Beverley Paine's Australian Home School Curriculum: Tips for Learning How to Read

Reading for Life: In the Kitchen

© Beverley Paine, 2004

Even if you cook from instinct and never open a cookbook, you still read as a cook and your children can help you do it. The kitchen is a great place to insert casual, but important, reading skills into your home learning program. It is a basic, everyday task, but planning and cooking dinner is a wonderful example of how people use reading in everyday life.

• Start a 'favourite recipe' card file. These could even be recipes your children make up and then try out, or you could dictate the ingredients and how to make their favourite meals. They could cut and paste recipes from magazines.

• Ask them to write a shopping list of all ingredients they will need.

• Encourage them to ask for recipes for food they like when you are dining out with friends and relatives by doing this yourself.

• Have one child read the list of ingredients and ask another to find them as you cook.

• Read the whole recipe together, and then as you cook, ask your child to read the steps one at a time.

• Point out the different reading tasks required in preparing the food: reading the time and temperature gauges on the oven and stove, reading measuring tools, reading the packaging of ingredients.

• Plan entire menus together; find books that have suggested menus and recipes and try them out.

• Write shopping lists for dinner parties or camping trips.

After 20 years of being a contact and support person Beverley no longer takes phone call or email inquiries. Please join one of her yahoo groups if you want to know more about homeschooling or have a question.

Pioneering members of the home education movement in Australia, Beverley and Robin Paine are passionate advocates of true educational choice for families. They began homeschooling their children in 1986 and three years later started the South Australian Home Based Learners network.
Beverley wrote Getting Started with Homeschooling in 1995-97 and since then continues to write books and booklets on home education. She balances spending time helping home educators with working in her garden and renovating her home, as well as continuing to build her collection of writing on a variety of homeschooling subjects. Beverley maintains an extensive collection of websites as well as several Yahoo groups supporting families teaching their children at home. In 2007 Beverley joined the HEA and became a committee member in 2008: she also edits and produce the HEA Newsletter, HEA magazine, Stepping Stones for Home Educators, annual Resource Directory and other HEA publications. If you'd like to keep in touch with what Beverley is up to her in her life, sign up for the Homeschool Australia Newsletter or visit her Facebook page.