Hello my omschooligans! Today's Omschool Tree Fort lesson plans are for adults as well as children. Here's a rationale for cooking with kids and why educational activities that involve food prep should be integral to any curriculum. I'll include food themed lesson plans too.
HALTing with FRIENDS
Perhaps you've heard the acronym HALT which means that when we are hungry, angry, lonely or tired (I would add sick) we can't perform well. And we need to HALT. Very often students come to school with many unmet needs (often through no one's fault). School begins early so children may not have felt like eating and are still sleepy. They may feel angry or lonely due to this or other situations. While we can't fix all their problems, we can offer FRIENDS (Feed, Refresh, Include, Engage, Nurture, Develop and SHARE). Sometimes, something as simple as a fun snack craft, made and shared with friends, can HALT the negative cycle and reset the positive FRIENDS energy.
Friendly Faces Snack Craft Recipes
To reinforce the idea of friendship and sharing, have children bring in supplies to share to make these snack crafts. Work in an assembly line to build cooperation. Encourage communication with story sharing or story starters in which each person adds a detail.
1. Apple Happy Face Owls
Base: Apple slices (cut across entire apple, remove seeds)
Features:
Eyes: Kiwi slices, banana slices topped with blueberries or chocolate chips.
Beak & Feet: Almonds or sunflower seeds.
Chest Feathers: Granola or puffed rice cereal glued on with a dab of cream cheese or peanut butter.
Skills Learned: Fine motor balance, pattern making, and knife safety (using butter knives for soft spreading).
2. Happy Monster Sandwiches
Base: Round rice cakes or square bread slices with cheese or lunchmeat slices or spread with blended cottage cheese (the high-protein, low-carb base!) or nut butter.
Features:
Hair: Shredded carrots, pretzel sticks or shredded coconut.
Eyes: green pimento stuffed olive slices, or cherry tomato halves.
Smile: Sliced strawberries, curved bell pepper strips, or pea pods.
Skills Learned: Creativity, geometric shapes, and facial expression recognition.
3. Butterfly Buddies
For the body, use pretzel rods or sticks, celery or carrot stick, hot dog or cheese sticks
- Wings: Romaine leaves, tortilla chips, yellow bell pepper rings arranged on the sides.
- Wing decorations: blueberries, raspberries, sliced strawberries, sliced red and green grapes, grape tomatoes, carrot triangles
- Head: cucumber slice
- Antennae: Chives or thin pretzel sticks poked into the top.
- Eyes: Green or black olives, round cereal with raisin inside
- Smile: red pepper piece
- Skills Learned: Symmetry, patterns, and hand-eye coordination with slicing, design with arranging, shapes.
4. Cucumber Smiles
- Smile: Round slices of cucumber, sliced halfway across to look like open mouths.
- Cream cheese spread
- Tongue: Red pepper or ham slice
- Teeth: Raisins or sunflower seeds lined up along the edge.
- Skills Learned: Precision cutting, spatial awareness, and imaginative play.
5. Pet Pals
- Muddy Buddies: Have children make homemade pudding as a group then distribute animal crackers to "play" in the mud.
- Puppy pals: Make any sandwich more friendly by "frosting" open face with cream cheese or nut butter, adding blueberry, grape or banana slice eyes, strawberry slice noses and pretzel stick whiskers. Cut second bread slice in four triangles for ears.
Why lesson plans should always include food
Food is a universal teacher whether making or eating it. There are so many cross-curricular lesson plans and skill-builders that cooking with kids addresses:
- RWSL (reading, writing, speaking and listening) cooking provides opportunities to develop all these skills. From reading instructions to writing recipe to working collaboratively to prepare a meal, to sharing small kitchen spaces effectively, all these are addressed.
- Kitchen math: In cooking lesson plans, students learn multiplication and division, fractions, (when doubling or halving recipes), measurement (metric and standard), process management, telling time (reading a clock) and more.
- Social studies: I can't think of a better way to explore cultures than by enjoying foods from around the world. Exploring the local cuisine, produce grown there, spices and cooking techniques used is the perfect virtual travel experience.
🗺️ Omschool Activity Tip
- Community Building: One of my favorite YouTube channel subscriptions is Kend Islari which features women in rural Iran preparing traditional dishes in silence. I find serenity watching them perform these simple cooking activities. Their meals are prepared as acts of service and to enjoy together and share with their neighbors.
- Communication Skills: I'm Teacher Omi (grandma) and this Omschool was begun in honor of my grandchildren. We love to cook together and as we do, we practice asking questions, describing processes, discussing concepts, brainstorming and learning together.
- Intergenerational storytelling Children share stories with me and I tell them stories about my life and the lives of their family who went before.
- Following Directions: cooking is a great way to learn direction following.
- Decision-making: cooking teaches us to make priorities and make choices.
- Multitasking: most all forms of cooking require the setting in motion and monitoring multiple processes at once.
- Problem-Solving: even if you follow the recipe perfectly, problems may occur in your cooking. And this is the perfect opportunity to learn workarounds, and problem-solving skills.
- Scientific Exploration: cooking is always a science experiment!
- Fine Motor and Eye Hand coordination: Using tools requires these to manipulate. Cooking teaches kids precision, accuracy, motor control, balance and coordination. Food prep addresses some of most fundamental developmental tasks.
- Safety skills: fire safety, handling sharps, working with electricity and gas and heat are all essential skills.
- STEAM activities: Kitchen skills provide all kinds of hands-on lesson plans in chemistry, physical science, design, engineering, math, technology, gadgetry, you name it. Kids actually learn the STEAM (science, tech, engineering, art and math) in the process of making steam.
Around the World Community Potluck
Here's a easy Omschool activity to bring this all together. Have students plan and prepare an around the world community potluck.
- Compose invitations requesting that community members bring a dish to pass of their favorite family foods.
- Map the dishes by country. At our Catholic church potlucks, so many nationalities are represented. We've enjoyed foods from Spain, the Netherlands, Germany, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Ukraine, Palestine, Russia, Poland, Mexico, Canada, Japan and more. Have students color maps to show regions.
- Flag it! For a simpler versions, serve regional variations of cheese, bread and local produce. Design and color flags of countries to indicate origin. Make these into banners.
- Create a class recipe book of dishes shared.
- Read kids books about global foods.
- Pair foods with kids' books from that country.
- Plan a grocery list of supplies needed.
- Price compare foods for best value.
- Shop for foods. Aldi often includes flags of countries of origin to help. Aldi is a much easier store to shop with a group.
- Study science of food safety, food storage and preservation and chemical and physical reactions in food prep.
- Explore food insecurity.
- Brainstorm food sustainability habits.
- Think globally and discuss worldwide food waste statistics.
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