each stage and can also use these as a sequencing and describing activity.
Have fun and don’t forget to get the kids involved in cleaning up the mess!
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