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Busy making, busy baking!

Cooking with your child is a fantastic literacy and numeracy activity, giving practice such as reading lists, measuring ingredients, and understanding that we use different language for different purposes.

Cooking also teaches your child planning, patience, and the pleasure of eating something you’ve made yourself. So choose a recipe together, head to the kitchen, and ‘Talk. Cook. Learn.’ with ideas like these:

• • talk about the ingredients – eg names, textures, smells, tastes
  • talk about the equipment and utensils you use – eg what they are called, what they do, how they work
  • involve your child in counting and measuring
    Could you wash three carrots?
    Let's measure two cups of flour.
    We need a dozen of these muffins for the fete. How many is that? Twelve! Let's count them out.
  • ask your child how to share the food that you've made
    How can we share these eight cakes among the four of us? How many would each person get?
  • ask your child to arrange containers by size.
    Which container holds the most? How could we check?