Do you spend time in the kitchen with your children cooking or baking? Both can be enjoyable activities to do with your little ones and will greatly benefit them. Not only does cooking allow you to spend quality time with them, but it encourages learning as you teach new skills. Their reading ability often increases from reading recipes and they increase their understanding of what goes into the foods they eat. Whether you enjoy baking desserts like a fresh strawberry pie or you fancy making a spaghetti bolognese together, below are four benefits of cooking with your children.

 Improves Reading Skills

One of the most important skills to work on with your children as they grow up is their reading skills. Everywhere you go in life you will be consuming new information, most of it by reading it to yourself. Cooking helps improve reading skills since they must read the recipes you’re using to make dessert or dinner. Most recipe books have words that will challenge your children and encourage them to ask questions about how to say them, spell them, and the meaning of the words.

 Encourage Family Bonding

One of the most beneficial things about cooking with your children is the quality time you will spend with them. Cooking encourages teamwork, and communication and allows you to bond with them in a different way from how you may normally bond. Ask another family member to join you for dinner and have your children cook for them too. This way, your children will have a sense of achievement when your guest enjoys the food you have prepared together. When cooking the meals, try to explain why certain ingredients are used in the recipe and the benefits of eating healthily.

 Teaches Your Children Life Skills

Cooking is an activity you often do most days of your life. Make it a positive activity now so they don’t dread it in the future. Teach them the fun of cooking so they enjoy it as they get older – it’s a life skill that will never go away. Ask your children what their favorite meal is and cook it with them. Show them ways to make eating vegetables more fun that way it’s easier to get them to eat their 5 a day. There are many lessons that can be learned from cooking. When researching a recipe, you and your child will often discover a few new things that you did not know before.

 Increases Math Skills

As well as improving your children’s reading skills, cooking also helps improve their math ability. Most recipes will have a wide range of measurements that you will need to adapt as you cook. This might mean halving, dividing, or adding. Encourage your children to compute the math with you. This helps them work on their maths skills but in real-life scenarios instead of at school in a classroom.