When my youngest son was born in February I was reminded of the benefits of having my children help in the kitchen from a very young age. Both of my older children (10 and 11 at the time) were able to pitch in and help make sure that we continued to have healthy and delicious meals even when I could not spend a lot of time in the kitchen.  These are skills not only help our family now, but will follow them into their adult lives.

The two questions that I hear most often are “when do I start?” and “how do I start?”  For our family the answer of when is as soon as they are old enough to stand up and follow SIMPLE instructions. Our children start helping us in the kitchen when they are toddlers. They can pass us various items, help stir, put napkins and silverware on the table, and other simple tasks.

Mixing is one of the first activities a toddler can help with and maybe the most fun. They love stirring up the pancake mix or the fruit salad. Sometimes I have to go back behind them and mix a bit more to make sure things are thoroughly mixed or give them something like a small bowl of rice or beans to ‘mix’ when there is not anything that actually needs mixing.

As they get a little older, they want to start learning how to cut fruit or salads. We start our children with some of those basic cutting tasks around age three. I know that can seem young and probably scary to some folks but we use these great kid safe knives (aff) and close supervision. They can learn to cut up the lettuce for a salad or apples for snack.  This is a great way to get them active and engaged in the kitchen.

As they are learning those basic skills, they are watching our actions in cooking the meals. It is amazing how much they soak up simply by being in the kitchen with us. As they get a little older they begin to want to tackle entire recipes by themselves. At that time, we have them help us make the recipe. If that goes well the next time (or several depending on the child), we allow them to make it under supervision. Once they have mastered the recipe they can make it on their own. We repeat that process through various recipes until they have the skills needed to follow most recipes.  We are still available to help as needed, but at that point they are free to try new recipes without our direct help.

Another frequent question is how to choose recipes for children to try. There are many children’s cookbooks but unfortunately, they are often full of overly processed ‘boxed’ foods that do not work well for us. We do enjoy some great children’s cookbooks but often the recipes are simply the ones we use for foods the children enjoy. For example, my daughter loves pancakes. So, when she wanted to learn how to make pancakes we taught her the recipe we were already using to make pancakes.

You may be thinking about the mess and time that can be involved in having children in the kitchen. It can be a challenge but the benefits far outweigh the challenges. At the toddler/preschool age the benefits include quality time spent together, fine motor skills practice, and often encourages them to be more adventurous with food. As they get older, they work on math skills, life skills, and they can begin to contribute to the family through cooking meals or preparing snacks.

I am so grateful for the time I’ve had cooking and working in the kitchen with my children. I love knowing that they are learning valuable life skills even as we spend quality time together. Over the next few months, I’ll be sharing posts with more details about knife skills, using cooking in our homeschool, and other ideas for helping children in the kitchen. Tell us in the comments when your children start helping in the kitchen and what is your biggest question or struggle with kids in the kitchen.

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When you sign up for our free resource library you will get a link and password to the library, we are adding to the library each month with new items. You will also get a bi-weekly newsletter email to keep you up to date on what we have going on.

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In some ways it seems odd to be planning on teaching my children about things that happened in my lifetime as a part of their history program, it makes me feel a little old. However, there really have been a lot of important events over the almost forty years that this section spans. There have been great improvements in technology from the average home not having a computer to the average adult having a smart phone, from the giant satellite dish that my grandmother got in her backyard for television to wireless data and cable. There have also been troubling times including the Gulf War, September 11th, and the Global War on Terror.

Last month we talked about finding those people that had experienced the Vietnam War and the Space Race but this month it gets even easier. The vast majority of adults have lived through these changing times and been impacted by at least some of the events that we are going to discuss this month. While many of these things are interconnected we plan to split our month up into three main focuses: technology, President Reagan and his policies and the changes that happened during his administration, the wars of our modern time with an emphasis on September 11th and the Global War on Terror. There are also many important figures from our time and I hope to spend some time reading biographies about some of those great leaders including Billy Graham and Ben Carson.

If you have very young children I highly recommend Fireboat: Heroic Adventures of the John J. Harvey when studying about September 11th. It is a great way to help them start to learn about that day in an age appropriate way. For older children who want a better understanding of the culture in Afghanistan I recommend Extra Credit. We read it as a read aloud last year and it brought up a lot of great discussion points. I have ordered Science Year By Year (this is a timeline of science and technology in a book. It does reference millions of years) to help the children get a better feel for just how rapidly things are changing in technology compared with centuries past. I plan to start the technology conversation with an episode of The Jetsons. I think it will be a fun way to start the conversation about how technology has changed.

