How could baking be like reading?
Teach your child to read like you SHOULD be baking a cookie.
Baking is a passion of mine. I’m quite good at it, besides the dreaded jelly roll cake. Mine cracks every time. My husband and I love to watch the “Great British Bake Off” and fight urges to stuff our faces with Oreos as we do. The cravings are real. Often the show inspires me to try something new and either be pleasantly surprised, or hypercritical that it doesn’t mirror Mr. Hollywood. As I was baking cookies the other day, however, I was thinking about the parallels of baking and the relationship of a parent (caregiver) to reading with their child.
The Preparation
When making the perfect cookie, there is a painstaking process of dealing with the butter. One cannot just heat it in the microwave to room temperature; the baker has to take the butter out beforehand and let it come to room temperature naturally. The reasoning behind this is how the butter reacts to the oven heat when assembled. This is similar to how a parent handles reading with their kid. Parents need to prep and work on phonemic awareness. This requires time, planning, patience, and persistence. Parents can’t just jump into teaching their child to read with a book; this is technically the first step. Even before preheating the oven, if you will.
The Assembly
After prepping your materials- the sugar, butter, flour (anyone hearing Waitress? The musical?) The baker needs to put them in the right order into the bowl. First, blend the wet and dry separately, then add the dry to the wet. The reason for this is to avoid clumps of flour in the egg, butter, and sugar mixture. That would mess up the baking reaction in the oven. The two separate materials, wet ingredients and dry, come together to make dough, the cookie. Similarly, after prep with phonemic awareness, the caregiver assembles phonemic awareness with phonics (Dry and wet) before the two separate skills combine to make reading. At the outset, this skill of taking sounds and combining them is not reading, not until we add more steps, but it is the base, the dough, the meat of the reading process. ** The pro tip here when combining. To make a truly perfect cookie, the bottom of the bowl needs to be scraped; much like reading we need to make sure there are skills that our kids need that are not “left behind,” like the butter-sugar mixture at the bottom of a bowl. We pay meticulous attention to what skills are being missed. Gather those skills and incorporate them with those skills that are already established.
The Placement
The baker next takes the mixture and tediously places the equally measured dough balls onto the parchment paper, then places them in the freezer. Meanwhile, to be efficient, the baker preheats the oven. After about 10 min. it’s time to bake. The word I’d like you as parents to focus on is TEDIOUSLY. The process of practice for fluency and vocabulary is repetitive, tedious work. Your child needs to read and read, then reread, and read some more, and you, the dedicated parent, listen, gently correct, and listen some more. This part of reading is like slowly taking out the dough and placing it where it needs to be on the cookie sheet. For me, this part is annoying and boring. Like much, listening to new readers read. It’s a challenge because it’s hard. The main difference that you can make during this stage is never giving up, summoning Christ-like patience, and listening to your child struggle. This means not correcting all the time, letting them stretch out sounds, and ultimately throwing a mini party every time they get something right. Remember you’re almost there and this is the last hard step before the good stuff happens.
The Bake
Finally, the baker takes the chilled dough out of the freezer and pops it into the warm oven. The baker will set a timer for half the instructed time. The baker will be tempted to pop them in, set the timer, and leave. This won’t yield the perfect cookie. The cookie needs to be placed in the oven, baked for half the time, then turned halfway through baking. This will ensure the perfectly even bake everyone wants. When thinking about reading, we know this spot of waiting to be a challenge. This stage is what I would relate to using all skills (phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension) together. Working together, waiting, and practicing. Like the placement, this is also a waiting game. The two are related
but different: a child will eventually learn to read; then it’s just about waiting and practicing. Getting books in front of them to read, and more to read and read and read and wait.
The Payoff
After mixing, scraping, placing, waiting, and baking, you get to see the fruits of your labor. A child who loves to read, who has confidence in all things, because of the blessing of literacy they have from you. This is a beautiful, nonreturnable gift, and if they would, they would thank you for it. If you think of teaching your child to read as baking the best cookie, it requires a lot more steps than you thought. Reading isn’t just handing your kids off to your kindergarten teacher. It’s putting in the work, or reading each night, of prioritizing book time over screens; it’s teaching your child grit by not handing them an iPhone during dinner but talking to them; it’s heading to a library; it’s reading in front of them yourself. These are the things that matter. So I beg you, when you pick up your phone to scroll (I am guilty too) ask yourself if this is more important than your child becoming illiterate?