Wise parents understand that keeping youngsters occupied in the kitchen can help them finish their cooking, but even wiser parents understand that the kitchen can double as a science laboratory or math classroom!
Aside from the obvious baking and cooking, the kitchen offers a store of learning opportunities for your child. In the kitchen, kids get the opportunity to classify, measure, count, estimate, and recognise numbers and fractions, thus improving their math skills.
The kitchen is also an ideal “science laboratory” where kids can ask questions and explore how ingredients and mixtures change during blending and baking.
Use boxes to make jigsaw puzzles
Keep your children busy while you cook by taking empty cereal, spaghetti, or rusk boxes and cutting them into a homemade jigsaw puzzle for your child to put together while you cook.
Measuring tools teach children about volumes and weights
Toss your measuring cups into a bath of water and ask your children which containers hold the most amount of water. Bake muffins and let them do the measuring. Introduce them to the concept of temperature by letting them set the temperature of the oven.
Learning geometry with different shapes
Make a shape tray with various containers from around your kitchen. Keep a lookout for posters featuring shapes to place nearby. Ask your little ones to identify different shapes in the kitchen.
Make chemistry fun
Mix together bicarbonate of soda and vinegar to get a volcanic explosion.
Use taste trays to enhance your child’s senses
Place different white powders (talcum powder, salt, bicarbonate of soda, sugar) in small bowls and get your child to try to identify them by smell and touch, and failing these, by taste. Do the same with a variety of clear liquids – water, vinegar, bleach, soda water – but this time discuss why you shouldn’t taste something to identify it unless you know it’s safe to do so. Have other trays of items with sour, sweet, salty, and bitter tastes.
Mind your math with a measuring scale
Many mathematical devices are already available in the home. These include metre sticks and measuring tapes as well as the standard 30-centimeter ruler; scales for measuring weight, measuring cups for capacity, thermometers for measuring the temperature, and clocks for learning to tell time.
Teach your child about different time zones
Lining your kitchen wall with clocks – and setting each clock to a different time zone, is a very visual way for children to learn about time zones and to calculate time differences between places.
