How to Teach Preschoolers Through Cooking

Preschoolers love learning things when it involves hands-on activities and food. By combining food with hands-on activities, preschoolers engage in learning basic skills in an interesting way. Creating a cooking theme at home, or in the classroom, lets you teach skills such as shapes, colors, letters, numbers, spelling, reading, measuring, sorting, adding and subtracting. The best part of a cooking theme is that the kids can eat everything they learn. Read on to learn how to teach preschoolers through cooking.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Kid-friendly recipes
• Measuring cups
• Measuring spoons
• Bowls
• Mixing spoons
• Food supplies

1. Choose your kid-friendly recipes based on the learning theme for the month or week. If you're working on letters, you can choose apple dipping sauce for A, chocolate chip cookies for C, lemonade for L, peanut butter for P and so forth.

2. Read the recipe aloud to the kids so they know what you're cooking. A couple kids can gather the ingredients as you call them out, while other kids can gather any utensils or bowls you need. This teaches preschoolers that preparation is important before cooking.

3. Go over safety rules before cooking. Teach preschoolers about the importance of hand washing and wiping counters down after food touches the surface. After a few cooking lessons, ask the kids what safety rule you should follow as you cook so you can see if they're catching on to safe kitchen practices.

4. Use a measuring cup with large numbers on it so the kids can see how much one cup, two cups, three cups and other measurements look like. Hold up the measuring cup and tell the kids how much you need for the recipe and then have a kid show you how far the measuring cup should be filled.

5. Plan a day where the kids break into groups of two or three and cook a recipe you read aloud. This helps preschoolers practice listening and following directions skills. Keep the recipe simple, such as putting together a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, making ants on a log or adding chocolate chips and nuts to pre-made cookie dough.

6. Let the kids practice book making skills by creating a picture cookbook. Bring in food magazines and have the kids cut out pictures of dishes they think looks good. Have them paste the pictures onto construction paper and bind with yarn.

7. Practice sorting and counting skills with iced cookies and different colored candies. Give each child two cookies and instruct them to put all one color on one cookie, and only a certain number of candies on the other cookie.

Tips & Warnings

• For group activities ask parents to volunteer so you have extra help in the classroom.
• Use cookie cutters for teaching shapes, letters and numbers.
• Never leave preschoolers alone with any hot food or around any hot cooking appliance.

Resources

• Kid-friendly Recipes
• Cooking and Recipe Ideas