Sesame Street Activity of the Week: Kitchen Helper

By Rosemarie Truglio, PhD. Senior Vice President, Curriculum & Content, Sesame Workshop

Play Cookie Monster’s Foodie Truck game with your child.

Enlisting your child to help prepare snacks and meals not only builds self-esteem and self-confidence, but math skills, too. As you cook, bake, or prepare snacks together, talk about how you are following the directions of the recipes and that you’re doing lots of math as you:

• Use numbers to measure and weigh ingredients
• Find different shapes together all around the kitchen, from plate circles to baking sheet rectangles to placemat squares
• Talk about relational concepts such as big vs. small; small, medium, and large; or big, bigger, and biggest as you choose different-sized bowls and pans. Ingredients and cupboards can be open or closed, and you can teach fast and slow as you mix and blend
• Highlight spatial relations language as you use low or high heat, place items on either the top or bottom oven rack, flip over pancakes or rotate your quiche to cook evenly

Learning bonus: there’s a lot of science going on, too. Your child can see how mixing ingredients together forms a whole new substance and that liquids change into solids with the heat of an oven or the colder temperature of the freezer.

Healthy habits bonus: when children help in the kitchen, they’re more open to trying new and nutritious foods: because they were involved in its preparation, they are naturally curious how it tastes. Try these recipes with your child and talk about how healthy foods keep you strong and give lots of energy to play and learn.

• Big Bird’s Breakfast Sundae
• Rosita’s Pineapple Mango Smoothie

These are stressful days for families everywhere, and Sesame Workshop is here to help. With 50 years’ experience in early childhood education and in helping children and their caregivers face challenging times, we’ve created an online hub of resources that parents can use at home to spark playful learning, offer children comfort, and focus a bit on self-care, too. Each week, as we roll out new content, a Sesame Workshop early childhood development expert will contribute a column here with strategies to help families find ways to breathe, laugh, and play together.