Celebs Sensation: ambition while cooking

Showing posts with label ambition while cooking. Show all posts

Teaching Math to a 10 year old With Cooking – Secrets they don’t teach you at school

10 year olds are busy bees! How do you get them to practice math at home? To be effective, one great way is for kids to practice math through hands’ on activities which gets their interest. At times, there must be some injection of fun and not so serious an environment to get them to understand math.

Math basics are essential and you will be surprised how our homes are equipped to ensure that our kids acquire those math fundamentals.

1 FRACTIONs

10 year olds need to learn a lot about fractions. From basic fractions that are with common denominator they will go on to learn uncommon denominators and the use of fractions in various math operations.

It was not easy for me when my son was just learning fractions. Drawing diagrams and using color just did not get it home with him. I sliced potatoes at first to show him what fractions meant.

Potatoes helped greatly and I also turned it into an art project! But potatoes did not help much when denominators and numerators differed and operations become complicated.

Cooking however is a very good method to teach fractions. How?

For simple fraction practice, simply follow a recipe.

For more advanced fraction, get your child to double or halve the recipe. Another practice is asking your child to figure out which measuring cups to use. For example, only make available a 1/4 cup measuring cup when baking a cake. Help your child figure out how many 1/4 cups go into each 1/2 and full cup. And so on.

Check my blog entry on Love Cookies to help with a quick recipe for giving your kids a lesson on fractions.

2 DECIMALS

Decimals is the other thing that 10 year olds need to learn. Teach decimals from basic fractions.

Children will also work with decimals with money. If you give your child an allowance, you may want to give slightly different amounts. Vary the practice. Ask your child to add the decimals or subtract.

You can also show your child how to compute the tip at restaurant, which will practice decimals.

Cooking is again an excellent method. Change the recipe to decimals. Give your child the measuring cups and so on and he will need to translate the decimals to fractions.

You can use the same principle for other math basics.

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Happy Cooking!

Why take the trouble To Teach Kids While Cooking

The ability to cook is a great asset for our kids. Hear the phrase 'Give a child a fish, he eats for a day, Teach your Child to Fish, he eats forever. In this case, teach your child to cook, he will never go hungry and at the same time helps them eat healthy.

Children are so "teachable" and there exists opportunity for strengthening food-related life skills. And with it they take care of their own nutrition. Cooking gives children a boost of confidence, exposure to new and/or healthful foods, and often provide the curiosity and motivation needed to continue cooking. Cooking also promotes togetherness between parents and their children - cooking creates bonds and memories that cannot be taken away. It makes the trouble all so worth it.

Cooking with Kids is a wonderful strategy to help children with so many things. Helping them with school lessons, teaching them to be self reliant and the most beautiful part of it, mum/dad and kids create special moments. Cooking a meal does not become a chore but an activity that becomes incredibly fulfilling experience.

Happy Cooking!

Please tell me what you think. Look forward to your views and experiences.

Happy Pancakes

Do you get your kids asking for snacks or saying that they are hungry or there is just nothing to eat!

In situations like this, I look to the good old PANCAKE. There are other quick bites too but I thought I’d share with you my simple pancake recipe in this blog.

Pancakes are quick, easy and tasty snack.

Have a look at this recipe, it’s extremely easy to remember and easy to make. It makes about 5 to 6 pancakes.

Lets see how to get your kids involved and what they learn with such a simple recipe.

Shopping List and Parent’s Teaching Aid

1 cup self raising flour
(self raising flour is better than plain flour
because of its enhancing structure)

1. What is flour 2. What is flour’s texture 3. What is flour made of 4. Numbers – 1 cup

1 cup milk
(for kids, please use fresh milk or full cream.
Low fat milk is simply not encouraged for kids

1. Where does milk come from?2. Fresh milk vs ow fat milk because of the low fat content
3. What does milk have? 4. Why is milk good for you

1 egg

Let your kids break the egg. Show them the yolk

1. Where do eggs come from
2. Why do eggs have the yellow and the white
3. What happens if you boil eggs
4. Where do chicks come from

Notice that everything comes in 1.

