Weekends are special times for fun and learning, and kindergarten readiness can piggy back onto your activities. With more time than during the week, how about cooking up some fun? Spring is a great time for playing in the mud–right in your very own kitchen. This mud is made of yogurt and a little chocolate milk mixed together. The next ingredients are favorite fruits. Because bananas are soft, they are easy for little hands to slice with a plastic knife. Big hands sliced the apple and peeled the orange. This big apple slicer cuts the apple into a flower shape. Fruit pieces taste extra yummy when dipped in the mud.
The kitchen is a great classroom. Kids can learn lots of readiness for kindergarten and life skills when they are cooking and ‘helping’. Here are a few of these skills: creating, planning, organizing, using visual details, measuring, counting, sequencing, comparing and more. Language skills include questioning, explaining, and learning specific vocabulary such as stirring, mixing, ingredients, etc. There’s some basic safety lessons and the responsibility of cleaning up after cooking, too. Just having places where things go introduces kids to a basic system of organization. Plenty of grownup activities depend on having a system. Besides math, language and thinking skills there’s valuable social skills like sharing and working together. Can you and your child cook up some learning?