The kitchen is a great place for homeschooling. Pre-school aged children through high school seniors can learn much from food and recipes without leaving the breakfast table.
Younger students can count raisins or pretzels during snack time to practice their numbers. As they get older and better at it, they can make groups of 2 or 5 and practice counting by those increments. Make this a daily habit, and you’ll create happy little counters. Add a variation by having your child make numbers out of their raisins or other small snacks. Use this time to make letters as well as practice the sounds the letters make. When your child is ready, have him or her create sound blends by placing two letters next to each other. You might find a resistant learner actually enjoys learning when food is involved.
A fun food game to play with older students might be measuring various amounts of popcorn kernels and charting how many cups of popcorn result from each measurement. Chart your findings over the course of various days or weeks, or you may not be able to keep up with eating all the popped corn. Then you can begin to discuss ratios. Check your work by making more popcorn. Melt butter, cinnamon, nutmeg, and sorghum molasses for a delicious topping, and chart the ratios of the measurements as you attempt to create the perfect topping. Come up with other toppings to pour over your popcorn. Have your children learn to write these experiments up as recipes. They can even give these recipes out as gifts to family members.
Making cookies can be an educational experience for any age children as they learn to be culinary geniuses. Older students might get assigned the job of cutting a recipe in half, rewriting it, and then making half a batch of cookies. Or—if your family is large or you want to make lots of cookies to share with friends and family—you can have your children double, triple, or quadruple recipes. Just make sure you have a large enough bowl for all the cookie dough! This is a hands-on, real life experience with fraction manipulation and conversion that yields tasty results.
Another fantastic ratio lesson involves lemonade. Give your students a glass, sugar, lemon juice, and water. Of course this wouldn’t be homeschooling without a pencil and paper nearby for recording data. Let your kids make some lemonade via their own recipe. Let them taste it. Does it need more sugar, lemon juice, or water? Keep experimenting until you find the best recipe for the tastiest lemonade in the world. Let young children taste these creations and use descriptive words to tell whether each batch of lemonade is sour, bitter, sweet, or diluted. You will be building vocabulary, learning the importance of ratios, and laughing through the school day.
Homeschooling is one of the most important things that I do with my kids. We spend many hours of the week learning together. The more fun we can have while learning, the better they are going to understand, love, and value their home education.
Happy Homeschooling in the Kitchen Everyone!
Lisa Blauvelt (with her family and three dogs, two cats, a horse, pony, donkey, two red eared turtles, a fluctuating number of tadpoles and baby fish, and various other creatures collected by her adventurous boys) puts her education degrees to work at her home in the Deep South. There she teaches not only her own children, but others who come to her home to learn. Her decade long experience in teaching children to read will soon be published as a 476 page guide for parents.