For older children – this is a simple and great recipe to teach multiplication and division and using common sense

e.g.
1. How much flour, eggs and milk I need if I need to make 10 pancakes
2. What happens if I half the ingridients? (Teaching fractions)
3. What happens if I double or triple the ingridients? (fractions and multiplying)

A little sugar and salt
Not too much. Only enough to give a taste.

Blend everything together. Have your kids know what’s little or a lot

Place some oil in a pan and fry the pancakes a little at a time You can help your kids. Be careful of the fire. Teach kids about fire and how something that was raw gets cooked with fire.

Serve as is or with butter and honey or marmalade or fruit, or anything that the kids or adults like.

Mums and Dads,

I hope you and your kids have a wonderful time making the pancakes.

Please let me know how they turn out and whether your kids learnt a lot more that either of you thought!

Happy Cooking!

Useful Resources on Kids and Cooking

Dear Parents, I hope you have been enjoying reading experience this blogs on applying cooking to teach our kids.

If you would have noticed, for a lot of the articles, I set out links to information that could be useful to you if not directly, indirectly in your dealing with your kids and the whole cooking experience. Being an accountant, I have also included some elements of finance. Its for your convenience and I thought that a lot of these material, are an excellent choice and provides value for money.

For this entry, i thought to provide some easy reference information and material that could be useful in teaching kids and cooking. The internet is a huge place and there’s just everything of everything everywhere. And sometimes, we just want something simple. How to get the kids to eat or even trying to figure out what to Ccok.

Some of the books and resources are from Amazon and a lot of others from various places, which I thought are quite good.

Kid Approved Meals! 13 Weeks Of Breakfast & Lunch Menus That Are Kid-Tested & Mom Approved, With Categorized Grocery Shopping Lists Accompanying Each Menu. Perfect For Homeschool Families, Stay At Home Moms, And Daycare Providers

This site http://astore.amazon.com/http1teachinb-20
has some great books and ideas in one page. The prices are also reasonable and constantly with ideal promotions. The books are about recipes but what is more interesting is that there are selected books about cooking and kids.

I do hope enjoy these resources. Do let me know if there are other useful resources for other mums and dads. Glad to post it on the blog

"I Want to be a Chef" - Build A Business Plan

My 9 year old is determined to be a chef when he grows up. He has been interested in cooking since he was 2 and I perhaps fueled that energy by allowing him into the kitchen and ‘cook’ dishes with real pots and pans.

He feels that serving people food is the best way to make them happy. And he wants to ensure that he has good and tasty meals and more importantly is that everything served at his restaurant must not cost more than a dollar! He reasons that everyone must be able to afford and enjoy good food. He has got the name of the restaurant, which every now and then changes as his experiences change and develops. He had started with “The White Restaurant” and stuck to it for a few years, until recently, he wrote up his menu with name of restaurant changing to “The King’s Restaurant”. He says that anyone who eats at his restaurant is a king. (He did not mention about the queens though!)

I realized that perhaps I should document his thoughts down. I drew up a business plan for him and asked him to put his dreams, plans and action steps.

I thought to myself that he should be reminded of his young thoughts when he grows as well as for my husband and I to reminisce on our young son. It reminds me to say that the internet is a wonderful thing to allow us to pen and share this information with as many people as possible. And who knows, these ideas may just become real someday.

It is a simple plan, I asked him to complete a template with his ideas. It looks something like this. I have summarized it with the items that I asked him to think about. I helped him with it and it now runs to about 4 or 5 pages.

Name of Restaurant/Café
How will your menu look like
What is your theme
Building/corner shop/near a school/city?
What will you sell - Food and Beverages
Who will be your cook?
When do you want it open
What will you price your food and beverage?
Where will you open your restaurant
How many people will work for you
How much money will you need

Children can be taught from young the importance of planning and such and to articulate their dreams. These plans will change over time. But I realized an important aspect of this exercise – which is that getting him into the kitchen and cooking taught me to teach him other things, like thinking about his ambitions, penning them down, to be as specific and to have the entrepreneurial mind set.

I look forward to hearing your views and feedback. I am so quite happy to draw up a
business planfor the mums out there – just drop me your email in the subscription button to the left.

Happy cooking and teaching your kids to have an ambition while cooking