The smell of freshly baked bread wafts through Arbor Green Nursery in Edinburgh every morning as the children start each day by cooking. They collect fresh herbs from the garden to go into their bread and do all the preparation and measuring themselves.
'Cooking is a huge part of the nursery day,' says manager Natalie Clark. 'It's so important because it takes in every aspect of the curriculum and is also a life skill.'
As well as setting the foundations for children's future health and well-being, cooking offers many valuable learning opportunities and experiences - from observing how ingredients change under certain conditions (melting, freezing, rising, solidifying) to the mathematics of weighing, counting and measuring, developing manipulative skills (kneading, stirring, whisking, rolling) and learning about the origins of ingredients, to list just a few.
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