So Many Cooks in the Kitchen: All the Ways We've Homeschooled with Educational Cooking Projects

King cakes from scratch!

 As I was writing the other day about my kid's experiences with baking throughout her childhood, I got interested in trying to remember what-all we actually had cooked together as part of her homeschool education. 

Spoiler alert: it's been quite a lot!

Projects like these have been such a part of the pattern of our days that I couldn't remember off-hand more than a few notable ones: the cookie map of Ancient Egypt. The cookie Solar System. Mason jar butter. Experimenting with yeast.

Fortunately, THIS is why I've been a blogger for 15-odd years--it's so I don't have to lose my precious memories because of my terrible memory!

I had SO much fun going through my blog archives to find all the times we incorporated a specific cooking project into our homeschool. I didn't count the times that we did stuff solely for fun (even though that's all educational, too!), like our cookie bake-offs and our dyed rainbow waffles and cupcakes, or the food that we made together just as part of life, like yogurt popsicles and applesauce and endless DIY pizzas and quick breads. In this master post, I'm just counting specific projects that we did that were for specific topics of study. I wish I could go back and do them all over again with those magical little kids!

ART

• sculpture: bread sculptures. Bread dough is edible clay! It's also interesting to kids to see the transformation in their sculpture that comes from baking the bread. Of course, bread dough is just one more interesting sculpture medium that all kids should be exposed to, along with all kinds of clays and papier mache and anything combined with a good hot glue gun. You could also incorporate bread sculptures into subjects like math and literacy, sculpting bread dough snakes into shapes and letters and baking them into breadsticks. 

GEOGRAPHY

• Japan: homemade mochi ice cream. Try making your own awesome Japanese treat! Cooking and tasting Japanese cuisine is a great way to build context in a kid who loves anime and manga. If kids are interested, the library usually has kid-friendly cookbooks of Japanese cuisine, and I feel like most places have Japanese restaurants. It's a great segue into a study of Japanese culture. 

• local geography: locavore food prep challenge. Kids learn first-hand about the local food movement and what foods are grown and currently being harvested in their location as they collect ingredients and make a dish consisting entirely of local foods. If kids are really interested in local foods, you can spend spring through fall visiting every u-pick farm in driving distance, and look for places like independent dairies, local breweries, honey farms, and other local food providers who offer tours and workshops. Learning how to preserve those food products is a great next step! You can do also similar cooking challenges anywhere--collect ingredients and make a fun meal at an Asian or Mexican grocery; set a budget for kids to shop for a meal at the grocery store and then cook it independently; find all the Fair Trade items, etc. Even younger kids can play by finding foods with specific colors or something new they want to taste or something that starts with a certain letter, etc.

• New Orleans, Rio de Janeiro, Venice: king cake. Mardi Gras/Carnival is a great time to dip into a geography unit study of New Orleans, Rio de Janeiro, and/or Venice. Not only is there the local cuisine of each area, but also the local music, the costumes, the dances, the parades--so much for every sense! If kids love that kind of thing, there are all kinds of nation- and region-specific holidays you can explore throughout the year to build geography and cultural knowledge. If kids just like baking, you can actually learn quite a lot of American history just through baking cakes!

• map skills: cookie map. This is one of my favorite homeschool projects to do with young children. We've made cookie maps of every place imaginable, from the United States as an Independence Day project to various countries that we've studied to places that illustrate historical events. Kids can use frosting and candies to embellish the map and add features, and can make flag labels out of paper and toothpicks. The possibilities are endless! 

• Taiwan: bubble tea. If your kid is into bubble tea, this could be the first restaurant-quality food that they learn to cook at home, because it's a SUPER accessible recipe. It fits great into a unit study of Taiwan or the entire continent of Asia, or expand the geographic interest by making or tasting special drinks from all over the world while studying those places. Take it in a new direction with more exploration of the mathematics of spheres or the science of polymers. Boba is also another preschool-friendly sensory material, although it's a choking hazard for under-threes. 

HISTORY

• Ancient Mesopotamia: Gingerbread Cuneiform. See what it's like to write cuneiform... and then see how delicious it is to eat it! Other great Ancient Mesopotamia enrichment activities could include building models of a ziggurat or the Temple of Ishtar and listening to The Epic of Gilgamesh. Take the gingerbread cuneiform in a different direction by having a kid use the stylus to draw maps or diagrams or spelling words, or premake a gingerbread moveable alphabet to practice word building.

• Neolithic Great Britain: gingerbread Stonehenge on a cookie cake. Kids get their hands on this Neolithic henge monument by building it in gingerbread on a cookie cake base. This one is mostly just for fun, so it would be a good thing to make as a little celebration when finishing up the relevant unit study. It also almost certainly ties into ancient astronomy, so you have a ready segue into the history of science. Gingerbread is also just a great structural material, so you could have a go at building pretty much any architectural creation with it--how fun would a gingerbread Eiffel Tower or Egyptian Pyramid be for Christmas-time?!?

