Baking With Kids
5 Reasons Your Child Will Benefit

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Baking with kids can be lots of fun and rather messy! But among all the mess, there are so many benefits that kids gain from the whole baking experience.

On this page, I am going to take a look at 5 reasons you should bake with your kids!  Specifically, I want to show you some of the ways a child's school skills can benefit from the whole experience of baking and cooking, even from as young as preschool age.

With younger kids, things can get a little messy, but if you persevere, the mess does gets less as they develop their skills. But above all, the fun they will have with you, and the skills they will learn, far outweigh the temporary inconvenience of some mess!

And don't forget how special it can be for a child to spend time creating memories with you in the kitchen!

  1. Your child can practice bilateral coordination skills 
  2. Your child can practice eye-hand coordination skills
  3. You child can strengthen the hand muscles
  4. Practice spatial perception and planning skills
  5. Your child can practice math skills while baking!
5 reasons to bake with your kids at Christmas time!

1) Practice Bilateral Coordination While Baking

Baking can give your child lots of opportunity to develop and use both hands together in a coordinated way.

Rolling balls of dough, rolling out dough with a rolling pin#Ad, and flattening dough with the hands are all great ways of letting kids practice their bilateral coordination skills.

rolling balls of cookie dough is good for kids bilateral coordinationRolling balls of dough
using a rolling pin is good for kids bilateral coordinationUsing a rolling pin
flattening dough helps kids bilateral coordination skillsFlattening a tray of dough
sifting flour helps kids bilateral coordination skillsSifting flour

Developing good bilateral coordination skills can help children master the skills of tying shoelaces and cutting with scissors, among other skills.

Sifting flour into a large bowl is also a good bilateral activity: it trains a child to use one hand to “support” while the other does the heavy work.

If your child needs more practice with bilateral skills, try my other bilateral coordination activities.

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2) Practice Eye-Hand Coordination While Baking

Pouring ingredients into bowls and jugs, and spooning batter into tins are all good ways for kids to practice their eye-hand coordination.

pouring ingredients with a jug helps with eye-hand coordinationPouring ingredients with a jug
spooning batter into cups helps with eye-hand coordinationSpooning batter into muffin cups

Squeezing icing onto cookies and decorating cupcakes also use eye-hand coordination.

If your child struggles with these tasks, then try some of these eye-hand coordination activities.

If your child is very wobbly when pouring, and struggles to pour with good control, you might want to work a bit on shoulder girdle stability to help improve those skills.

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3) Develop Hand Strength While Baking

Baking with kids can give them lots of opportunities to strengthen their hand and finger muscles. 

In the pics below, you can see how squeezing dough into balls gets the hands working. Even sprinkling cheese on pizza bases can give the fingers a workout!

And as you can see from the pics, both hands are also working together in a coordinated way, which helps develop bilateral coordination skills.

squeezing cookie dough helps strengthen hand musclesSqueezing cookie dough
sprinkling grated cheese is a great hand exercise for kidsSprinkling grated cheese

Have you ever made English scones from scratch (also called "biscuits" in the USA)? Rubbing the dry ingredients into the butter/shortening is a great exercise for strengthening hand muscles.

Using both hands to rub the ingredients together is also good for bilateral coordination skills.

rubbing ingredients together is a good hand exercise for kidsRubbing ingredients together to make scones.

Homemade icing bags / frosting bags are super-easy to make and make a great hand exercise for your child. They are the easiest way to let a group of kids ice or frost their own cookies with the minimum of mess and with far fewer broken cookies.

Make a basic glaze icing from icing sugar and a tiny bit of water - just enough to make a smooth paste without being too runny.

Place one or 2 tablespoons into the corner of a small plastic baggie, tie a knot in the bag and then snip off the corner.

Your child can then squeeze the bag to get the icing / frosting out onto the cookies.

squeezing a cake frosting/icing bag to work on hand strengthSqueezing icing/frosting bag - two hands
squeezing a cake frosting/icing bag to work on hand strengthSqueezing icing/frosting bag - tripod fingers

Depending on hand strength, you can let your child use one hand, both hands or even the tripod fingers.

If your child's hands are very weak, try some of my hand strengthening activities.

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4) Practice Spatial Perception and Planning Skills

There should always be a recipe involved when baking with kids!

Whether they read the recipe themselves (in words or in pictures) or follow your verbal instructions, following a recipe can boost your child's listening and sequencing skills.

Following instructions is an important school skill, and baking can give your child lots of practice in this.

Helping your child to organize him/herself in the kitchen and clearing up messes is also a helpful life-skill. Help your child take dirty dishes to the sink and "clean up as you go" , and then remember to pack all the ingredients away afterwards!

Spatial perception and planning skills are also boosted when your child has to cut out cookies.

Challenge your child to get as many cookies as possible from single roll-out of the dough - this will challenge your child to place the cookie cutters in a way that minimizes waste.

working on spatial perception with cookie cutters and doughSpatial perception with cookie dough

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5) Practicing Math While Baking With Kids!

Letting your kids bake with you will help them learn about measuring and about number concepts in real life.

kids counting eggs in the kitchen - build skillsCounting Eggs
kids measuring liquids in the kitchenMeasuring liquids

Let them count out eggs and cups of flour. Let them measure liquids with measuring cups and measuring spoons#Ad, and just expose them to the concepts of math in real life.

You might even manage to get some skip counting done! I let my kids skip count while the beater is running!

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Resources For Baking With Kids

Feeling inspired? If you don't already have some baking equipment at home, I have found some resources on Amazon to help you on your way...


My own kids started "helping" me in the kitchen when they were toddlers, and we have many fond memories that were created among the floury mess!

And the skills they practiced along the way, laid down strong foundations for the formal learning.

I hope you are inspired to make baking with kids a part of your life!

Scroll down to get my free Cookie Recipes!

how baking activities can benefit kids

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Bonus: My Free Printable Cookie Recipes!

I am sharing two of my family's favorite yummy cookie recipes - they give lots of opportunity to include some or all of the skills mentioned above.

Get Your OT Mom Free PrintableTM Cookie Recipes!

These are my two favorite cookie recipes that are easy for kids to make and build their skills. They come in a printable, accessible PDF.

Fill in this form to access your freebie right away! You also have the option of signing up for my newsletter through this form!

OT Mom's free cookie recipe downloadFree Recipe Download!

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