Kitchen tips and tricks
A lot of homeschooling families skip the whole pretend play kitchen and food and let their kids cook along with them in the kitchen. My daughter was spreading butter with a butter knife at four, and I know other parents whose children do the same (with supervision, of course).
My daughter still has fake food to play with because she asked for it for Christmas (she uses it to feed her stuffed animals), but she cooks with me pretty regularly. Here are a few things that we have learned together so far.
Girl Scouts cookies can be used for just about anything. Crunch them up for pie crust or to top your yogurt and you’ll want them all year. (Buy from us next year—they freeze well!)
Broccoli and carrots make excellent people and animals, especially when you use toothpicks to hold them together and make them talk.
Give your child as much power in the kitchen as you can; it’s his or her kitchen, too, and it’s such an important job to teach your child how to cook and about food in general. In my case, I’m actually learning with my daughter! I let her label things, for example, with both words and drawings in marker.
Create a cooking ritual to make things even more special in your kitchen. We stir clockwise, for example, to inflect our food with our love and positivity. When we have noodles, Wood Sprite gets a ceremonious uncooked noodle to crunch while we ready the pot.
Save your cans to make wind chimes! Paint them and sprinkle them with glitter before hanging them on your porch.
And here are a couple of recipes I ran across that you might want to bookmark:
Fairy Garden Bites and Fairy Cakes!
Photo courtesy of Wikipedia
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