When I grow up…
I love cooking
If your child drags a chair to the bench every time you cook, here's what that's made of at primary school.
Ages are guides, not deadlines — follow your child’s pace. How to help at home → · See it on the map →
What this is, really
A chef feeds people — planning dishes, measuring and timing everything at once, keeping a kitchen safe and fast, and making food people remember. It's maths, science and care, served hot.
The seeds are already on the map
23 real skills your child can already meet at primary school, grouped into 5 strands. Every one links to its full page.
MathematicsSciencePersonal & Social DevelopmentLearning to Learn
Measuring is half of cooking
Grams, cups, minutes, degrees: a recipe is applied maths.
Fractions you can eat
Half a cup, a quarter of the pizza — the tastiest fractions on the map.
Kitchen science
Melting, dissolving, browning: cooking is chemistry you're allowed to lick.
Food and the body
What food is for — and why a menu is a plan for other people's energy.
Plans, steps and cool heads
A kitchen runs on order-of-operations and staying calm at the hot bits.
What it looks like at each age
Pouring, stirring, tearing lettuce: every job at the bench is fine-motor work with a delicious ending.
They can follow a three-step recipe, crack an egg (mostly), and measure a cup that's actually a cup.
They can halve or double a recipe — real fractions — and run a simple dish with you as sous-chef.
They can plan a family meal, budget the ingredients, and get three things finishing at the same time. That's the whole job.
Try this together
Free, low-key, and doable tonight — no special supplies.
Give them one dinner a fortnight that's theirs: they choose, you shop together, they cook, you assist.
Halve a biscuit recipe together — suddenly three-quarters of a cup matters enormously.
Do a supermarket price hunt: same ingredient, three brands. Cheapest per 100 g wins.
Let them plate up restaurant-style one night — presentation is care you can see.
After primary school
Food tech and maths help in high school, but kitchens hire on attitude and speed of learning. The roads in: apprenticeships (chefs earn while they learn), TAFE, and every family dinner between now and then. The knife skills can wait; the taste-as-you-go habit can't.
The quiet truth
About 61% of what a cook needs at primary school also lives inside other dreams on this site — reading well, a feel for numbers, noticing patterns, and sticking with hard things. Dreams change: that is the point of being seven. Nothing your child learns here is wasted.
This page is a map, not a plan. It shows what a dream is made of at primary school — it does not say your child will or won't do this one day, and it measures nothing about them. Explore it together, follow what they love, and let the dream change as often as they like. Learning Map original · CC BY-SA 4.0