Maybe it would not come to your mind that kitchen can also be good place to improve the
children’s skills. Under these circumstances, people spend more time at home, and usually it
takes more time to prepare the food as well.

It might be challenging for you to finish with all the chores in time, but we are still
encouraging you to involve the kids. Children are often more than happy to be helpful, so
don’t be afraid to ask for their participation. They can flavour the food, mix the ingredients,
school-age kids can help peel or cut vegetables – according to their skills.
We have brought you some fun activities to do in the kitchen that can lighten up the boring
days while their fine motor skills and creativity can improve.

• Make colourful pancakes:
  You can colour the batter with food colourings. It is fun to make several colours in different bowls and try to make shaped or just colourful pancakes.
• Paint with salt: Have a thicker, coloured paper and let the kids draw on it with a glue stick. For example, they can draw what they want to eat at the moment. Then let them pour salt on the paper – bigger ones can follow only the glue lines. When ready, remove the unwanted salt, and pour some water drops on the lines with a pipette or a wet brush. Look how the salt is getting coloured by the paper. You can explain the happenings to the bigger kids.
• Play with dry pasta: If you have piled up some dry pasta, you can mix different types in a big bowl and let the children sort them on a tray by shape or colour. Bigger children can try to make patterns in an order or the children who can already read, can have fun playing with letter-pasta as well. If they are ready with this, they can build a city using the pasta.
  Let their creativity fly.

Let the children ease you from the hard tasks, give space to their creativity and do not forget: there is no strength without unity! 🙂

Forest Tale Daycare

This article is translated by Anita Nagy.
Click here for the Hungarian version.