Being at home with your child calls for spending hours and hours of time with your child. While you try to balance your household chores and spend quality time with your child, the kitchen may just offer you a place for both. In this issue, we’ll talk about how the kitchen can be a place for connection for your child and your family.
Benefits of family meals
Family mealtime can be a good centerpiece for each day. As mentioned in our previous wellness blog post, routine and predictability offer comfort to both adults and children. Meals also provide the opportunity to experience ourselves as a family. There is no perfect picture of a dinner time experience. It may be loud, it may be calm, it may be indoors or it may take place on top of a blanket in the backyard. Dinner time looks different for everyone, but the important aspect is doing it all together. According to recent studies, regular family meals have many benefits for children, such as an increased sense of resilience and self-esteem. The dinner table is also a good place for boosting language development as a result of being an area where families tend to talk more about their day.
Ideas for dinner time fun:
- Hold a virtual dinner party with family or friends!
- Get the family together to imagine your favorite kind of restaurant, then bring it to life. Do you want to take the role of the chef or the customer? Take turns being the server, to keep things fair.
- Mystery food game: blindfold your child and have them guess the food they are eating (We may be onto something here! You can feed your child as many veggies as you can!)
- Need some inspiration on conversations to have? One Liner Conversation starters
Benefits of cooking with your kids
Cooking together can be a fun (and delicious) learning and bonding experience. Children love cooking because they love to help and feel trusted in getting to participate in an adult behavior. Also, they are more likely to eat what they cook! Other benefits include chances to practice early math and literacy concepts, vocabulary, science, and social skills such as patience, taking turns, and following instructions. Whether you have a baby or a preschooler (or anyone in between) cooking together in the kitchen is a bonding experience which allows for a lot of learning and a lot of smiles. Check out our Ethos recipe book which holds recipes where kids can easily play co-chef!
Some ways babies can be involved in the kitchen:
- Allow active observation: there’s a lot of sensory experiences in a kitchen. Allow your baby to watch you cut, stir, mix and work your kitchen magic.
- Give them tools to pretend to play in the kitchen. They can pretend to mix while you actually mix right next to them!
Resources for math in the kitchen:
Math is all over the kitchen, in the forms of counting, estimating, and measuring. Utilize these resources to enrich your cooking experience.
– We have provided a sheet which may help you find ways to incorporate math: Tips Sheet
– The following recipes are simple and include math discussions and conversations you can have with your child as you both cook!
From the South Boston Community
We have put together a list of recipes recommended by the Ethos and South Boston Community. Please CLICK HERE to open our Ethos Recipe Book.
Bon Appetit!
Also, one of our Ethos parents shared info about a series of at home cooking classes, taught by some of Boston’s best chefs. Registration is free, with an encouraged donation to No Kid Hungry.
We hope you get a chance to share with us what your family creates in the kitchen by tagging us and using #EthosLearn. We miss you and love hearing from you all.
As always, please reach out if you need us, we are here for you! and if have something you would like to share with the Ethos community, send us an email at cpolo@ethoslearn.com.
Till Next Post,
Aleezeh Makani
Ethos Early Learning Center Educator