Cooking Around the World

I’ve enjoyed cooking ever since my sister showed me how to make gumbo.  And my daughter loves to help me in the kitchen.  As with most of our activities, the primary focus of our cooking together is the enjoyment of being together and the fun of making a tasty dinner.  But, there is educational material to be found in the kitchen just like anywhere else.

Of course, cooking is a great entry to chemistry and mathematics and while we’ve explored those connections we’ll probably do more with them when she gets a little older.  Right now, we enjoy connecting cooking with geography.

Our living room/dining room/kitchen is one open area so we have easy access to our globe and wall map of the world right next to our bookshelf of cookbooks.  One of my favorite cookbooks is 500 Curries.  In addition to the excellent recipes, it also provides us with an opportunity to connect what we eat with where it came from.  Just the other day we cooked Cambodian Chicken Curry.  So, as we’re preparing the meal, we can run over to the globe and find Cambodia.  When we cook Thai food we can find Thailand on the globe.

I suspect these are fairly obvious connections but I continue to be struck by several things regarding young children and their learning.

1. It is natural.  The learning we do, whether in the kitchen cooking or elsewhere is always a natural process.  It consists of a give and take and is conversational.  
2. It is fun.  We enjoy our time together and if she is ready to move on for whatever reason we do so.  Like most unschooling families we don’t have “math time,” “history time,” etc.  We just live each day and take what comes our way.  
3. It is not always (or ever) linear.  It was James Burke’s television special The Day The Universe Changed that introduced me to the idea that history is non-linear.  We are often educated to believe that things unfold linearly but this is not how history works and it isn’t how life works.  Everything connects in a myriad of different ways.  ​