Home before everyone
You are hungry and home first. There is bread, cheese, fruit, and things that need the stove.
What do you make?
Life Skills · Practice · Grades 3 to 5
Chapter 6: Everyday Independence
Clean hands, sharp things, hot things, and clear up.
Clean hands, sharp things, hot things, and clear up.
2 situations to decide. There is often more than one good answer: pick one and see what happens.
Home before everyone
What do you make?
A small pan fire
What do you do?
Wash your hands before you start. Not because you are told to — because whatever is on them ends up in the food.
Anything that touched raw meat — board, knife, hands — gets washed before it touches anything else.
Knives and heat need a grown-up until they say otherwise. When you do use a knife, cut away from your hand, on a flat board.
Cooking is not finished when the food is ready. It is finished when the kitchen looks like it did before.
These ones do have right answers.
Sort each kitchen job.
Which of these need a grown-up first?
Tap something to move it.
Question 1 of 1
You have chopped raw chicken. What do you do before cutting the salad?
Something to do away from the screen. Nobody is checking.
Why: The last step is the one that makes people let you do it again.
Cooking is the highest-value practical skill in this chapter and the one most often postponed. Children who cook eat better as adults, by a wide margin.
Expand permissions deliberately rather than by drift: name the day they may use the stove or a sharp knife supervised, so it is a step rather than something that happens when you are not looking.
Insisting that cleaning up is part of cooking from the start avoids the very common outcome of an enthusiastic cook who leaves a destroyed kitchen.