ELCHC PROVIDER’S FOCUS MAGAZINE
Kids in the Kitchen: elchc.org Winter 2020
Family Child Care Home Edition
by: Lissette Godwin, Regional Area Manager, Provider Relations The average adult spends a little over an hour a day preparing three individual meals, but how much time do family child care providers spend in the kitchen each day preparing meals for multiple children at various ages? Mealtime is a prime time to bond and interact with children; many times it's consumed with routines and transitions. So how can we get that time back and capitalize on expanding child development during mealtime? Simple…. Bring the kitchen to the children. Adults are often hesitant to allow children to help in meal preparation. Although there are guidelines that must be followed, there are still many opportunities for children to help in preparing meals and snacks. Let's look at the benefits of including children in the kitchen in your Family Child Care Home.
Motor Skills:
You may find that bringing the kitchen to the children will allow you more time to prepare meals. Developing children's small muscles is easier than you think and a natural fit in the kitchen. Many of the skills children will need and use once they enter school, such as writing, fastening, typing, turning pages and basic selfcare, all begin with the development of small motor and gross motor skills. Now you may be asking yourself, but how do I do this without allowing them in the kitchen? … well, bring kitchen activities to them. Introduce children to kitchen gadgets such as rolling pins, molds, mixers or whisk, measuring cups and more. All these gadgets can be used during center time with play-doh, water tables, housekeeping and more.
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Most meals require some level of preparation. Look at what is planned for the
day. Are there items children can help with? For example: Snapping green beans and plucking leaves from strawberries before washing, folding napkins, spreading their own jam on bread, or even pouring the drinks. We tend to do these things for children because it's faster, we understand there is a lot to do and little time, so start small. Try once a week, implement a new skill and eventually, the children will be taking over much of the preparation for meals at the table. Top it off with children being a part of making something special, taking turns mixing a cake or rolling dough and using cookie cutters for dessert! Nothing tops a yummy project they can eat in the end.
Social Skills and Social Studies:
Beyond these practical skills, cooking builds character. It encourages children to work with others to produce results and boosts their confidence as they take the lead in preparing lunches, baking holiday treats, or helping to get meals on the table. It also encourages them to be open to foods they otherwise might not have tried. Ask yourself, how much do children know about food preparation? What would they like to learn? These questions will begin many more discussions that will open them up to the world around them. Teaching Social Studies in the kitchen takes an inquiring mind. There are many questions that we can ask children about food. Where does the food we eat come from? Who invented the tools we use to cook and eat? Does everyone eat the same foods? There are endless possibilities, and it helps to model openness and inquiry with the children until they do the same. Wondering out loud is a great way to begin this process , after a while you will notice that the children will begin to ask questions too and that's when the fun starts. Now a days the
inquiry cycle has many handy helpers such as: Google, Alexa, Siri, the internet, but never forget the importance of a good old fashioned book or trip to the library.
sure to allow children to use kitchen tools, phones or cameras to take pictures with and then create a classroom cookbook.
The adventures can be endless. One adventure could be creating special placemats with children that include the topics you are researching together. For example: Where do foods come from? It can be a map with foods and the country or state they are grown in. You can also experiment with recipes from different regions, countries or cultures which can lead to conversations about the people in those countries and children's many cultures. With young children especially those who are in the "me" phase you might want to start local, meaning places, foods and recipes that are meaningful to them. The adventure can be started by a favorite food, a book, a family tradition etc. So where will your adventure begin?
As you can see, STEM has led us straight into Literacy and Language. Creating a classroom cookbook is just one way of bringing literacy to the kitchen. There are many more literacy skills you may not even be thinking of. For example, when you invite children into the kitchen, you are building comprehension and listening skills by having children follow directions. You are building vocabulary in the way you use descriptive language and labeling the many items used in the kitchen which some children may never have seen or used. Different types of foods have many names. Take an apple, for instance; you have Gala apples, Macintosh, Red Delicious, Fuji, and my all-time favorite Granny Smith apples, just to name a few.
STEM:
Social studies just scratches the surface of inquiry. STEM really begins to Dig in deep. STEM includes Science, Technology, Engineering and Math; nearly everything children do daily touches some part of STEM. You don't have to be a scientist to promote STEM skills with children, in fact...Children are natural-born scientists and mathematicians. Many lifelong skills are acquired in STEM; problem-solving, designing, measuring, weighing, comparing, sorting, and one-to-one correspondence are just a few of the skills you can reinforce with STEM. But where do you begin? Just as we posed questions in social studies to explore and discover, there are many topics children may question in and around the kitchen. Here are a few questions which you can turn into long term experiments from the kitchen to get you started: I wonder why food spoils? I wonder why water changes from ice to liquid to bubbles to steam? I wonder why food changes when it's cooked or combined with other foods? All of these questions can be turned into long-term experiments with your children, but the easiest and most obvious is simply cooking with them. This doesn't have to be their main meal it can simply be a snack or special event treat. Make
Literacy:
Literacy also includes writing skills and early reading skills. Encouraging children to help create menus of their favorite meals will begin to promote planning, which is an advanced writing skill when they reach school age. Letting children include pictures from those meals such as box labels or out of a newspaper coupon section will encourage children to read environmental print and boost their reading confidence. When it's all said and done, you have encouraged and built an environment where children will feel safe exploring and experimenting in the kitchen while also incorporating developmental standards. HAPPY COOKING!
