Baking Activities for Little Learners
Have you ever enjoyed an afternoon of baking with your little ones in the kitchen? Preschoolers absolutely love helping in the kitchen, and it may sound surprising, but they can be very helpful during the baking process! Pouring ingredients into a bowl, measuring flour using measuring cups or a scale, or stirring in the chocolate chips are all great ways to help them learn how to follow a recipe. If you have a child who loves to help in the kitchen, then these baking activities for preschoolers will be an engaging addition to your preschool lesson plans!
Lesson Components
This unit is made up of the following activities that will help to provide kindergarten readiness skills to your preschooler:
- dramatic play
- literacy and language activities
- sensory bins
- math and STEM activities
- fine motor activities
- gross motor activities
- name activity
- art activities
Dramatic Play Activity
Nothing gets my little ones more excited than playing in our pretend kitchen! If you have a kitchen set in your home or classroom, you can use it for this dramatic play center. If you don’t have one, then you can use the printable pieces in our Baking Preschool Unit to create a pretend play kitchen using boxes, bins, and a few printed pieces! Using the pretend kitchen, your child can explore measuring, pouring, and mixing! Enjoy every moment watching as their little hands get messy “baking” things in the kitchen. You can even start to form great habits they will carry with them to adulthood by teaching little ones to wash the dishes they used to bake with in a large bin of water. Include a washcloth to scrub and a dry towel to dry the dishes, too!
Fine Motor Activities
Cooking requires gross motor and fine motor skills. Your preschooler will use children’s scissors to cut their way toward a variety of baking tools in this activity. Each strip has a line that matches the tool, a straight line for the piping bag, and a squiggly for the icing spreader or mixer. It will give your preschooler great cutting practice, and they can learn new vocabulary as they cut!
Homemade playdough is so easy to make and so fun to play with. Let your child create the ultimate preschool snack and construct the different letters of the alphabet out of dough. When they are done, enjoy some pretend play as they bake them up and enjoy!
Sensory Bins
When I put together sensory bins, I love to use a variety of sensory bin fillers to get my little ones used to feeling a variety of textures! Rice is a great filler for sensory bins because you can create whatever color palette you want. Other great options for baking themed bins are flour, sprinkles, or sugar! Then, just add in some letter cards from our Baking Preschool Unit and your child can practice matching uppercase and lowercase letters.
Math Activity
Cookies are a favorite in our house, and this chocolate chip cookie math mat is the perfect addition to the baking activities for preschoolers mentioned above. Just cut out some cookies with different numbers of chocolate chips and have your child count and find the matching cookies.
This activity combines art, math, fine motor development, and just plain fun! To combine all of these skills into one, we are decorating number cupcakes using beads. All you need to do is have your child count out the number of beads to match each cupcake and then string the beads onto a pipe cleaner to create a colorful candle. You could even sing happy birthday and pretend to blow them out!
If you are looking for baking activities to use outside the kitchen, then check out this Baking Preschool Unit! It combines all the fun of baking while letting your child learn some important kindergarten readiness skills. Your child will love creating recipes in their play kitchen, reading a baking book, and even using different kitchen tools to create their own piece of artwork!
The fun doesn’t have to stop here! If your child absolutely loves these baking activities for preschoolers. Check out my full Preschool Curriculum. It includes these activities and plenty of others to get your child ready for kindergarten!
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Written on March 9th, 2023 by Laurin Brainard