Cooking with children can be a fun and therapeutic activity for families to share together. Cooking together provides opportunities to:
- Build social skills
- Promote communication
- Explore sensory components (e.g. taste, smell, look, sounds, feel)
- Developing fine motor skills (tipping and mixing ingredients)
- Executive functioning (recalling, sequencing and planning tasks)
- Maths (measurement) and science (how do ingredients react together)
- Creativity (expressing how foods look, feel, taste)
- Literacy and Language (understanding the recipe and what the words mean)
Here are some simple and fun mealtime activities below that may require more or less supervision depending on the ability and skills of your child:
- Setting the table
- Getting out the ingredients needed for a recipe or meal
- Washing any fruit or vegetables
- Tearing up lettuce for a salad
- Mixing ingredients in a bowl
- Mashing soft food (e.g. banana)
- Cut soft food using a child safe knife or peeling fruit or vegetables
- Reading recipes or watching the recipe (if found online)
- Finding and selecting recipes
- Spreading butter on bread with a child safety knife
- Measuring ingredients (e.g cup, spoon)
- Using electric equipment (microwave, toaster, mixer) with supervision
Using simple, quick and easy to follow recipes creates a fun and positive opportunity to connect with your child and practise a variety of important skills for their development.