In our home everybody helps out in preparing a meal everyday. But we also ask the older girls to prepare the whole meal from beginning to the end. A team of 2 girls would have to discuss, plan, wash, cut and cook a meal for the whole family (usually at lunchtime). This is the basic homemaking skills that everybody (especially a girl) should learn. Sadly, almost no public school nor private school provides this type of training to the students. Only under the homeschooling environment would a young child be taught these important lifelong skills. There are the skills that our girls would learn through the simple act of cooking:
- Teamwork: who gets to clean and cook what
- Planning: what is the menu for the meal? Is there enough food for everybody?
- Following instruction: how to follow the recipe and put the math skills into use when it needs to double or triple the ingredients.
- Creativity: when there is no recipe to follow, how to best use the food on hand? Afterall, why not create your own recipe?
- Cleanup: cooking is fun, but cleanup is also important.
Most of the young girls these days don't even know how to cook for themselves, let alone preparing a nutritious meal for the whole family. By teaching your children at a young age, you are essentially preparing them to be responsible and caring mothers in the future.
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Sonia and Viviana's turn to cook. |
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A pot of vegetables, entirely prepared by Sonia and Viviana. |
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Salad bowl. |
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Cutting sweet potatoes. |
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