Why spend learning time doing "Cooking"?

Our parent participation school has used cooking as way of introducing curriculum support for years. Imagine a lesson where kids are fully engaged, hypothesizing what will happen, and watching their experiments come to life. Even better, at the end, you get to eat the results. That is a brief introduction to "cooking" or Culinary Enrichment as I envision it.

For example, cooking can reinforce literacy if a class reads the book Thunder Cake by Patricia Pollaco or lessons can support STEM or social studies curricula. In my opinion, the best way to introduce fractions to kids is to have hands-on activities where students can see what a fraction really represents. Who needs expensive manipulatives when you can use food? How better to teach kids about coinage than to have them buy and sell fruit to each other and then learn to make change for a dollar? Want to have a kid relate to how Native Americans might have eaten in the past? Make a recipe like succotash with beans, corn, and squash, or homemade tortillas from dried corn kernels. How do you discuss complicated subjects like matter and energy? Compare food storage and preservation techniques, like dehydration and canning, to how a battery stores energy for later use. Energy from the sun is converted via plants into something we can preserve and then eat for energy at a later time.

Oftentimes, a light bulb only goes on in a child's mind when things are introduced multiple times and in different ways. Cooking is both an enrichment opportunity, as well as a way for students to see things in a different way, using a medium with which they are intimately familiar. The strength of this kind of Culinary Enrichment is that we can use everyday, inexpensive materials to illustrate complex ideas to expand a child's mind and understanding and then watch them bloom.