Tiddlers specialises in cooking for children, skills development and food awareness. We currently have many classes across Sydney creating happy chefs. We are expanding into more child care centres following the success of our cooking parties, events and private lessons.

Cooking assists children in reaching important milestones while having fun. Here is a list of some of the benefits of cooking for children of all ages:

• Healthy eating habits
• Self esteem
• Fine motor skills
• Gross motor skills
• Creative and imaginary development
• Social skills
• Cognitive development
• Vocabulary skills
• Learning about different cultures
• Learning about origins of foods

Healthy eating habits:
Cooking encourages kids to try healthy foods. Parents’ feedback shows that kids are more likely to sit down to a family meal when they help prepare it.

Improving self esteem:
When our chefs say, “I made it myself”, they feel a sense of accomplishment. When children like what they cook, they feel a sense of pride and achievement.

Fine and gross motor skills:
Cooking involves all sorts of new types of movements that allow preschoolers to experiment with manipulating their muscles and practising their fine and gross motor skills. Actions involve sprinkling, mixing, measuring and more.

Creative and imaginary development:
Getting children involved in the kitchen also improves their comprehension and reasoning skills, teaches them how to follow directions, enhances their imaginations, makes them more resilient to peer pressure, and gives them practical life skills. Children love the creative freedom of open-ended art projects. When they engage in self-directed art activities, it encourages them to explore and express themselves without rules.

Social skills:
Experience has shown that there is something about good food that sparks a flurry of conversation. So, for parents who have a difficult time communicating with older children, spending time together in the kitchen is a perfect way to encourage them to open up about their day.

Cognitive development:
For all ages, cooking is one of the best ways to learn math and pre-math skills. For preschoolers, cooking encourages number recognition, counting cupfuls, and basic numerical concepts like “more,” “all,” and “half.” Older kids get practice reading fractions and doing addition.

Vocabulary skills:
When children cook, they are exposed to an entirely new set of words. Using words like skillet, preheat, teaspoon, defrost, brown, drain, and grate expand a child’s mind. Also, we read to learn, and cooking is one of the best ways to show kids that reading offers tangible results. Following step-by-step instructions to get to a finished result is an important reading skill, and using that skill to cook shows kids that reading has very practical benefits.

Learning about different cultures:
It is far more interesting to teach kids about the Chinese New Year by making a Chinese traditional dish than by giving them a history lesson. Kids learn by experience. Cooking touches all of their senses, enabling them to remember what they have learned in a way unlike any other.

Learning about origin of foods:
When they cook together, kids learn that pizza doesn’t have to come from a restaurant and spaghetti sauce doesn’t have to come from a jar. One of the easiest and most enjoyable things to cook with kids is bread. Many kids think bread is a raw ingredient. Just showing them that they can make white bread in their own homes is a revelation to many kids.