Teachable Moments Through Cooking
With the kids at home doing Florida Virtual School, we have been loving it! The kids are doing well, and we have found our groove. We definitely had a rough start in the beginning, but like I said before, they are doing great! With Florida Virtual School (different from live zoom classrooms) we work at our own pace, and a lot of the hands-on learning we are on our own for.
My kids learn through touch, and applying what they learn through real life.Something I do just about everyday for my family is cook, so I figured having them help me in the kitchen is the perfect way to implement homeschool learning into our normal everyday life.
You will be surprised how much of a classroom a kitchen is! Making something as simple as rice can hit 4 different subjects, Language Arts, Math, Science, and Social Studies! In this blog post I am going to share how cooking and making Success Rice can be a teachable activity for yourself and the kids.
All Four Subjects in the Kitchen
Language Arts in the kitchen: READING!! To cook, you have to read the ingredients! For RJ (2nd grade), since he is a full on reader he loves to read everything, and tell us the ingredients and steps. Since Elias (kindergarten) is an early reader, we had him locate sight words on the Success Rice Jasmine Rice box, and tell us words he recognizes.
Math in the kitchen: Cooking rice is a great math lesson because you have to understand the rice to water ratio. If you’re doubling a recipe, you’ll need to double all the ingredients. Since we are a large family, doubling recipes is nothing new to us. So we turned it into a math lesson for the boys. I wrote out “if 1 bag of rice needs 4 cups, how many cups of water will 2 bags of rice need?” RJ put his thinking cap on and solved the problem!
Science in the Kitchen: The science lessons in the kitchen are ENDLESS. But the 2 that we touched on was volume, and different states of matter. When we plan For volume, we asked “will the amount of water in the measuring cup look the same in the big pot, or look smaller?” , and we also asked “when the water starts boiling, what state does it change from and to what”! It’s so fun to see their science lessons happening in real life!
Social Studies in the Kitchen: Food comes from somewhere!! And everything we make, we figure out exactly where it is grown and where it originated from. Last week, the boys learned where rice comes from and how long rice has been a food! Their minds were blown that it is from China, and has been around longer than grandma and grandpa lol.
These are just a few examples of teaching moments in the kitchen that I have personally done with the kids. Growing up, I was always in the kitchen with my mom asking her a million and one questions abut what she’s doing. Children’s minds are so curious and ready to absorb, that’s why I make sure to keep them engaged and involved on everything that I am dong whether it’s in the kitchen, adding up finances, writing a check, or even outside gardening!
Thank you Success Rice for partnering with me on this blog post on Teachable Moments in the Kitchen.
