My son is already, with ten years, an excellent cook. Learn about the different products, how to choose the best fruit or vegetables, how to identify if the meat or eggs are not fresh, what type of cooking or preparation is more suitable for each food and also knows how to prepare delicious dishes and has even invented some the same. But above all enjoy and learn, well the kitchen, for children, is a learning laboratory extraordinary about health, food, history, human geography, mathematics, chemistry and physics.
I can not resist sharing with you an example, the beautiful page of a friend of my son, the great TristanyChef, where this little kitchen magician explains his best recipes.
And, well raised, the kitchen can be an extraordinary educational and experiential resource For children, where they learn and also share experiences with their family that they will never forget. The kitchen is a place to learn, enjoy and experience, while building a family relationship. But always following security measures, of course.
There are many possibilities that we can explore in the kitchen and, in addition, help children to make their own reflections on the reasons why the matter changes its appearance, texture and state, through the simple actions we take to prepare a food.
Go shopping
Go shopping With children it is not always a pleasant experience. But if we do it without stress and with the necessary explanations, it can be a fun and educational excursion at the same time.
We can help them identify the different pieces of meat, the variety of fruits and vegetables, explain the origin of the food we buy and the way in which we can identify those that are fresh or read, when they have already learned the numbers and days, Expiration dates The possibilities of learning in a transversal way are enormous, infinite.
The psychomotor skills in the kitchen
Of course, with the safety and supervision of adults, children can exercise their fine motor skills in the kitchen. We measure, weigh, take materials of different sizes and textures with our hands, pour them into containers, remove them, cut them with scissors or knives, being careful not to cut ourselves.
Matter in the kitchen
When we cook we manipulate all kinds of materials. Sugar is a thick powder, the flour is much finer. Bread dough is malleable, just like croquettes or butter. The cookie dough is soft and you can make figurines with it.
Water, milk and oil are liquids, but some are more slippery than others. Recent bread is spongy but then hardens. Raw meat is solid but has liquid, once cooked it is still solid, harder, but at the same time easier to cut.
Children can experience many different textures and also analyze your changes.
The kitchen as a science laboratory
The kitchen is a great science labSo, essentially, cooking is transforming the raw material through actions that change it by force, component addiction or energy. Physics and chemistry They are the protagonists.
There are compounds that dissolve, such as salt or sugar, changing the taste of food. But also, if they are added in excess to a liquid, there comes a point where they no longer dissolve in it, when saturation is reached. In addition, a little salt dissolved in water will end, when we let it evaporate, to precipitate and even form beautiful crystals that we can look at later, comprising fundamentals about the way in which minerals occur in Nature.
The liquid water hardens when we put it in the freezer and evaporates when we heat it, turning it into gas, being able to understand how the temperature changes the shape of the matter and its state. In addition, by freezing the water expands, which we can also study in a practical way.
The way we cook a food or their previous nature, they can give us all kinds of presentations. A asparagus can be cooked, and it will be softer, but if we put it on the grill we will get it to be soft inside but toasted on the outside, depending on the medium we use to cook it or the temperature that is reached.
Mixing water with sugar we will make a sweet liquid, but if we heat it we will be able to syrup in different concentration, a fluid that becomes more sticky until we achieve, if we reach the point of caramel, that it hardens, burning it a bit to achieve a delicious natural lollipop .
The cheese melts, first soft, expelling the fat, and becoming churruscado and crunchy if we continue to leave it in the fire.
The ham, so rich, when heated, becomes more crunchy and also, to taste, more salty, when the water evaporates and the salt remains, which is not volatile, concentrated.
The kitchen, learning and children
Cooking with our children will provide us with many moments of shared learning both in regard to daily life and in the scientific experimentation on the subject and the changes that can be produced in it by the actions we take. But there is more, and we will see it in the next topic. The kitchen, learning and children They can go together.
The kitchen is undoubtedly one of the best laboratories to deepen knowledge, the experience and emotional experiences shared with children.