In addition to our reading and discussions we always like to include a little bit of food in our history study. We will be indulging in a few foods that were popular in the ’80s and ’90s as we study through those Eras. Can anyone say Capri Sun and pizza bagels? I also learned that the ‘Hot Sign’ for Krispy Kreme was developed in 1992. That seems like reason enough for a field trip to me. I’ve included several lists of iconic ’80s and ’90s foods in the resource guide.

In our field trip list this month I kept the space related field trips as the space program was still growing and active through part of this period. June is a busy month for us but we would love to make it to see the Airbornne & Special Operations Museum and the Billy Graham Library.

I would love to hear you share your favorite part of this era in history or tell me your favorite resource in the comments. Check out our Free Resource Library for a more complete list of resources and join us as we wrap up this Journey Through History.

Resource Library

When you sign up for the Schoolin’ Swag free resource library you will get a link and password to the library, we are adding to the library each month with new items. You will also get a bi-weekly newsletter email to keep you up to date on what we have going on.

Resource Library 

This post may contain affiliate or referral links, including Amazon affiliate links. As always I will never recommend a product that I don’t believe in and you will never be charged more for purchasing through our links. It does help pay for the costs associated with the blog.

When my son was younger he, like many children, had big dreams of being a famous detective. He even had a ‘detective agency’ with his sister and several friends for a couple of years. They searched for a missing dog and always hoped they would get a big case! At age 12 he has outgrown that career goal, but I knew he would still really enjoy this review that let him think like a detective while learning new vocabulary words. We worked through Critical Thinking Detective: Vocabulary by The Critical Thinking Co.™  together as a way to increase both children’s vocabulary.

Each lesson is set up as a mystery that you have to solve and includes 18-25 new vocabulary words. In order to solve the mystery you have to understand that new vocabulary words that are used the story. You are given a paragraph or two of background information that includes some of the vocabulary words and then below that you have pictures and statements from four different suspects.

For our family I would read that case and stop whenever we came to a new vocabulary word. My two oldest children (10 years and 12 years) took turns looking up the words in their dictionaries. Once I finished the case information we talked about it to make sure that they understood both the new words and the case itself. Then we proceeded through each suspect in a similar manner. Once we had read through the statements for all four suspects we would go through and decide who we could eliminate based on the information provided.  Then they would tell me who they thought was guilty and I had them explain why. In general they agreed but once they did not and we had a discussion about why each one thought their answer was correct. In addition to being a vocabulary lesson it was an opportunity for critical thinking and being sure they were paying attention to details.

After each case there was a review page of sentences with blanks for a missing vocabulary word and a word bank of the word choices. I had the children work on this independently as a review after we had completed the case together.

The cases typically took us about 30 minutes to complete which was great because we could easily finish a case during our morning time a couple of days a week. As they got back into practice with using the dictionaries (a skill I had been neglecting) it went a little faster than in the beginning.

Each sentence in the case was numbered and the back of the book included an answer key with an explanation. The explanation used the sentence numbers to help the students find where the clues were and better understand the answers that were given if there were any questions or confusion.

Overall, we really enjoyed this book and I intend to continue using their products once or twice a week during our morning basket time. I think that it would have been too difficult for my 10 year old by herself but she is at the very youngest end of the recommended age range. However, by working through it together I think she benefited from the program. The children both enjoyed it and were excited to do another lesson which has honestly never happened for us with a vocabulary program before. If you are looking for something to strengthen your child’s vocabulary or critical thinking I suggest checking out Critical Thinking Detective: Vocabulary or one of the other products by The Critical Thinking Co.™ . Click below to read reviews for this and other The Critical Thinking Co.™  products by our other Crew members.

As an added bonus you can get Free Critical Thinking Puzzles!
A $75 Value! Delivered weekly to your inbox. Choose PreK – Grade 8. Sign Up Now!
https://www.criticalthinking.com/toscrew and use the coupon code TOSCREW18 for free shipping and 15 % off.

When you sign up for the Schoolin’ Swag free resource library you will get a link and password to the library, we are adding to the library each month with new items. You will also get a bi-weekly newsletter email to keep you up to date on what we have going on.

Resource Library 

This post may contain affiliate or referral links, including Amazon affiliate links. As always I will never recommend a product that I don’t believe in and you will never be charged more for purchasing through our links. It does help pay for the costs associated with the blog.