What Are The Benefits Of Cooking With Our Children

01:35 – Let them sort out their senses
02:00 – Start to help them understand where different places are in the world
02:35 – It helps children understand measurement and just basic elementary math
03:15 – It helps the mind in understanding how to follow instruction
03:55 – Cooking teaches children patience

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Hi everybody, Harper Jones here with Bow Tiger and you’re watching Saturdays with Harper. And today we are going to talk a bit about cooking with our children, with our toddlers. What are the benefits to having our kids in the kitchen? It sounds not fun. It doesn’t sound fun at all. But it actually can be a really fun experience. It helps you out, it helps your toddler out. Makes them feel like a part of a task that you’re doing, and it also can be really stimulating and educational for them as well. So I’m just going to go over some of the key benefits today. Of course I’m sure you viewers, you guys have some other suggestions or comments. If you do have any comments please be sure to leave these comments on the videos. You can leave them on any of our social media pages and we’ll make sure to mention it on one of our next videos as well.

Okay so we’ll dive right into it, what’s the first benefit to having your child help you out in the kitchen. Food, food is very different. Vegetable to vegetable, none are really the same, fruit to fruit etc., nothing’s really the same. Everything has different consistency, different feels, different looks, different shapes, different colors, etc. Looks shapes, colors, all these things that I’m talking about consistency, these are part of the elementary things that we need to teach our children. Now in addition that, food has different smells, different tastes, different textures. These are all senses. This is something, this is what our children, our toddlers really use to start to understand or explore the world at all. So why not make that available to them in a task that we already have to do for the day which is cooking for our family. Involve them in the task and let them sort of use those senses, let their brain develop even faster while we’re going through some of our daily chores at home.

Another thing that we can do is, food comes from different places whether it’s grown in the ground, or in a tree, in a tropical environment or in a colder environment, the places that food grows geographically, this is something that we can start teaching our kids too. Start to help them understand where different places are in the world and maybe even take out a globe so you can show them where your cherries are from, maybe in North America, where some of your fruits come from, maybe down south. All these different things can help your child start to understand geographically what they’re eating and where they’re looking at on a map. Very, very helpful when they get to the school age, they’ll have kind of a one up on everybody if you’ve been doing these kinds of tasks with them and activities with them at home.

Another thing that cooking does is it helps children understand measurement and just basic elementary math. If your child can start to understand at a young age what a full cup is, what half a cup looks like, a quarter cup, things like this you’d be amazed at how helpful that will be in their next few years and when they start to jump into school. Another thing and this is, there are two more things that I did want to mention. Providing or getting our children and our toddlers to follow instruction is sometimes the most difficult task of all. Because they kind of veer off, they don’t want to concentrate for too long or they can’t concentrate for too long. This is sort of a task that aids the mind, that helps the mind in understanding how to follow instruction. Because to get through a recipe or to get your food tasting the way it’s supposed to be, you have to follow that recipe. You have to follow instruction. So not only is this going to help their brain sort of understand and start to develop a reason for instruction, it’ll also help them in other with other daily tasks that you give them, like if you instruct them to clean up their room or if you instruct them to put the markers away, something like this.

They’ll start to understand that to get a result there has to be instruction and they have to follow that instruction. Okay so the last thing that I wanted to mention, we are running out of time, but the last thing I wanted to mention and this is the best part of all, is cooking teaches children patience. Patience is not something that a lot of toddlers have or they don’t have much of. But in cooking you have to be patient, whether you’re waiting for the cak...