Children of all ages benefit from knowing their way around the kitchen. While the clean-up and mundane tasks aren’t top of the fun list, we have compiled some favourite fun cooking activities for kids. These are especially popular in the cold winter months when fresh warm food and drink is a cozy special treat.
Here are the top three recipes from our Kids Quick Cook series that are simple to do and make delicious family food.
When you and your kids are together in the kitchen, it’s a time when you can converse spontaneously or even have a little parental purpose to your talk. You will find a few learning conversation starters with the activities below, but you can likely come up with other great topics for a family chat around the kitchen.
Cookie Structures
You’ve heard of a gingerbread house, but let’s take that concept to a year-round affair and make a chocolate chip bridge or a shortbread shed or perhaps a sugar cookie car. Brainstorm more structures with the family and see how creative you can be to think up and build an edible architectural delicacy.
You can use pretty much any cookie recipe that would result in a firm crunchy cookie. With most types of cookie dough, you’ll want to chill the dough for 30 minutes or more and then roll out. Then you can cut and shape the dough to the pieces needed to connect together.
To connect the pieces, you can use the traditional icing option, but you can also melt caramels to ‘glue’ together the sections. You can get some more ideas for decorating options with some healthy alternatives to make your unique creation in our article Sweet Graham Nativity Scene.
Drink Mixes Meant to Be Modified
Hot drinks are common for winter, and there are many options to make a tasty treat you can drink. From homemade hot chocolate, you can put a twist on the ingredients to make a container full of mix or just make a warm mug at a time. You and your kids can add the flavours that appeal to your taste buds and make it a practice to experiment with new flavours in your hot chocolate.
Use the hot chocolate recipes in our article Hot Chocolate Mix and Mingle and gather round the kettle any time of the day for a cocoa creation.
Chemical Reaction Recipes
Science in the kitchen is the way to go in the winter. Not only will you get in some good lessons, but your kids will also produce some good food for all to enjoy. Chemistry is child’s play when we’re talking about food, and we’ve good a few lessons for every age group in your house – parents included!
The Littles Lesson
Colour mixing with lollipops will have your young ones observing, creating, and tasting. After dissolving store bought lollipops, the liquid solution is ready for mixing to test your hypothesis of what colours will result and what flavours please the palate. Read through the whole experiment at Fantastic Fun and Learning.
Elementary Level Lesson
Heard of the Maillard reaction? You can smell it, see it, and taste the results. Check out this simple experiment to lead your learners on a journey of reactions in the kitchen: Exploratorium – Smell the Maillard Reaction.
After that experience, hop on over to ACS ChemClub to get the inside story on why bacon smells (and tastes) so good. It’s all about the Maillard reaction too!
Teenager Tough Lesson
Get deep into the Maillard reaction by making pretzels. Sounds simple enough, but these pretzels will be dipped in lye. With an in-depth lesson on the science behind browning and the high pH solution that gives authentic dough pretzels their irresistible taste and aroma, teenagers and adults will learn good stuff about chemical reactions and fine-tasting food. Science at its best!! Get the lesson and recipe in the post Pretzels and pH – Hacking the Maillard Reaction.
Learning with Fun Cooking Activities for Kids
The kitchen is a place for learning in many ways. Read these articles with lessons in the kitchen for science, art, and more fun cooking activities for kids.
Science, like math, is around us daily from the plants growing in our backyard to the electronics in our home. Our kitchens are also an exciting place to encounter science. Kitchen science lab experiments are a great way to bring science to your day-to-day life.
We live in a world that is full of so many different cultures, and chances are you’ve probably sampled quite a bit of meals from different cultures right at your kitchen table. This is a great teaching opportunity to get your kids involved while learning about where the meals come from.
The key to liven up lunchtime is made out of bread! A white key is a strip of white bread, and a black key can be made with the cut-off crusts or strips of pumpernickel bread.
This fun activity can be closely followed by a fancy meal or elegant snack from your efforts – if you can stand to eat your work of art! This will also be a helpful recipe for your little ones to practice basic kitchen skills while cutting bread in strips and neatly spreading on the sandwich filling.
This article has been written by homeschooling staff writers of The Canadian Schoolhouse (TCS). Enjoy more of our content from TCS contributors and staff writers by visiting our Front Door page that has content on our monthly theme and links to all our content sections.
"Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old, he will not depart from it" (Proverbs 22:6).