Courses · Cooking & Food · Kindergarten to Grade 12
Cooking & Food
Food is a good gift, and cooking it well is a skill for life. These courses teach children to cook safely, build a balanced meal, understand their taste buds, use heat and cold, and see the chemistry of starch, oil, protein, moisture and yeast. They also learn why some foods are hard to stop eating, how to grill and season, and how to plan and serve a family meal. Each lesson starts with a real story, from Pasteur’s yeast to Birdseye’s frozen fish, and ends with a real recipe cooked at home.
Choose a grade
Ages 5–6
Kindergarten
Clean hands and washed fruit, five food groups on one plate, sweet, salty and sour, melting and freezing, bread that puffs up, Jesus cooking breakfast by the sea, and no-cook recipes made with a grown-up.
Ages 6–7
Grade 1
Leeuwenhoek’s tiny animals, the five food groups, your tongue and nose, steam and the old icebox, Elijah’s cake on the coals, shaking cream into butter, cinnamon from bark, and a family picnic.
Ages 7–8
Grade 2
Germs that grow on bread, Daniel and the king’s food, the five tastes, keeping food cold long ago, Jell-O and the protein net, why some foods are hard to stop eating, salt and spice, and the first Thanksgiving.
Ages 8–9
Grade 3
The Great Fire of London, the claw grip, Carver’s sweet potatoes, getting used to new foods, Tudor the Ice King, Parmentier’s potato, how the brain learns to want foods, Marco Polo’s spices, and Martha and Mary.
Ages 9–10
Grade 4
Fahrenheit’s thermometer, the nine major allergens, sailors’ lemons and limes, the tongue-map myth, Percy Spencer’s microwave, baking powder and sourdough, the marshmallow test, chimichurri, and the first American cookbook.
Ages 10–11
Grade 5
Semmelweis’s clean hands, Pasteur’s germs and yeast, Ikeda’s fifth taste, Rumford’s kitchen, Birdseye’s freezer, the bliss point, the spice trade, Fannie Farmer and a family feast.
Ages 11–12
Grade 6
Lister and the clean kitchen, the chef’s knife, macronutrients by the gram, Eijkman’s brown rice, retronasal smell, Appert and Birdseye, gluten and emulsions, Pavlov, Scoville’s peppers, and a ration-book budget.
Ages 12–13
Grade 7
Typhoid Mary and Robert Koch, carryover cooking, supertasters, the Maillard reaction and caramel, osmosis and brining, the brain’s reward pathway, the Clove Islands and vanilla, the two-zone grill, and a week of meals on a budget.
Ages 13–14
Grade 8
John Snow and food microbes, Atwater’s calorie, Brillat-Savarin and umami, Rumford and Papin, the science of jam, ice cream and fresh pasta, the bliss point and retraining your taste buds, barbecue, and cooking for a crowd.
High school
Grades 9–12
Food Science
The chemistry, physics and microbiology of cooking: starch, fats, proteins, water and yeast; heat transfer; fermentation and preservation; and food safety, with kitchen labs and tests.
Grades 9–12
Culinary Arts & Meal Planning
Knife skills and cooking methods, flavor and the grill, nutrition and the balanced diet, food-handler safety, budgeting, and planning and cooking a week of family meals.
How every lesson works
Each K–8 course has 8 units of 4 lessons, one lesson a week for a school year. Each week has two sessions, one to learn and one to cook. The same eight subjects return every year, a little deeper each time: kitchen and food safety, the food groups and a balanced meal, taste and smell, heat and cold, food chemistry, cravings and a balanced diet, the grill and spice, and meal planning.
- Warm-up. A sniff test, a guess-the-food or a look in the cupboard, with a question to think about.
- Watch. A hand-picked YouTube video from a food-safety agency, a university extension service, a science channel or a good cooking teacher, with a note on when to watch it.
- Learn. The story, how they figured it out, and the kitchen science, in short sections a parent can read aloud.
- Picture study. A public-domain painting or photograph, such as Vermeer’s The Milkmaid, Velázquez’s Old Woman Frying Eggs or Chardin’s Saying Grace, to look at closely and talk about.
- Kitchen project. A real recipe with a recipe card, plus an experiment or taste test inside it, then cleanup.
- Cook’s notebook. The recipe in your own words, taste charts, rise logs, and what to change next time.
Safe at every age. A parent supervises all cooking. Young children wash, measure, stir, spread and assemble while an adult does every hot step. Older students earn the knife, the stove and the grill step by step, with an adult beside them. Only adults light a grill. Every recipe names its allergens.
Food without diet talk. The courses teach balance, thankfulness and self-control. They call foods “everyday” and “sometimes” foods, never “junk,” and never talk about weight or body size. The cravings unit explains plainly how the brain’s reward system works and why some snack foods are made to be hard to stop eating.
Each unit ends with a short review and a unit challenge, such as a family kitchen-safety inspection or a blind taste test. In the last week, the student plans, shops for and cooks a family feast.
Every recipe uses ordinary grocery-store ingredients and an ordinary home kitchen. The grill lessons include an indoor broiler or grill-pan option. Each unit also lists optional books, free resources and simple tools.
Every course can also be downloaded as one printable PDF, with the video links printed in each lesson.
Videos open on YouTube. Each one was checked for the lesson and for the content, but YouTube shows its own recommendations and ads around them, so parents should stay nearby.