I’m starting a new series on cooking recipes for kids. Something I’ve been meaning to do for awhile. Now that Thumper is very independent in the kitchen, it’s time to implement the idea.
This page will be the index page for all the recipes. In addition, I wanted to share what I’ve seen in Montessori classrooms and how we’ve half-assed adapted it for the homeschool environment.
How’s Cooking Different in the Montessori Classroom
There are several Montessori principals at play for kids cooking:
1. The ingredients and tools are on a tray.
Like many things in the classroom, all items are on a tray for the kids to carry to their workspace. It’s learning to have everything prepared before starting work. (A very good soft skill to have!) At home, I ask the children to first clear the kitchen counter, wipe it down, and put everything they need on said counter.
If items are already on the tray, you will order them in a general left to right order in the sequence of when they would use the item. For example, if the child will be using chopsticks, whip, spoon, and fork, you will place them from left to right in the order they will need to use them. But this won’t be exact because you may have to place the heaviest bowl in the center or the small spices on top.
2. Everything they need to cook is within reach and sized for small hands.
For ideas of how to set up your practical life space at home, check out my old post: Half Hearted Practical Life for the Lazy Mom. You should definitely devote space in the kitchen for the children. But it doesn’t need to be so rigid like a classroom because the home kitchen isn’t magically cleaned up by custodians and teachers when the children don’t.
Daiso has great and affordable child sized kitchen tools like a trays, whip, spatula, measuring cups, rice scoopers etc. You can also find some affordable items at Ikea. Otherwise, For Small Hands by Montessori Services specially serves this need, but they can be expensive. For example, the same glass pitcher from Montessori Services sells for $7.95 vs $3 at Ikea. (Though they don’t seem to see it anymore.
3. Recipes are typed up and easily accessible.
For Primary classroom, the recipes may be in a flip book, with a photo in the center and one line instruction on the bottom. This will allow the young child to practice reading if they can read. Notice in the picture how enticing the layout is, with the use of properly sized tools and lovely red mats and recipe accordion book. (This picture was taken from my album, laid out by my trainer.)
For elementary, I’ve seen it as laminated sheets of recipes that kids pull out. They gather all the ingredients and make their snack or what not. At first I wanted to implement this method, then realized I didn’t need to because I only have 2 kids, I can show them how to make snacks and they will remember without a cookbook.
In our house, we put it in a sheet protector folder, recipes the children wrote plus bilingual recipes I typed up. I will share some of these recipes in future posts. Bilingual recipe books work for us because both children learn to read English late and will just ignore the English. This may not work for you if your kids is more comfortable in English.
4. Recipes are easy to prepare ad appropriate for a child’s age
A small kid doesn’t necessarily have the strength or the dexterity for some of the recipes. So when we pick, we have to think, the easier the better. Here are the Practical Life preparations listed in my album, just to give you an idea:
- Isolation of Difficulty
- Egg Shelling
- Egg Shelling and Slicing
- Egg Salad Sandwich
- Recipe
- Broccoli – Breaking
- Banana – Dipping
- Celery – Spreading
- Happy Face Sandwich
- Orange Juice
- Recipe Using Measuring Cups – Granola and Yogurt
- Recipe Using Measuring Spoons – Banana and Applesauce Delight
Notice how the teacher broke up making an egg salad sandwich into 3 different presentations, working the child up to ultimately making that sandwich.
At home and at school, we’ve done and I’ve seen activities such as:
- slicing bananas
- coring apples
- making simple sushi
- cutting cheese
- cutting carrots, cucumbers, or zuchini
- baking bread, muffins
- whisk eggs for scrambled eggs.
I try to choose short and easy activities that will let the kids go and prep their own snack as part of their work period. In the beginning there was a lot of hand holding because I tend to micro-manage. But after so many years homeschooling, the kids have their routine down. After working for 1-1.5 hours, there is a natural tendency to want to take a rest and make a snack. This is one reason I really really love homeschooling; that I’m able to follow the child’s natural work rhythm rather than following a clock. Think about it, as an adult, does someone tell you when to take your work break? No, you do it when your brain needs a break.
Well, that’s what Thumper does. Astroboy, on the other hand, seems to want to eat every time he starts work. He eats breakfast for an hour, does about half an hour of work, then it’s snack time for another half hour to an hour, then he kind of just roams around till lunch time. Ha! But I have hope because I’ve seen that kids do grow into the whole routine.
How We’ve Adapted Cooking at Home
I had a friend who would let her kid climb up on the counter to reach plates high in the cupboards, hold plates with only one hand, and put in/take out a very hot cast iron Dutch pancake. Practically gave me a heart attack when I saw it, and yet I admired her ability to trust her child. As someone who doesn’t really like messes, doesn’t remember to prep, and am a bit concerned about safety and dishes/plates breaking, I’ve had to accept that Practical Life in our house is not going to look the same as the classroom.
But it is okay. For me, other than giving kids a sense of independence, practical life is really a different mindset for the parent, that you believe your child is capable of working around the kitchen. It may not be as perfect as you, an adult who has done it for years, are able to do, but the more you let them do it the better they get.
1. Take the graduated approach
What works for me is a leveling approach, where I let the kids do the parts of one recipe I know they can master and I complete the rest. For example, if we were making pancakes, for Astroboy, I would first let him only put ingredients into a bowl and mix. Then once he has mastered that I would show him how to take out all the ingredients, leave him to mix, come back to show him how to flip the pancakes and teach him about being careful of the heat. Once he has mastered that step, I will let him set things up, then show him how to turn on the stove. By now he is probably 5 or 6 years old and I’ve determined that he can focus and will not get distracted, has better motor skills and won’t forget that stoves can get hot. Eventually he is ready to also clean up and wash the dishes well.
I’ve seen kids in a Montessori classroom put away dishes that still have soap bubbles. The teachers comes around after class to rewash/re-rinse. This doesn’t work at home where I’m running around doing 3 things at once usually. I can’t have dirty dishes that I don’t know who washed and re-wash. So the leveled approach, where I stand by and watch my kid show me they’ve master a skill before I let them free, works better for me.
Thumper has graduated from this approach. She first just cooked, then was allowed to operate the stove, and recently, is responsible for the whole cooking process without me watching. I now am happy to let her just look at new recipes and make it herself. Grocery shopping and budget management to the cooking process will be taught next.
2. Introduce only one dish at a time
Here’s another reason why we don’t have a stack of laminated recipes. I realized I didn’t really want a stack of recipes for kids to just go read and make. As part of the graduated approach, I also make sure the kids have mastered one recipe before they move on to the rest. I don’t have time to clean up after them so it is better for me they learn how I like to operate the kitchen at home.
In addition, the recipes we use at home are not all adapted simple easy to make recipes for a classroom, but rather just things we would make and eat. I do try to find age appropriate recipes when I can. But breaking up the steps kind of allow us to introduce harder recipes earlier. These sometimes are more complicated and multi-stepped.
Recipes
Here is an index of the bilingual recipes that I will post in the future.