10 Things Your Child Is Learning Every Time You Cook Together

Cooking with our children is an absolute joy. It’s also, well it can give you a bit of a headache, can’t it? You walk into the kitchen full of good intentions, the kids are really excited, and before you know it there’s stuff going on everywhere. Everyone wants to get involved with everything, which is lovely and chaotic in equal measure.

That chaos is partly why I started looking at cooking in a different way, and why Dinky Bakers came about.

But there’s another reason I wanted to write this post. Something I think a lot of parents quietly feel. I have definitely felt it myself.

Between work, family life and everything else going on, the last thing you want to do at the end of a long day is pull out a workbook. I’d almost lose sleep over it, honestly. Worrying I wasn’t doing enough.

Then I started paying attention to what was happening in the kitchen. And cooking, it turns out, can help with a lot of this. It’s one of the most natural ways for learning to happen and one of the most relaxing. So this week I wanted to write about something we take for granted every single day: how much our children are actually learning every time we cook together. This isn’t too take away the learning at school, this is to help create a learning environment at home in a relaxed way.

Be assured – You don’t need a full recipe. You don’t need a highly equipped kitchen. You just need a few minutes side by side. And grow, one stage — or one recipe — at a time, through stages, not ages.

This one crept up on me. One day I realised my children were doing maths whilst we were cooking and I hadn’t even noticed it was happening. But once you start looking, maths is everywhere in the kitchen and not just the obvious measuring-and-weighing sort.

Take something as simple as a sandwich. There’s shape in the bread, shape in the cucumber slices. There’s counting — how many slices of bread, how many slices of cucumber. There’s sharing equally, and there’s fractions the moment you pick up the knife to cut it. Halves, quarters, triangles.

And here’s the bit that matters most to me. If your child struggles with maths in a paper-led, classroom environment, cooking is a completely different way in. The kitchen is relaxed to start with. Cooking is visual, tactile, and uses more than one sense at a time — sight, smell, touch, taste, sound. When more than one sense is working, our minds really come alive. For a child who finds worksheets hard going, this is a much more natural, much more forgiving way to take all of that on board.

A recipe is, at its heart, a step-by-step process. Step one, step two, step three, step four. Follow them in order and you get something you can eat. Miss out step two — your flour and sugar are in but the eggs and butter aren’t — and by the time you get to step four, something’s gone a bit wrong, hasn’t it?

That’s a lovely lesson in itself: there is a process, and the process exists for a reason. If we don’t follow it, sometimes things go wrong. Not always — sometimes you get away with it. But sometimes you really don’t.

Now, if you sit down with some children and say “let’s read”, you can sometimes see the panic set in. Getting them to sit still can be a real battle. But when the reading is tucked inside “let’s make biscuits”, it doesn’t really feel like reading.

I wouldn’t even suggest they read the whole recipe at first. You could start with a visual recipe — pictures, with the words underneath. Take it in turns reading a step. Ask them to point to words they already know. There’s so much adaptation you can do, and all of it counts.

Every time your child stirs, pours, chops, squeezes, or kneads, they are strengthening the tiny muscles in their fingers and hands. Absolutely superb for so much more than cooking — handwriting, getting dressed, doing up buttons, tying shoelaces. So much of what we ask our children to do in a day comes down to fine motor strength.

Planning actually matters in the kitchen. You need all your ingredients out and ready, any equipment you might need, your workspace clear. Your children aren’t going to master this straight away — it’s really something that blooms towards the Little Chef stage — but planning is a life skill, isn’t it?

They’ll need it when they pack a school bag, when they think about what lessons are coming tomorrow, or when they’re putting together a packed lunch. Particularly as they move on to secondary school, it becomes even more important. Cooking is a lovely, low-stakes place to start practising.

Sequencing goes hand in hand with this. It’s the understanding that this has to happen before that. You can’t necessarily skip steps or do it in a different order, because there’s generally a reason for the order it suggests. That said — sometimes it’s fun to change the sequence on purpose, just for interest. Occasionally you’ll even create something better than the original.

This is, honestly, one of the best ones — if not the best one. When our children have made something and they’re just so proud — you can see their confidence has grown so, so much in that moment.

You’ll see it as you work through the Dinky Bakers stages, because the whole idea is for them to slowly become more independent and to see that they can do these tasks with less and less support from an adult. That’s exactly what builds confidence.

The independence can come from something as simple as a child creating their own sandwich for their school day. They’ve independently achieved that. Then when they go in with their sandwich and sit down to lunch, they can tell their friends quite confidently that they made it themselves — and they chose what to put in it (within reason!).