• Ancient Greece: cookie and Jello map. Here's your assurance from me that your kids' cooking project does not have to look perfect, or even attractive... or even not gross. I think this cookie and Jello map of Ancient Greece that the kids made looks SO gross, but they put a ton of research into it, worked really hard on it, and learned what I wanted them to learn. And they said it was delicious! 

• pioneer studies: Mason jar butter. You'll probably come to this project inspired by reading Little House in the Big Woods or visiting a living history museum. It's an especially good activity when it's miserable outside, because it gets little bodies moving and occupies them for quite a while--and then you can have a snack! Contextualize the activity by visiting a humane dairy farm or getting a 4-H kid to let you milk their cow, or doing other living history projects. It pairs well with the picture book Fry Bread, which also includes a cooking project!

LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

• J.R.R. Tolkien: Lord of the Rings feast. Themed dinner and movie nights are my absolute favorite thing! After we read each of the books in the Lord of the Rings trilogy together (Matt has read SO MUCH TOLKIEN out loud in his life!), we had a movie night with a themed dinner to watch the associated film. It's very fun for kids to remember their favorite details from the book and figure out recipes to represent them. Sometimes they like to make foods written about in the book, like seed cakes or rabbit stew, and sometimes they like to make foods that represent other part of the book, like these Ring of Power doughnuts, above. You can make a themed dinner about ANYTHING, and it's always educational for the kids to research what they want to make, shop for the ingredients, and cook it.

• children's books: Amelia Bedelia Bakes Off. The kids thought that Amelia Bedelia was SO FUNNY, and I still remember how absolutely thrilled my kid was when we finished Amelia Bedelia Bakes Off, she turned the page, and found a recipe there for Amelia Bedelia's cake! All praise to that author, because my kid could make the cake right then, using ingredients we already had on hand. Making recipes from children's books is such a great literacy connection. It builds context to the real world, and it makes reading feel even more fun than it already is. We also own and have really liked cooking from the Green Eggs and Ham Cookbook and The Little House Cookbook--any literary cookbook written around a children's book is probably going to have kid-friendly recipes.

   MATHEMATICS

• fractions: Rice Krispy Treat fractions. Make Rice Krispy Treats, pour into a square or round cake pan, then when they're set have a lot of fun cutting them into various fractions. You can use any food that can be set in a round or square pan, but Rice Krispy Treats work particularly well because they cut cleanly without a lot of crumbling. Combine it with all the other hands-on ways that you can explore fractions, because it builds a kid's number sense by seeing the same concept illustrated multiple ways. Rice Krispy Treats are also a good sculpture tool for all kinds of art and model-making projects.

• geometry: heart-shaped cake. Making a heart from a square and circle is a neat little trick--and it's delicious! You can extend the geometry play with paper geometric figures that kids can pattern and make pictures with. If you're feeling really ambitious, you could then bake a cake of whatever picture they've created with their shapes!

• logic: edible chessboard. My kid and I baked this blondie and brownie chessboard during a time when chess was of high interest to her, and it was so fun! There was some good patterning and ordering involved, but things really got wild when we started removing squares from the board and figuring out how to play around them. Kids who like puzzles and games or are at all creative or mathy can get really into chess, and there are a lot of kid-friendly chess enrichment activities around. These two matching brownie and blondie recipes would also lend themselves to even more fraction exploration, patterning, and, if you frost them with letters, moveable alphabet play.

• telling time: clock cake. This is more fun than educational, but it does require practical knowledge of how a clock face is organized and the ability to write the numbers. You could expand this lesson by cutting the cake to demonstrated elapsed time, or instead writing fraction divisions on it. 

PRACTICAL LIFE

• reading comprehension/following directions: Jello. As soon as a kid can read pretty well, I think it's so educational for them (and SO fun for you to watch!) to be given any variety of easy-prep packaged food and encouraged to read the directions and make it all by themselves. Jello is perfect for this because the only cooking required is hot water, and it's very hard to mess up Jello! Instant puddings, canned biscuits and sweet rolls, and boxed cake mixes are also easy enough for a young independent reader to make.

• how it's made: homemade peanut butter. This requires a high-powered blender, but kids find it fascinating to see how easy it is to make their own nut butter. My kid did not prefer this freshly-blended, peanuts-only peanut butter (even though the peanut butter I bought her at the time was also peanuts-only, sigh), but found it VERY fun to blend other delicious things into it. You can blend in honey, maple syrup, jam, and even more creative ingredients like spices and whole fruits. Cinnamon honey peanut butter was DELICIOUS! If a kid gets into the "how it's made" part, they might LOVE the TV show, much of which is free on YouTube. If they get into the blender part, introduce them to making their own smoothies and hummus and other nut butters. Blenders are VERY fun!

