It's time for your child to pull all their work together, roll up their sleeves and let the cooking fun begin!
Decide, based on the age and responsibility of the child, how involved you should be. Allow some room to breathe and make mistakes. Afterall, we learn from mistakes often more than we do from a success. However, consider having a secret back up plan for this meal, just in case it goes really south.
Cooking is excellent for math skills. Fractions and measuring become visually concrete through hands on experience.
Following directions, especially when baking, is typically tested in while cooking and can help them in all areas of their life. Even later when it comes to reading "the fine print" for financial documents. If they don't learn to read completely and understand the consequences of skipping over information, it could lead to big boo-boos as adults.
Work ethic is not something you can easily teach, but it can be gained with giving them opportunities to do a job, do it well and receive praise for the effort done. Depending on the outcome, this might be a good opportunity to explain what work ethic is and why it is important. However, be sure to really praise good effort and allow this to be a positive experience.
Discuss the exercise with the child over the meal. Ask open ended questions and encourage absolute honesty. The answers could already be blatantly obvious to you, but the Socratic Method of teaching is really the best way to get the child to internalize a lesson. Asking questions and leading them to an answer you already know, rather than just telling them is going to leave a lasting impression.
Some suggestions would be:
Good luck and share your experiences!
Decide, based on the age and responsibility of the child, how involved you should be. Allow some room to breathe and make mistakes. Afterall, we learn from mistakes often more than we do from a success. However, consider having a secret back up plan for this meal, just in case it goes really south.
Cooking is excellent for math skills. Fractions and measuring become visually concrete through hands on experience.
Following directions, especially when baking, is typically tested in while cooking and can help them in all areas of their life. Even later when it comes to reading "the fine print" for financial documents. If they don't learn to read completely and understand the consequences of skipping over information, it could lead to big boo-boos as adults.
Work ethic is not something you can easily teach, but it can be gained with giving them opportunities to do a job, do it well and receive praise for the effort done. Depending on the outcome, this might be a good opportunity to explain what work ethic is and why it is important. However, be sure to really praise good effort and allow this to be a positive experience.
Discuss the exercise with the child over the meal. Ask open ended questions and encourage absolute honesty. The answers could already be blatantly obvious to you, but the Socratic Method of teaching is really the best way to get the child to internalize a lesson. Asking questions and leading them to an answer you already know, rather than just telling them is going to leave a lasting impression.
Some suggestions would be:
- What did they like?
- What did they not like?
- What, if anything, surprised them in the experience?
- What lesson from this experience could they use in the future?
Good luck and share your experiences!