Kitchen Play and Learning Experiences

As parents, sometimes it’s difficult to know exactly how to ‘play’ with some toys. Thinking particularly about Kitchen play, these toys looks so gorgeous and amazing but apart from pretending to eat the food and pretend it’s 'yummy'……. What else do you do with them? 

Just like the video sequence (see Experiences with Kitchen Play video) it can be as simple as a little session of quality time together to build your child’s repertoire of an independent sequence mimicking a real life experience. Cooking muffins, a salad or a pizza you can role play it together and really cook in the kitchen to show your child how they can use their amazing toys just like you.

It might take a little bit of time the first time, but once they’re shown, they will remember the series of actions to then independently ‘make you a pizza’ or ‘make a salad’.

Some benefits of using kitchen play toys:

• Developing independence
• Remembering steps in a process
• Describing actions and saying names of food/equipment along the way to develop speaking and listening
• Teaching hygiene, safety and good habits- eg washing hands, being careful of the oven, using the knife
• And of course, the most meaningful to them… quality time!!!

Remember, once they have seen and experienced something like this with you, your little darling will remember and repeat what they have seen and done to develop skills and language along the way.