How Cooking Teaches Your Pre-School Kids Math and Science Skills

Counting - Read the recipe card out loud to your kids. Count how many ingredients are needed with your children. Also, count how many of each ingredient is needed, for example, how many eggs, how many spoons of baking powder, how many slices of banana, etc.

Counting the ingredients teaches your children real life math skills that they will remember because they participated in the food preparation.

Measurement - Have your kids take part in spooning out the ingredients. Let them measure one cup of flour or two tablespoons of vegetable oil. Hands-on measuring teaches the concepts of more and less. Toddlers learn much faster by doing and seeing, rather than being told what more and less means.

Sorting - While cooking with your kids, have them sort the different ingredients into groupings according to grain, fruit, dairy, protein, vegetables, lentils, and colors. Talk about the nutritional benefits of each grouping. The USDA website has wonderful printable Food Pyramid Posters for kids. Not only will your children learn about sorting but also about nutrition.

Matching - Draw silhouette shapes of all the cooking utensils before you start to cook with your kids. Take all the cooking utensils like a spatula, mixing spoon, cake knife, measuring spoons, fork, and oven mitt and have the kids match them to the silhouette shapes. This is a fun way to learn the math concept of matching, as well as keeping the cooking utensils organized.

Graphing - As you complete cooking projects with your kids, keep a graph of the most favorite and least favorite recipes. Another graph teaching tool is to graph the different ingredients used in all the recipe projects and figure out which ones were used the most and which have the most nutritional value.

Teaching science concepts while cooking with your kids

Observation - The best recipes for teaching your kids the science tool of observation is a recipe that takes more than a few minutes to make. For instance, have the kids place teabags in a pitcher of water and put the pitcher in a sunny spot. Observe the water as it darkens from the tea bag. Ask the kids what they are seeing and take down notes about their observations.

Dehydrators work great for learning observation skills. Have the kids slice up some fruit and arrange it in the dehydrator. Take observation notes every hour as the fruit dries.

Comparison - Have your kids use their senses to compare different fruits and vegetables. Have them tell about the difference in how different fruits feel and smell, especially items that are similar, like butternut and acorn squash. Your kids learn how to use their senses to find the similarities and differences between objects.

Predictions - Before beginning to cook with your kids, read the recipe to them and talk about how they think the recipe will come out. Ask them different questions about what they predict would happen if you added extra flavoring, spices, or sugar.

Experiment - Allow your kids to use whichever kitchen utensils they think will work best for the recipe even if you know they are wrong. Let them try different tools and decide which one gave them the best results. For instance, did a spoon or a whisk work better for beating an egg?

Resource: Lisa Feeney, Bonnie Blagojevic, Cooking: A Practical Guide for Teaching Young Children, Scholastic Teaching Resources