Cooking: So Many Skills in One Activity

Cooking is a valuable life skill that teaches children a variety of helpful skills. Cooking incorporates a variety of academic skills such as learning about food and food safety, as well as building math, science, literacy, and fine motor skills. Working in the kitchen helps kids develop many important skills. They’re working on fine motor skills and coordination when they scoop, measure, spread, and stir. Following a recipe helps teach them to follow directions, wait, and turn-taking. Also cooking and eating with others helps improve social skills and communication. Cooking is also an excellent time to bond and have fun while learning new skills. These are all skills we work on in speech, occupational, and physical therapies!

Making cheesecake in OT!

Some Tips to Make Cooking with Your Child Easier

visual instructions make cooking easier for visual learners. You can turn your recipes into visual recipes with programs like Lessonpix.
Preparation! Make sure you have all the ingredients you need before you start. Some children will like looking for the ingredients in cabinets, while others will need the ingredients measured out so they can add them to a bowl. Adapt the experience to the child’s abilities.
Have fun and remember mindset is important- if the idea of cooking with your child sounds more stressful than fun to you, it might not be the best activity for you. You can ask your child’s therapist to do a cooking activity and provide the ingredients. If you are stressed, your child will be too. Remember, messes can be cleaned up, hurt feelings are harder to fix.
Recipes don’t need to be fancy. Some great ideas for kids with autism or other exceptionalities are making a sandwich, break-and bake cookies, pancakes, or just decorating cupcakes. I like to look for sales on sandwich, waffle, and quesadilla makers for my boys. They think they are so much fun to use. I give them as Christmas gifts so they know they are theirs. My oldest loves making quesadillas for dinner. It’s such an easy machine to use and you can teach them to be careful when cooking.