Learning through play and hands-on activities involving handling food and equipment during food preparation are paramount to providing a foundational learning experience. Children learn by touching, tasting, seeing, feeling and listening. During cooking, all the senses are involved and this multisensory experience is what makes the experience unforgettable.
Mixing ingredients and shaping dough builds a child’s fine motor skills, which are needed to develop academic competencies, and since cooking involves a lot of measuring, basic math skills are improved. Today’s cooking class is dedicated to making homemade pasta, where students of younger grades have mastered all these techniques. By mixing flour and eggs, they made a thin dough, then stretched it with the help of a machine and finally left the pasta to dry.
