Getting your kids involved in cooking is a great way to get them used to preparing healthy meals. The question is how do you do it in a safe age-appropriate way?
The good news is that there are several ways in which you can get children, even younger ones involved in preparing a meal. Even if they don’t go near the stove they can play a large role in preparing a meal.
ere are some tips that will help you to get your kids involved.
Go Grocery Shopping With Them
One of the easiest ways to get your children involved in preparing a meal is to go grocery shopping with them. Grocery shopping is the first stage in preparing a meal. Get them involved by having them help you prepare a grocery list.
Once you have prepared the grocery list. You can take them through the aisles and explain to them how to read labels and look for healthy food items.
Search Out Recipes
Another great step you can take is to have your children assist you with looking through recipe books and finding recipes for delicious healthy snacks. There’s nothing children love more than hearing how they’re going to prepare food.
Once you have found age-appropriate recipes ensure that they mix or pour ingredients all while following the recipe. This can be a great time to teach your kids mathematical skills such as counting, addition, subtraction, and even fractions.
Allow them to Taste
A great way to get your children even more enthusiastic about cooking is to let them taste as you go along. This is especially delightful if you are making cake or cookies.
You can find the best sugar cookie recipe here. Children love the taste of these cookies and tend to prefer making them when they are younger. You can save the higher-end dishes for when they get older.
You can also try making bread with them. Bread is relatively easy to make especially if you have a bread machine. It is often something that children really enjoy making.
Let Them Clean Up
Another important life skill that you can teach your children when you allow them to help you cook is how to clean up. Clean-up not only refers to washing pots and pants.
It also refers to keeping their hands clean while they are cooking and learning best practices for hygiene in the kitchen.
Get Started
Getting your children to help in the kitchen is a great way to teach them not just cooking skills but also responsibility as well. As you can see you can also teach them a lot of mathematics along the way.
Look carefully at what your children are doing in the kitchen, so that you can spot when a task is too easy or too overwhelming for them.
This is the best way to ensure that everybody has fun in the kitchen.