With Valentine’s Day right around the corner, you’re probably wracking your brain for the perfect recipe to bake for your loved one. There’s nothing wrong with store-bought chocolate, but there’s no topping the personal touch of some homemade baked goods. If you have kids, baking alongside them can be just as rewarding as enjoying the fruits of your labor. As an added bonus, baking is a hands-on opportunity where your child can learn all sorts of important concepts. Here is a short list of some of the educational lessons hiding in your kitchen. What Your Child Can Learn From Baking EDUCATION IN THE KITCHEN
MATH Baking is a numbers game. Just take a look at any recipe, and you’ll recognize the importance of math in building a beautiful cake. Having children measure out ingredients helps them learn about fractions and ratios. You can also test your kids by doubling or halving a recipe for multiplication and division practice. With older kids, practice unit conversions by asking, for example, how many pints are in half a gallon.
Over time, down pillows tend to become flat and lose their integrity. In many cases, dust can accumulate inside of your pillows, and odors can easily be absorbed into the materials. Although it can be gross to think about, your down pillows can be the perfect place for germs to reside. That is why it is so important to get your down pillows cleaned at least once a year. At Janet Davis Cleaners, we clean down pillows by using a pillow machine. We discard a pillow’s old ticking (a strong, durable material used to cover mattresses or pillows) and replace it with a new one. Feathers are removed from the old ticking and placed into our pillow machine. Once they are inside the machine, the feathers are agitated by rotating brushes that fluff the feathers, break up clumps, and allow dirt and non-feather particles to settle to the bottom of the machine. Many soiled pillows contain up to a pound of dust and other foreign materials. These are removed during the sanitization process, which can help prevent illness. Ozone and ultraviolet lights deodorize and sanitize the feathers as they are being fluffed. Once the feathers are completely sanitized and odor- free, they are blown from the machine into a brand-new pillow ticking. If additional feathers are needed to fill the pillow, we can easily add them to the new ticking. We return your freshly cleaned pillows to you in a sealed plastic bag. Quality down material is a major investment and can make all the difference in your pillows. With proper care and attention, you can make this investment last a lifetime. Cleaning your down pillows will prevent sickness, ensure they last longer, and maintain their bounce better. THIS YEAR? HAVE YOU CLEANED YOUR DOWN PILLOWS
FOLLOWING DIRECTIONS Not unlike computer science, baking requires a strict order of operations. The wet and dry ingredients often need to be mixed separately and then folded together. It only takes one deviation from the instructions for a pastry to go from delicious to disgusting. Spending time in the kitchen, then, is a great way for kids to learn the importance of reading directions carefully and comprehending what they’ve just read. CULTURAL UNDERSTANDING Cuisine is a fundamental part of every culture. Introducing your child to dishes from around the world will expand their horizons. Want your child to be a less picky eater? Involving them in the cooking process is the surest way to get them excited about trying new flavors and ingredients. NUTRITION Now, you might not think that baking cookies will encourage greater nutritional awareness, but hear us out. Sugar is often buried within packaged foods. When you bake something at home, a child gets to see, firsthand, just how much sugar goes into certain sweets. Meanwhile, cooking savory dishes also allows them to learn what constitutes a balanced, healthy diet.
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