While baking cookies, muffins, cakes and more in the kitchen with mom or dad is a fun activity for kids, it’s also a recipe for life lessons! Here are a few ways baking together can enrich your child’s life.
Enhancing motor skills
The development of a child’s motor skills can be effectively nurtured through repetitive natural actions encountered in everyday activities. Baking offers a multitude of opportunities for children to work on their motor skills in an enjoyable way. Pouring liquids involves careful hand and eye co-ordination, while kneading dough helps strengthen muscles. Whipping, creaming, and rubbing in ingredients engage different movements and muscle groups, essentially making a baking session an excellent workout for young ones.
Communication and social skills
Apart from honing motor skills, baking provides ample opportunities for communication and social interactions. Engaging in general chit-chat during a baking session is one aspect, but it goes beyond that. Children can learn positional language, such as “in”, “on”, and “over”. They can also practise early mathematical language by using terms like “more”, “less”, “heavy”, and “light”. Moreover, baking allows for plenty of fun with descriptive language. Encourage children to think of alliterative ways to describe mixtures or use onomatopoeia to depict different sounds they hear.
Reading and writing
Baking also plays a pivotal role in fostering reading and writing skills in children. As kids start to recognise the purpose of reading, they find pleasure in the process. They come to understand that those squiggles on the pages of a recipe book serve a purpose beyond just taking them away from playtime. Involving them in helping to read the recipe can make reading more appealing to those who are reluctant to sit and read in a formal way. Using a recipe book also allows them to practise using an index, following instructions, recalling information, and even retelling it in their own words.
Math made fun
The kitchen offers an ideal setting for teaching early maths concepts in a hands-on manner. Baking involves measuring ingredients, which helps children grasp the concepts of weight and volume. You can discuss density and mass by comparing the different volumes of various ingredients needed to make up a certain weight. Doubling and tripling ingredients to create larger quantities of a recipe reinforces addition and subtraction skills during weighing. Time-related language can also be introduced when discussing how long dough should be kneaded or how long brownies need to stay in the oven. Familiarising children with these ideas in the kitchen will pave the way for better understanding of abstract mathematical concepts later on.
Science
The kitchen is a treasure trove of scientific exploration when it comes to baking. Certain recipes can be designed to teach specific scientific concepts, while others offer opportunities for close observation. Baking imparts valuable skills that budding scientists need for successful experiments, such as careful measurement, following instructions, close observation, risk assessment, and recording results.
Healthy eating
Baking your own treats comes with various health benefits. By making simple substitutions, you can improve the nutritional value of baked goods. Additionally, baking from scratch is more eco-friendly, as it allows you to avoid unnecessary packaging and opt for responsibly sourced ingredients. It presents an opportune time to discuss responsible consumption and making healthy choices not just for ourselves but also for the planet.
A sense of achievement… and the joy of cake!
One of the most rewarding aspects of baking is the sense of achievement it instils in children. The process of working on a task that results in a delicious product to enjoy and share with others boosts their confidence significantly. For kids who lack confidence, it’s advisable to start with simple and easy-to-follow recipes to build their culinary skills. And, of course, ultimately the crowning glory of the entire baking experience is the end result – a scrumptious treat! After all the hard work, take a moment to sit down with your child and enjoy the outcome of your baking adventure.
