Cooking with under 5's

Cooking with under 5's

Surely that you've heard it before: Cooking with your kids, especially cooking with under 5's, it is the best way to teach principles of good nutrition and encourage healthy eating habits for life. Studies show that children are more likely to try new foods when they help in preparing them. Setting them to be "good eaters" for life.
Cooking gives very small children an early grounding in science, math, language, art, and even reading? The kitchen offers plenty of lessons in basic chemistry—discovering how certain ingredients combine, react, and change as they cook —as well as arithmetic, since ingredient lists are nothing if not a study in amounts and fractions. You can ask children to describe what they see, taste, and feel which feeds their vocabulary, and exposing kids to food's myriad colors and textures provides them with a whole new palate. Also, reading through a recipe with a child helps them learn how to follow words from left to right, while beginning to distinguish numbers from letters. And fine-motor skills are enhanced when little fingers tear, stir, and pour.

No matter how you cut it, slice it, mash it or peel it, you can't lose the battle by getting kids cooking as soon as they can stand at the counter. So what's stopping most parents? Many adults underestimate how much young children can actually do in the kitchen. The sense of achievement for a child when they have produced something, it is worth seeing it through a child's eyes. Feeling proud it is an understatement. They love it!

Keep and eye on my Blog for recipes to cook with really young children. They should be fun, healthy, safe and delicious. Just try cooking with your under 5, it is really fun. My daughters have been cooking for as long as they can remember.