While cooking is without a doubt one of the best skills to teach your children to help them progress in their adult lives, it’s also beneficial to teaching them about STEAM. STEAM food activities are fun for both adults and children, and the school breaks and weekends are the perfect time to spend more time together in the kitchen. We encourage you to make learning more fun for your children by offering them cooking with STEAM lessons in the future. Let’s take a look at a few of the easiest lessons you can share with children of all ages. To help you out, we recommend investing in a set of our child-friendly tools, which will help to make cooking safer and more enjoyable for your little ones.
Look at the States of Matter
Solid, liquid, and gas are the three states of matter which any young child needs to learn about. However, these can be hard to demonstrate without STEAM food activities. Cooking is a more interactive way to teach your children about states of matter than just a dull chemistry lesson at school. You can easily show these three states within just one recipe or a few simple cooking ingredients.
For solid matter, we recommend using ice cubes. You can then allow these to melt, which showcases how water or liquid is made. Supervise your child over a heated saucepan, where they can add an ice cube and allow it to melt into water. From there, continue your STEAM food activities by letting the water evaporate off. This is a safe way to show off gas, which is something any child needs to learn about for their health and safety. You can then continue cooking with STEAM and learning about states of matter with any of your favorite recipes. Children will soon find chemistry to be a much more relevant subject, and you’ll increase their interest in science ready for their future school lessons.
Practice Math Skills in the Kitchen
STEAM food activities don’t just revolve around science lessons. Your child’s math skills can also improve with your help, and you can show how fun math can be thanks to cooking with STEAM. Depending on your child’s age, you can start with addition and subtraction. From there, you can advance a little further with multiplication and division. For older children, it’s time to test their knowledge of fractions. All of these can be put to the test with any recipe. Before adding ingredients to the mixture, ask your child to finish a calculation, which is a fun way to encourage cooking with STEAM. Make sure you have a range of measuring cups and a set of scales, which you can use to showcase various fractions and ensure children get to grips with these lessons.
A Basic Engineering Lesson
While you might be surprised to associate STEAM food activities with engineering, there are so many tools in the kitchen that will help to introduce your child to this field. To help you out with this task, we highly recommend investing in a set of our child-friendly kitchen tools. They are made for little hands and make cooking with STEAM much safer for your child. You can share the different uses of tools with your kids and then get them to have a go at using each of them. To challenge them further, encourage them to come up with different uses for various tools and find substitutes for tools you might be missing. This will also encourage them to think out of the box and find new ways to work with limited supplies and tools.
Learn About Chemical Reactions
Chemistry is something that many children struggle to find any real-life examples of at school, but STEAM food activities bring science to life in a whole new way. Almost every recipe that you’ll make when cooking with STEAM will involve some form of chemical reaction. Cooking is a much more exciting way to learn about chemistry than reading a textbook. On top of that, they’ll end up with some tasty treats that they can enjoy after a busy day at school.
To begin with, you need to explain how everything is made up of matter and how you can mix various ingredients together to create something new. You could even start to discuss basic elements of the periodic table, especially as your children get a little older. From there, it’s time to start mixing up ingredients and showcase the mixtures you can make by combining different foods. Chemistry and cooking have so much in common, which is why we love STEAM food activities. It’s a great way to bring science to life in a more relevant way. Make sure you choose some kid-friendly recipes to help with this task so that cooking is fun for your children as well. While we hope that you don’t burn your food when cooking with STEAM, this is another important lesson to teach your children.
There are so many fun STEAM food activities to share with your children. We recommend starting off with basic activities at a younger age and then progressing your lessons as your child grows older. Cooking with STEAM is something that will complement your child’s lessons at school, and it will help to improve their grades in science, math, and many other subjects at school. By showing real-life and practical examples of science, you’ll find it’s much easier to get them interested in these school lessons.
To help your child out with STEAM food activities in the future, make sure you offer them all of the tools they’ll need to progress in the kitchen. Standard kitchen utensils are far too big for a little child’s hand, so make sure you equip them with a set of our child-friendly kitchen tools. This will help to make cooking with STEAM safer and more enjoyable for your child so that you can spend endless hours teaching them lessons in the kitchen this year.