When children slowly and carefully walk through the stages, that’s when they can truly take the lead in the kitchen. And really start to grow and shine.

There is so much vocabulary in the kitchen. Honestly, I’m still learning new words — there’s always some unfamiliar ingredient appearing that stumps me. Whisk, fold, simmer, zest, dice, sift, knead, grate. These are words your child is picking up almost by accident.

Even when your child isn’t talking back to you, keep talking through what you’re doing. “We’re stirring the pancake mixture now.” “We’re going to sift the flour.” They are listening, even when they don’t look like it. And once you’ve made something, get them to tell someone else about it — a sibling, a grandparent, anyone who’ll listen. “Why don’t you tell your sister what we’ve made? What did we add first?” That’s all language work, and it feels like chatting rather than a lesson.

I’m not entirely sure this one is more for the children or for us parents, because certainly sometimes as parents we need some of this as well. But this is the children’s list today, so let’s stick with them!

Sometimes cooking doesn’t go to plan, even when you think you’ve followed the recipe. Things flop. They just don’t look like they’re meant to. My icing on a cupcake — gosh — it just will not go to plan sometimes, even with the best will in the world. But that’s such a good thing for children to experience. To learn that sometimes it just doesn’t work out, and that’s absolutely fine. Quite often that’s when we learn the most.

There’s also the plain old waiting. You put the biscuits in the oven, you must wait 10 to 15 minutes — they’re not coming out any sooner. And if we’re making bread and waiting for the dough to rise, we’ve got even longer.

I think it really helps to talk this through before you start. “We’re going to make bread, and while we wait for the dough to work its magic, you’ll have to wait an hour or so.” If they already know the wait is coming, it helps them not want to give up halfway.

It’s just not worth the battle. And the consolation prize, of course, is that even when a recipe doesn’t go as planned, it usually still tastes good. I’ve left biscuits in the oven far too long. I’ve put the wrong thing in by mistake more times than I care to admit. I don’t get it right all the time — and neither do our children.

Cooking uses every single sense — touch, smell, taste, hearing, sight. Not necessarily all at the same time, but quite often more than one is working together. That’s a rich sensory experience even before you sit down to eat.

Senses vary wildly from child to child. Some children will absolutely be fine putting their hands in the dough. Others will take one look and say no thank you. That is absolutely fine. It’s not to say they never will, it just needs to be taken a bit slower. And there are always workarounds: spoons, little tools. You don’t necessarily need to be touching the food for cooking to “count”.

When you cook with your child, you get a natural opportunity to introduce foods that are healthy, or deemed as being healthy. Sometimes our kids aren’t that keen, and that’s OK, but it’s important we’re showing them how food can be healthy.

A biscuit you’ve baked together won’t have the preservatives a shop-bought one does. And they’ve made it — so they have a better understanding of what’s gone into it. They still get the sweet treat, but on your terms.

It’s also a brilliantly low-pressure way to introduce foods they wouldn’t normally try. A little board with a few bits and pieces on it, one of which is something they’re not sure about. No pressure. Just an offering. You might find, when your back’s turned, that they quietly sneak a little try. Which is great.

The aim here isn’t rules. It’s curiosity. Natural ingredients, eaten without fuss, in the company of people they love.

This one is the big one.

When we cook with our children, we’re creating a bond. We’re creating memories. We’re giving them life skills. And we don’t need to be cooking a full restaurant dinner, start to finish, for any of that to happen. As the Dinky Bakers stages show, it can be a tiny task within a recipe — tearing the herbs, stirring the pan, choosing what to put on top. You’re working together. You’re talking together. That might be about what you’ve been doing during the day. It might be about what’s in the bowl. It might be about absolutely nothing in particular.

There’s something really lovely about the fact that you’re not sat staring at each other. You’re both carrying out your tasks, and creating something wonderful together. It’s one of the most relaxed kinds of chat you can have with a child.

Some of my favourite moments are the messy ones — when all three of mine are pottering in the kitchen and one of them decides to go and cut some flowers from the garden for an empty jam jar on the table, making it all look pretty. When we sit down together and someone’s put a bit of eggshell in something and it genuinely, truly doesn’t matter. Those are the times I’ll remember. The brilliant memories we’re actually making.

Try it today: the 5-minute sandwich

If this post feels like a lot, here’s the simplest possible starting point. A sandwich. Honestly. The same sandwich from Section 1, laid out so you can see how it flexes across all three Dinky Bakers stages. Same ingredients, same five minutes — just change which parts your child owns.