Let youngsters help to stir milk into a vanilla pudding mix. Divide it equally into seven small bowls, then add drops of food coloring to tint the pudding rainbow colors, as suggested on the Preschool Express website. Use the colored pudding in a game to teach children the order of the colors in a rainbow. Let each child scoop a spoonful of each color of pudding into seven separate plastic drinking cups. Line each child's cups in random order on a table in front of him. Show the children a picture of a rainbow. Explain that when you say, "Go," everyone must line up his cups in the correct rainbow order. The first child to line up the cups in rainbow order wins.
Provide dry pasta shapes so children can match them to numbered recipe cards in a counting game. Choose three pasta shapes to use for the game. Find spiral, bow tie and tube-shaped pasta at the grocery store. Divide the pasta by shape, into three bowls. On index cards, draw a pasta shape and write a number, one through 10, to be the recipes. Make each child a set of 10 cards with different number and pasta combinations. Give each child a set of cards and a plastic mug. Ask each child to look at a card in his stack, then place the correct number and shape of pasta into his mug. When the children have finished, pour out the pasta and compare the contents of the mugs to the cards in each child's stack. If the recipe counting cards and pasta match, the child wins the game.
Cut 1-inch wide and 12-inch long strips of red, purple and yellow construction paper. Count five of each color to give to children. Cut brown, green and orange strips and give youngsters five of each color. Pass scissors so children can cut the strips into pieces during a play cooking game. Give pairs of children a cooking pot and a list of vegetables to share. To make the lists, write the word "potato" in brown and "cabbage" in green. Write the word "carrot" in orange and "radish" in red. Write "eggplant" in purple and "squash" in yellow. To play, call out the name of a vegetable and a number between one and 10. Children choose the correct color paper strip and cut the matching number of pieces into the pot. When all of the paper strips have been cut, let the children play with the paper soup in your classroom's pretend kitchen.
No need to worry about a mess when preschoolers play a cooking game on classroom computers. The Knowledge Adventure website has a game called "Cooking With Piglet." Children choose to cook pizza, fruit salad or an ice cream sundae. The fruit salad game provides pictures of whole fruits. When the child clicks on and drags a fruit over the salad bowl, a slice of fruit falls into the bowl. Pizza assembling and sundae constructing work the same way. Children ring a virtual bell when the dish is complete.