Preschool Cooking Activities
Tips for Making Applesauce and Cinnamon Ornaments with a Preschooler
Normally I only post preschool activities that I would give a solid “A” on a traditional grading scale. Making applesauce and cinnamon ornaments, sad to say, is not one of those activities. It might be right for someone…Just not us.
I think the problem is that the return on investment was so low. Applesauce and cinnamon ornaments are a lot of work! Rather than enjoying quality time with my son while making beautiful stocking stuffers, I ended up spending the whole time trying to keep his cinnamon encrusted fingers from decorating everything else in the room.
On the plus side though, my son had the opportunity to practice some valuable skills, so I would consider this a good preschool cooking activity for parents who have the time and inclination.
Preschool Cooking Skills:
- How to stir
- How to use a rolling pin
- How to push the cookie cutters straight down so that you get a clean cut
- How to arrange the cookie cutters to get the most out of the dough
- How to carefully move the cookies to the drying racks
If you do decide to tackle this activity, I found fantastic instructions for making applesauce and cinnamon ornaments. But, before you attempt it with a preschooler, learn from my mistakes:
- Prepare everything beforehand. Walk through the entire activity in your head and get all of the supplies together.
- Cover the table, your kid, the floor, and yourself with materials you don’t care too much about. (I covered the table with a cheap vinyl tablecloth which worked great.)
- Don’t count on being able to make any ornaments yourself.
- You might want to do the mixing yourself. Cinnamon has a tendency to explode into clouds of brown smoke when a preschooler does it.
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Preschool Cooking Activity: “Doctor” a Pizza
This is one of those “Well, Duh” activities. Obviously, bored preschooler + frozen pizza = cooking activity, but I am going to post this activity anyway because maybe there is one parent out there who hadn’t thought of it…
I always keep a few healthy frozen pizzas in the house for nights that we don’t have enough time or energy for a proper meal. By healthy pizza, I am referring to the whole grain crust, veggie pizzas that taste almost as good as the box you buy them in. You really have to add some unhealthy stuff for them to be palatable. We call this “doctoring” the pizza, and it is as necessary as preheating the oven.
This is the perfect activity for Edison. He pulls a chair up to the counter and crumbles bacon, distributes veggies, etc. We have one of those fancy, $3 cheese shredders with 5 sides, and each face of the shredder produces a different type of shredded cheese. Edison is fascinated by this thing. We end up with five different sizes of shredded cheese and way more dairy than we really need, but it is an activity in itself.
The best part is, when Little Man “helps” with the cooking, he is much more likely to eat well. All in all, this activity is messier and more time consuming than cooking alone, but it is totally worth it!
