COOKING WITH YOUR KIDS

Here in this dyslexia blog article we talk about how to use cooking to teach your child....

Cooking can be a fun way to help your dyslexic child learn maths as well a good way to encourage them to read. At this festive time of year its really nice to do some baking !!

Cooking involves many educational skills such as reading and comprehension. In addition it requires counting, measuring, understanding time as well as sequencing.

You could start by getting your child to make a packet cake mix (such as the Dr Oetker Lillifee Muffin mix) which is simple for children to make by themselves.

First of all get them to read the instructions and then follow the steps to make the muffins. They hopefully will be more motivated to read if they want to make some yummy cakes or biscuits !!

Once they are able to make packet mixes successfully you could buy a simple cookbook written especially for children.

Once you have decided on a recipe from the cookbook get your child to make it.N.B you can help when and if necessary .

They could count out the number of eggs required or they could stir the mixture a certain number of times.

Let them help measure out the ingredients so they can learn about grams, kilograms and millilitres.

Cooking is an excellent a way to teach fractions. For example, you can cut a cake into 8 equal pieces and then you can explain that one piece of the cake is 1/8.

Also they can learn about time from cooking , if you ask them to work out at what time a cake needs to be taken out of the oven.

You can also make up word problems to test their maths. For example if you're making a cake, ask your child to help figure out how many eggs it will take to make 2 cakes, if it takes 3 eggs to make one cake. Ask them to work out how many sausages they would need to cook for 8 people ,if each person wants 2 sausages. Etc ..

Cooking really is educational as well as good fun for kids !!!