Home » Education & Career » Tips for Teachers » Using Cooking to Make Learning Fun!

Using Cooking to Make Learning Fun!

© Irene Taylor

One difficulty parents and teachers face in teaching basic skill areas is making the learning real. While school is ideally a preparation for adult life, children soon begin to question the reasons for learning certain skills if they can see no relationship between those skills and their everyday lives. In many instances, learning a useful skill becomes, for the child, nothing more than practicing many similar exercises in a book or for homework. Therefore, the real applications of "school subjects" are very helpful in showing the child that there are reasons to learn many things in school, and that there are real uses for those skills.

An excellent way to show this is to plan a shared cooking project that you and your child can do at home, and summer vacation is the perfect time to try this. The skills involved in such an activity are numerous, and they are all easily applicable to real life situations.

One key to the success of such a project is the sense of sharing with your child. Your help and encouragement are important, but it is also essential to be a good role model for your child. Seeing you using certain skills will help to reinforce the transfer of your child's skills from school to life.

The first step in planning such a project would be choosing an appropriate recipe. Let your child be a part of the decision making process. Some considerations for you as a parent should be the difficulty of the directions and the number of steps necessary to complete the recipe. Don't choose a recipe that would be too difficult for your child to read and understand, but do try to choose a recipe that is one of your child's favorites.

Next, a shopping list may be needed. Any trip to the store can be made into a real learning experience in its own right. At the store, your child will get lots of practice using math and reading skills. Unit pricing, comparison shopping, reading labels, buying multiples of the same item, money and change, refunds with coupons, and weights and measures are only some of the applications of basic reading and math skills.

In the actual cooking/baking process, your child will make good use of a wide variety of skills. Have your child be in charge of reading the directions carefully, and making sure they are followed in the correct sequence. Allow your child to practice using measuring cups and spoons, and to keep track of cooking times. Dividing the finished dish into the correct number of servings is a great way to visually work with fraction concepts.

The copyright of the article Using Cooking to Make Learning Fun! in Tips for Teachers is owned by Irene Taylor. Permission to republish Using Cooking to Make Learning Fun! in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.