Importance of Food Preparation and Activities Involved in It

This lesson is designed for parents to guide them about the importance of teaching food preparation to their children.

Introducing children to the kitchen at a young age gives them a chance to see how combining certain foods can result in something truly magical. They are also more likely to develop a lifelong passion for cooking and healthy eating. Also, children need to gain skills in food preparation in order to provide their valuable contribution as members of their families. 

By using this activity, children can easily learn how to sort, match, read labels, measure, and many other skills. Thus, it is important to involve children in preparing food from an early age. 

Food preparation involves many steps such as grating, peeling, slicing, tonging, breaking the egg and removing egg skin, etc. The activities will not only teach children to be more independent, but they’ll also teach them where food comes from and how it ends up on their plates. 

It also allows the parents to spend some quality time with their children and equip them with basic life skills.

List of Food Preparation Activities for Toddlers

1. Cutting and Dicing: This cutting and dicing activity helps a child to how to hold and use a knife. It also teaches a child to cut salads such as cucumber, tomato, radish, banana, etc for themselves
2. Peeling: This peeling activity helps a child to learn how to hold and use a vegetable peeler. Vegetables that can be introduced for peeling are cucumber, carrot, radish, etc.
3. Shelling an egg: This activity helps a child to learn how to shell an egg and slice it using an egg slicer.
4. Juicing: This juicing activity helps the child to juice citrus fruits such as oranges using a manual juicer.

Benefits of Food Preparation in a Child’s Development

1. It helps to become independent and responsible
2. It strengthens finger grip and improves hand-eye coordination
3. It improves fine motor skills
4. It improves memory and concentration
5. It reinforces math concepts, organization, and early reading skills. 

Other Skills to Learn from Food Preparation Activities

As they learn basic food preparation activities, they develop more complex skills such as:

• How to operate kitchen appliances such as an opener, coffee machine, juicer popcorn maker, mixer grinder, etc.
• How to cook food on electric and gas appliances.
• How to prepare for an emergency such as a fire breakout and how to use a fire extinguisher.
• How to place all ingredients before preparing food and which ingredients are required for a particular dish.
• How to wash utensils.

Watch the video to learn the importance of teaching food preparation to a child.

Invite the child to the kitchen and ask them to help you in preparing the food of their choice, as shown in the video. This helps in instilling a sense of confidence and independence in children.

Other Related Video Resources:

• Pressing Juice
• Put Away Clothes
• Hanging Laundry

For more practical life lessons, click here.

Video Created by: James Bauckman