How to Support Language and Fine Motor Skill Development in Cooking

Home follow-up tasks from your Occupational Therapist or Speech Pathologist to practise at home can sometimes feel overwhelming, but a lot of the time the skill you are practising can be done during everyday activities!

Cooking is an excellent example of an everyday activity that simultaneously relies on and develops both language and fine motor skills; so we think it is an excellent task to do together with your kids at home.

What is Language?

Language is words, sentences, and grammar used to share and understand messages – for more information, go to the Developing Language at Home blog written by Speech Pathologist Tess in March of this year (click here)

What are Fine Motor Skills?

When we think about fine motor skills, what we are referring to is our little ones ability to coordinate and control the small muscles in their hands, wrists and fingers. Fine motor skills enable children to touch, hold, and manipulate objects. Without strong fine motor skills, children may experience challenges participating in everyday tasks such as eating, dressing, writing and playing. One of our Occupational Therapists Renee has recently written a blog about fine motor skill milestones and other ways to support fine motor skill development if you are looking for more information.

How can we practise these skills in Cooking?

To focus on language, the top strategies are:

Labelling – saying what an item or action is called
Recasting – repeating sentences back to the child with corrections
Narration – saying what you and the child are doing
Modelling – using example sentences that have the target words
Choice Questioning – asking a question by providing choices

There are so many ways that we can practise our fine motor skills in kitchen and cooking activities.

Some of these skills and movements that we can practise are:

Pinching – we can perform a pinching action using either our thumb and index finger (pincer grip), or even our thumb, index finger and middle finger (tripod grip) to pull apart food, pick up small pieces, make patterns and open containers
Grasping – grasping onto food, pouring from a jug and stirring with a spoon are all great activities that we can do to develop our grasp as well as support our little ones to develop hand strength. They are also great activities to practise some hand-eye coordination.
Cutting – using a plastic knife or a safety knife, we can cut up soft foods or vegetables. You can even practise performing a cutting action using some play-doh.
Coordination (using both hands together) – we can encourage our children to have a go using tools which require using two hands together such as a rolling pin to flatten out dough, or using our two hands together to roll food into a ball shape.
In-hand manipulation – we can practise picking up a piece of food in your palm and using your fingers to move it between your thumb and pointer finger to decorate cookies or biscuits.

Our favourite recipes to practise these strategies with are:

Baking cookies!

For fine motor skills, you can encourage your child to use a spoon to mix together the cookie batter or use their two hands together to roll cookie dough into small balls to place onto the baking tray
For language, you can recast the child’s sentences and model new words in longer and longer sentences

Fruit skewers!

For fine motor skills, you can encourage your child to pick up the pieces of fruit using their pincer grip and push them onto the skewer
For language, you can use choice questions to pick what fruit goes where, and make the choices you suggest longer and more detailed as the child’s language grows

Pizza!

For fine motor skills, have a go at getting your child to use their two hands together to roll out some pizza dough using a rolling pin, or using their pincer grip to pick up and place the ingredients on the pizza.
For language, you can narrate what is happening and why to grow complex sentences

We hope that this blog has given you some ideas of how to get some extra practise in at home to help your little one develop their language and fine motor skills.

Happy cooking!