Cooking and baking are great ways to interact with your children. It is a way to spend time together, develop appropriate skills, and, of course, have a finished product. There are many emerging skills that can be incorporated into cooking and baking.
SKILLS
Below are the skills we will incorporate into cooking.
1. Sequences and Direction Following
This helps your child interpret printed directions through the use of prepositions and temporal language.
2. Concepts
This helps your child recognize concepts such as size, shape, and color.
It also helps with descriptive concepts such as wet, dry, hot, cold, hard, or soft.
3. Fine Motor Skills
This helps your child work on bilateral integration, crossing the midline, and developing handedness (hand dominance).
4. Recall and Retrieval
This helps your child boost memory skills and comprehension.
5. Gross Motor Skills
This helps your child improve strength, balance, and posture.
6. Sensory
This helps your child identify and tolerate different textures, smells, and tastes.
7. Time Concepts
This helps your child with time-telling and simple math concepts.
8. Number Groups
This helps your child with the different uses for numbers: volume, temperature, and counting.
9. Asking and Answering WH Questions
This helps increase your child’s thinking and problem solving skills.
10. Vocabulary Development
This helps increase your child’s understanding and use of vocabulary.
11. Using Complete Sentences
This helps your child to use grammatically correct and complete sentences to clearly express their ideas.
12. Turn Taking
This teaches your child to share and take turns.
13. Listening Skills
This helps to improve comprehension through good listening skills.
14. Descriptive Language
This helps your child to recognize and incorporate size, color, and function words.
Fun Fruit Salad
Ingredients
2 cup diced honeydew
2 cup diced cantaloupe
2 cup diced watermelon
2 cup halved grapes
2 cup blueberries
1 can diced peaches (do not drain)
Directions
1. Dice honeydew, cantaloupe, and watermelon.
Discuss the differences in color, taste, and texture.
2. Toss all melons together.
3. Add grapes, blueberries, and diced peaches.
Talk about the shapes and colors of grapes and blueberries. Discuss how diced peaches are different from fresh peaches.
4. Toss together.
Review how the order of the ingredients was combined.
5. Cover and refrigerate.
The activities suggested here are designed to reinforce in children some very basic skills. This is not intended as a substitute for therapy by licensed therapists. If you have concerns about your child’s physical or language development, consult your pediatrician or a licensed therapist in your area.
Supervise your child when using sharp knives and other potentially dangerous utensils.
© 2012 The Therapist’s Cookbook by Jacqueline Messineo-Cowles