In class, teachers and students talk about ingredients for recipes, chopping vegetables, cooking and feeding babies. Some children enjoy pretending to cook and feed babies or other family members at home, too. Playing out these rituals of family life can be comforting to children and help them process and make sense of these everyday occurrences. It also presents opportunities for language and literacy development.
Children at Park West show a lot of interest in the ingredient list that we use for the song “choppity chop.” We find, children like to make their own ingredient list for a recipe or a shopping list of items they pretend to buy. Children might approach this in a variety of ways. They may use pretend writing, random letters, pictures, inventive spelling, dictate their words to you or a combination of these methods. All of these approaches are valuable and should be encouraged and naturally start the building blocks of strong foundational literacy skills.
Here’s a link to a story about a family’s evening and dinner routines that your child might enjoy. Perhaps the story will inspire your child to want to help set the table. This procedure is great for kids and, aside from being helpful, can inspire mathematical thinking as children match one plate to one person and follow a pattern.
It can also be very enriching to help cook real food. Several companies make knives with plastic blades that are safe for kids to use, but really cut vegetables and other ingredients. Here’s a link to one brand: https://www.curiouschef.com/product/medium-nylon-plastic-knife/
The Kids Table, a local Chicago company, also sells a metal crinkle-cut chopper that is safe for kids to use and offers a video library of cooking demos and recipes geared toward kids. Amazon, your local toy store and cooking stores can also be good resources for cooking tools designed for children. https://www.kids-table.com/video-archive
Katrina Nousaine & Anita Speck, Park West Co-Op Preschool Teachers, contributed to this post
Park West Co-Op is a progressive preschool located on Chicago’s near Northside in the heart of Lincoln Park. Park West is a diverse group of teachers who are experts in early childhood education. We've dedicated ourselves to understanding and developing teaching methods that cater to each child's individual needs so they can grow in a positive way. Teachers work hand in hand with the parent run Co-Op and offer robust hands on parent education in the classroom.