Little ones gain experience and confidence early in life by working alongside Mom in the kitchen. A child as young as two can slice bananas with a small non-serrated butter knife. Then the fruit can be arranged by the child on a plate and brought to the table for snack time. In our home, we have a number of small cutting boards, aprons and utensils to fit little hands. There are many great Montessori catalogs that carry such items and specialty stores such as Sur La Table carry small wooden spoons, little whisks for beating eggs and miniature pizza cutters. Mainstream stores like Target carry a fine line of kitchen utensils that can be used by young children. Our kitchen has a small cupboard that holds the children's cooking utensils, small baking sheets and serving trays.
My boys have worked in the kitchen since they were toddlers; helping with food preparation, assembling meals like lasagna, kneading bread and, when they grew older, doing light supervised cooking at the stove. I think it is important for a young man to be able to find his way around a kitchen as not all young men go right from their mother's house into their wife's. Certainly, many go off to college or have an apartment of their own and need to know how to feed themselves.
I not only believe that both boys and girls should learn to cook for practical reasons, but because the kitchen is a perfect place to learn math: measurements, fractions, liquid volume, and temperature. It is also an excellent place to start conversations about science; covering topics such as how yeast makes bread rise, what foods are acid/alkaline, how mold forms :) and what pasteurization means. Social studies include: where spices grow in the world, how native cultures used corn as a staple food and why some people choose to be vegetarians.
We have a drawer in our kitchen where aprons are kept. The wearing of an apron not only keeps one's clothing clean but signifies the beginning and end of a work period. My almost three year old daughter takes her apron out of the drawer and asks what she can do in the kitchen each day. She has taken a liking to peeling and slicing bananas, cracking and slicing hard-boiled eggs, tearing the lettuce for salads and using mortar and pestle to pulvarize herbs and garlic. The older children can make french toast, bread porkchops, chop vegetables for soup and make biscuits from scratch.
Each of my children have gone through a "nut cracking" stage, usually around age 5 or so. We have a variety of nutcrackers in a basket as well as hard shelled nuts of different varieties. The children like to experiment with the various nutcrackers and use small metal picks to extract the nut meat from the shell. They have a tin for the freshly shelled nuts and a small bowl for the shells. Usually fresh nuts are found in the grocery stores around the Christmas holiday so the children serve their nuts to guests that visit our home.
Maria Montessori believed that we should "never help a child with a task at which he feels he can succeed". It is very important for children to complete an activity without the intervention of an adult unless the child seeks out the help of the adult. Many well-meaning parents and teachers interfere with a child's work in order to "do it right" and end up ruining not only the child's concentration but undermining his motivation as well.
Young children often work on an activity simply for the joy of doing it. They may repeat the task over and over again, not simply to gain competency or to do it in the quickest manner but for the simple happiness derived in performing it. An adult may do a task with efficiency in mind and to get to the end result. A child who is learning and actively participating in the family's work may often be found around the kitchen "under foot", but given the proper tools, can be a participant in the work of the family.
We have gone through quite a lot of bananas and hard boiled eggs these past few years while the children work in our kitchen. All are happily enjoyed after little hands prepare them with love.
