[Sca-cooks] Mission Impossible--long

[johnna holloway]

Johnna Holloway sends greetings.
( My son began his culinary career by sitting on the counter and licking
bowls at about 18 months, so I have some experience here.) The problems
are attention span, size, and the mess factor. How big of a mess can you
handle at any given time? If this is going to be a long term
arrangement,
every day after school for the next year or so, then you might want to
get
a juvenile  or junior cookbook with an easy format and big color
pictures.
Your nephew can look through it and choose a recipe, then you can make
plans
to make it. Include shopping for the ingredients, the measuring, the
preparation,
etc. Most public libraries, at least here in the USA (and most probably
where you
are in AU)  should have cookbooks on this level and there are
a number of story books that also involve the preparation of food. Read
the
story; make the dish. Once you get used to having him around, you'll
find yourself
creating menus that involve him without even thinking about it. having
salad, he can
tear the lettuce. Need eggs broken; he can help. Teach him to measure
and add.
You also might check out paperback copies of such things,
as Simple Kitchen Experiments and Gobble Up Nature; Fun Actities to
Complete and Eat
for Kids in Grades 1-4. Again check with a local library or even
possibly the school
library. There are also a number of art and craft project books
where you use common kitchen ingredients and make playdoughs and glooopy
cornstarch
mixtures that are inexpensive and can be real attention grabbers for a
number of
sessions. The home schooling market in the US also has a number of
websites that
go into these sorts of at-home creative projects. You should be able to
search those on
the web without problems.
Lastly, think ahead to the holidays. Patrick and I started making
gingerbread houses
when he was 4. This year he and his fellow Webelo's will be here at the
end of
November making their third gingerbread house for the elementary school
library. They
grow bigger and more involved every year. (Plus they are an excellent
way to use up
unwanted Halloween candies....)

Johnna


CLIPPED
> Elizabeth A Heckert wrote:
> >    Okay, IMF Cooks, should you accept this mission, you will help prepare
> > (in fifteen years or so!) a handsome single male cook!
> >    I have started looking after my kindergarten age nephew after school.
> > He has consistantly pestered to help cook at dinner, but gets too
> > distracted.  (His cousin, the telly, etc.)   Today we made a sucessful
> > batch of muffins, as his cousin is at day care, and the telly's on boring
> > old CNN!> >    Being child-less myself, I'm a little at a loss to know what your
> > average five-year old can handle as far as cooking goes--for example, we
> > were putting the tins in the oven, and his arms are too short to reach
> > the racks easily (Doh!)    Any suggestions?
> >    Elizabeth