Parents always want their children to develop a number of good skills in their life. There could be many ways how they can help them in enhancing some life-skills and other skills as well like involve them in reading new books, allow them to play outside with other kids and other ways. But did you know that baking can also one of the ways to help your kids to learn some amazing life-skills?

Why should you tell your Kids to help in the kitchen?

Telling your little ones to help you in the kitchen allows them to involve in the hands-on session. That way, they can explore new flavours and new foods themselves. And not only this but it also enhances your child’s language skills, maths and even improves their emotional development.

Why you should get your Kid in the Kitchen?

Whether it is cooking or baking, both the ways are really fun and enjoyable for them. Let them give a chance to create something new and eat it. Baking also allows your kids to use all their senses and in fact, develop a great sense of taste, vision, smell, understanding ingredients and many other.

Baking helps your kids to be more comfortable with the dishes can also make them understand what to eat and what not to eat.

Baking with children can be fun and messy at the same time. But remember helping them out with something new can be creative and make them smart. How learning to bake is helpful for them in real life is explained below, have a look.

Improves their Bilateral Coordination

While baking, the methods allow your kids to use their hands in a coordinated way. Baking helps your kids to develop good bilateral coordination skills and helps them to perform goods in other areas like tie their shoelaces, drawing a line with the ruler or cutting with the help of scissors.

When you make them roll the dough balls, teach them how to use a rolling pin to roll out dough or how to flatten it with the hands. All these ways give an opportunity to practice their bilateral coordination skills.

Allow them to sift the flour: it will help them understand how to use one hand to support and the other hand to do the heavy work.

Improves their Eye-Hand Coordination

Baking any recipe calls for pouring ingredients into jugs or bowls, and also batter into tins. These ways help your kid to maintain and practice a good eye-hand coordination.

Cookies and cupcakes demand decoration with icing and frosting respectively. It is also a good way to use eye-hand coordination. If your child is finding difficulty in these activities, try out some other activities like rolling a ball, passing and gentle tossing, object relays etc.

Not every child is the same, some of them are very rickety when pouring. If your kid also finds it difficult to pour with good control, you need to work on their shoulder girdle stability to enhance these skills.

Improves their Hand Strengthening

Baking also gives your kids a chance to strengthen their hands and fingers muscles. While baking, when they need to squeeze the dough into balls or sprinkle cheese on pizza, it gets both their hand and fingers working.

Homemade icing bags are quite easy to make and are the ideal way to do hand exercises. This is the fun and also an easy way to ice the cookies with little mess. They can make basic glaze icing with icing sugar and little water to make a smooth paste.

Add 2 tablespoons of paste into a plastic bag and tie a knot in the bag. Tell them to squeeze the bag and start icing their cookies.

It depends on their hand strength that they’ll use one hand, tripod finger or both hands.

Improves their Spatial Perception and Planning Skills

Baking gives an opportunity to your kids to enhance their listening and sequencing skills. And for that, you should always be ready with a recipe while teaching them how to bake. Now it depends whether they read the recipe themselves, be it in words or pictures, or they simply follow their verbal instructions.

Good listening skills will also be helpful in their school work and baking can be one of the ways to practice this skill. One of the great life-skill that baking teaches your kid is how to organize themselves in the kitchen and how to clear the mess after working.

Teach them that they need to take all the dirty dishes to the sink and clean them. Also, make them understand to pack all the ingredients away after they are done with baking.

These skills are also improved when they are asked to cut out cookies. Teach this skill in a fun and challenging way. Ask them to cut as many cookies as possible from a single roll-out of the dough. It will make them use the cookie cutter in such a way that they’ll be left with minimum wastage.