Food-Focused Family Learning

The kitchen is the family hub in many ways for the homeschooling family. It’s the place to share meals, learn at the table, use food items for experiments, have conversations about everything and ideally join together to make meals.

The single act of making food opens up many opportunities for learning on a whole bunch of topics. We’re all interested in having healthy families, and some consider it one of the great advantages of homeschooling that we get to be the main influence when it comes to eating the foods to nourish our bodies the way God intended.

Healthy habits start in childhood, and through your guidance, you can instill good habits and useful knowledge that your kids will benefit from into adulthood.

The Health Factor of Food

Take your children on a learning journey that involves making food, learning about nutrition, and being aware of the marketing messages and food ingredients that appeal to their sense of taste but not their health.

You may have a few ideas yourself on how you can go about this for your family, but we’ve also got a few online resources for you to check out to get the ideas flowing:

• This article from We Are Teachers describes 10 ideas, with additional resources like links and printables, that you can use as a teaching starter to explain that the main purpose of food is to fuel our bodies with quality energy.
• This curation of Health and Nutrition Resources from TeacherVision provides an abundance of printables, lessons, and quizzes you can use for various ages. The section History, Health, & Nutrition Connected looks especially interesting with some engaging resources, and you’ll like the connections made through the resources from Art, Health, & Nutrition Connected.
• Find a wide variety of health and fitness courses on SchoolhouseTeachers.com that connect different subjects and offer different approaches to learning. With a membership you can access the full Health and Fitness courses for different grade levels, resources from World Book, unit studies, and courses made for the whole family to work through.

Follow Along Learning Options

Cooking establishes culinary skills for sure, but it also requires math skills, teamwork and following directions. All of which are the life skills that your children will use in every part of their life. For some teaching courses and guided cooking instruction, check out these two websites that offer added engagement to get a well-rounded learning experience for you and your kids.

• Raddish is a monthly mailing subscription where you are part of a cooking club, learn culinary skills, and get meal ideas! Your monthly package has a unique theme that embeds math, science, geography, culture, and history into a fun family adventure.
• Kids Cook Real Food will have you and your kids growing in skills and relationship with these online cooking classes. As the first page of the curriculum map below shows, these well thought out lessons cover a wide range of skills and topics. You will love the new skills your kids pick up and enjoy the product of their learning!

Food for Fun and Family Time

Most kitchen lessons and learning opportunities are a great way to connect as a family and leisurely experiment with food. As any of the resources noted in this article will show, the act of preparing meals and snacks allows for many teaching moments in math, reading, spelling, critical thinking, science, geography, social studies and more. Many unit studies will include some type of food-making project because food really can be connected to every subject in some way.

Enjoy your family time in the kitchen and your exploration of many other subjects!

And for a bit of entertainment and perhaps some encouragement for some reluctant bakers in the house, you may want to check out the Food Networks’ Kids Baking Championship just to see how skilled kids can be in the kitchen.

This article has been written by homeschooling staff writers of The Canadian Schoolhouse (TCS). Enjoy more of our content from TCS contributors and staff writers by visiting our Front Door page that has content on our monthly theme and links to all our content sections.