Unit on Cooking
Words: pot, spoon, bowl, pan, refrigerator (no links--use the real thing!)
Goals: To recognize key terms by sight. To know that cooking takes place in the kitchen.
Activities
Baking sugar cookies. I bought one of those pre-packaged kits, so all I had to do was add an egg and some butter. If you’re going to do shaped cookies like we did you need a tablespoon of flour as well, which they put in teeny letters at the bottom. I did all the mixing while Charlie looked on, I helped him with two cookies and then finished myself. He seemed to like it and even tried the cookies, which is rare since he’s not a sweets fan.
Baking Pizzas. I did the tomato sauce on sandwich thins in front of him. We helped him add cheese. After all these activities, he’s starting to get the hang of that type of thing. Told him about the over and heat. He loved the pizza, but I knew he would!
Jell-O shapes. I messed this up pretty bad—you’re supposed to do two packages of Jell-O if you’re making molds, but I just did the regular thing and then tried to cut shapes out of it. That didn’t work very well. Charlie found Jell-O disgusting in every possible way—gross texture and sweet. He kind of melted down at the end.
Tossing a Salad. Helped him mix up the salad. Sadly, I have no good pictures because holding his hand and holding the bowl involved two adults. I do have this picture of him smiling as he tries to dump salad everywhere. He’s fun like that.
Book We Enjoyed
I checked out a lot of books, but none of them were really appropriate—all were too mature. Of these, my favorite was A Cow, a Bee, a Cookie, and Me by Meredith Hooper. Like I said, too mature for a toddler, but a great story about the origin of many common ingredients like eggs, honey, etc.
Please share any recommendation you have for cooking books—especially for toddlers!
