I love to cook with children! I am a teacher and twelve years ago, I started teaching kindergarten. I decided that I wanted to teach my class about the world. So, I decided the best way to do that would be through cooking. They loved it! Teaching the children to cook was so much fun! The children often shared places they had been and food they had eaten. The children were learning so many things when cooking. They learned about the country, how to work together, use their math skills and most importantly patience for the finished product.
The other thing that I discovered as time went on, was how the children were paying attention to the smells of the different recipes and how they remembered who they were with and where they were. This was so exciting for me. I had read that the sense of smell which is created in the olfactory bulb, which is in the limbic system of the brain, is closely associated with memory and feeling which is sometimes called the emotional brain. Smells can bring memories and powerful responses almost instantly. Because the olfactory bulb has a close access to the amygdala, which processes emotion and the hippocampus which is responsible for associative learning. The first time you encounter a smell you link it to an event, person, or moment. The next time you encounter the smell you elicit the memory or mood. This is so exciting for both myself and my students!
Watching this happen, gave me the inspiration to write a series of childrens book to teach children about the world through the magic of food. When children are immersed in culture they learn more meaningfully and remember always.
My vision is that all children will want to learn about the world through cooking.