The challenge

Step 1

Next time you're preparing food for visiting friends or family, get your child to help you prepare the meal.

Step 2

For this activity, we're cooking spaghetti bolognese. Source a recipe and write your shopping list. If a recipe serves four people but there will be eight people in total, work out how much of each ingredient you'll need to buy.

Step 3

After you have your ingredients, get cooking!

Tip:

Get out your cooking scales, and have your child help you with measuring out ingredients. Talk with them about different units of measurements and how they're labelled differently. For example, we describe mass for some things in grams, and other things in kilograms. Sometimes we use the word 'grams', and other times we just use the letter 'g'.

The conversation

• "We're making spaghetti bolognese for everyone. We need 2 kilograms (kgs) of mince and 500 grams (g) of cheese. Why do you think we measure some things in kilograms, and other things in grams?"
• "I noticed something: we need 300 grams (g) of cheese, but our scale only shows us g, or kg. What do you think those letters mean? How do we make sure we get the right amount of cheese?"
• "This cake recipe says it's for six people and needs three eggs. We want to make sure we have enough for 12 people. How many eggs do we need to use