The Benefits of Homeschool Cooking

If you've taken on the challenge of homeschooling your children, you probably already know the importance of finding interesting and unique ways to teach them new concepts and to give them a chance to practice old ones. But you may not have realized the answer is as close as your family kitchen. Below are some of the benefits your little students can get from learning via cooking.

Math and Cooking
Anyone who can cook can do math - it's that simple. So much of what you do in the kitchen involves doing math and that's why children can learn through following simple recipes. Take, for example, the dreaded math topic of adding fractions. When kids have to learn it by looking at numbers on a page, it can be difficult. However, if you decide you're going to make a double batch of chocolate chip cookies and all of those ingredients (most of which are written as fractions) need to be doubled, your son or daughter can find great motivation in learning how to add those fractions together. They wouldn't want to come up short on the chocolate chips, would they?

Science and Cooking
If you've watched many cooking programs, you may have already become familiar with the magic of science that is at work daily in your kitchen. Helping your students see that science and giving them the okay to experiment with it can be a great learning experience. It will also make for fun lessons they won't soon forget. For example, you could teach the children about the three stages of matter: gas, solids, and liquids. You could boil water and watch it evaporate. You could freeze water to make it into a solid. And you could use water in its liquid form as part of cooking. If you have several students, ask them to predict how long it would take for an ice cube to become water vapor on the stove top.

You can design experiments that show what happens to cookies if you leave out the baking soda or the flour. My daughter got first hand experience with this very thing last weekend when we ran out of flour and I was too lazy to run to the store. Pancake mix is not a good substitute.

Literature and Cooking
Another fun way to use cooking in your homeschooling lessons is by incorporating it into your studies of literature. For many years, schools across the country have been serving green eggs and ham to celebrate the Dr. Seuss classic. Your child could prepare the same thing with a little bit of food coloring.

When your kids are reading stories about children in different lands, find recipes for the foods that kids eat in those countries. You can create a whole unit study revolving around a foreign country, and cooking up the native food is a educational winner.

Another idea is to set aside a certain part of the day for literature discussion. You and your students can prepare a snack while discussing the book your kids are reading. It's a good way to get them used to discussing books.

Art and Cooking
One of the other nice things about the kitchen is that it's a great place for kids to show off their creativity. Children can use traditional food items, such as uncooked macaroni, to create artwork.
They can also make pancakes to look like a butterfly or a mouse. Ask your kids to create a sugar cookie then decorate it so that it serves as a model of a human cell.