SCIENCE

• astronomy: cookie Solar System. This is an all-day or multi-day project, but it is SO MUCH FUN! It requires calculation, geometry, a lot of research, and a lot of problem-solving, but the result is a tasty collection of cookie planets with correct relative size. My kids had a lot of fun reading about each planet so they'd know what color scheme to frost it and how many mini M&M moons to give it. It goes great with any other Solar System activities, many of which are equally hands-on. If you get a good cookie recipe that doesn't spread, you can also bake cookies to represent mathematical concepts like arrays and area models and larger map projects--can you imagine an entire cookie map of the world, with a different cookie for each continent?!?

• cell cycle: states of meiosis cookie models. Reinforce the stages of meiosis by building an edible model. You can turn just about any diagram into a cookie or cake model with enough creativity! Plant and animal cells also lend themselves well to being made of cookies or cake, and I have seen an AWESOME cake model of a World War I trench.

• fungi: yeast bread. The day that my kid learned that yeast is alive is one of my favorite days of homeschooling. She was so interested that we put aside whatever else we'd been planning to do and instead did some experiments with yeast, watched an educational video about fungi, looked at yeast through the microscope... and baked yeast bread! This would be a great intro to all kinds of kid-friendly yeast baking projects, including collecting wild yeast and making sourdough. 

• chemistry: gelling and spherification. Learn how polymers work by creating gelatin juice spheres. Other hands-on ways to explore polymers include making milk plastic and slime. Or continue with edible states of matter by playing with non-Newtonian fluids, densities in liquids, and ice. These taste-safe spheres also make a good sensory material for babies on up! 

• polymers: authentic homemade gummy candies. If you've got a kid who adores gummy candy, don't fall for those DIY kits or tutorials that essentially use just unflavored gelatin and juice or Kool-Aid. They do not taste like authentic gummies, and your kid will not be fooled! You really can make authentic gummies, though, that really do taste awesome, and your kid can get some hands-on experience working with polymers while you're at it! Kids who like this might enjoy other DIY food kits. There are SO many, from growing your own mushrooms and window gardens to making your own cheese and chocolate and gum.

• properties of matter: density cake. This an easy and kid-friendly recipe that kids can run when they're learning about the properties of matter and density. Kids can do some similar experimentation to make a liquid density tower, although that one's not edible. If mix-ins seem to encourage your kids to try new foods, you can expand that into all kinds of bake-offs and cooking play. 

I wish I'd taken better photos of the kids doing all this magical cooking, because I'd love to write a book of educational cooking enrichment projects, but now I don't have anymore mini models! Maybe my teenager could help me with some illustrations to use instead...

Homemade Halloween Treats: Sandwich Cookie Critters

Like the marshmallow monster cupcakes, these sandwich cookie critters were both inspired by a Pinterest project (Chips Ahoy! critters!) and made entirely from ingredients I already had on hand.

Well, I cheated a little bit. Matt went shopping for the ingredients to make oatmeal cookies, made them, and then I stole eight of them to make a critter for everyone in the family. But the cream cheese and powdered sugar were leftover from Matt's birthday (birthday carrot cake for the win!), I bought the food coloring to make rainbow cake for my Girl Scout troop's Bridging party, and I'm bound and determined that those candy eyes won't live through yet another Halloween.

Here's the cream cheese frosting recipe that I used.

If only I'd worked in a way to use up some more of our sprinkles, I'd have won on all fronts!

Want to keep up with all our random Halloween crafts and activities and weirdness? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page, where I post lots of pics of what we're up to and links to what we're into.

How I Organized Our Polymer Clay (And Prismacolor Pencils!)

Syd is my crafting soulmate. She loves working with her hands even more than I do, and she's got the added benefit of some serious artistic talent to work with.

She's also got her fingers in a lot of crafting pies! Here's what I've seen her engaged in, just in July so far: making digital art, creating endless batches of original slime recipes, sketching, repainting Monster High dolls, baking and decorating cupcakes and homemade ice cream sandwiches, and sculpting with polymer clay, and that doesn't even count the crafts that she and I have done together, or what she's done at the pick-up art classes that I've been taking her to.

Art-making is also mess-making, at least here in our home, so one of my major projects this summer is to organize and store some of the most popular and commonly-used tools and supplies. I want our playroom table and floor (and my study table and floor, and the family room table and floor!) back, and I want everything that Syd uses most to be in her space, the playroom, because although she always has access to our family storage spaces, she tends to leave them looking like a crafting hurricane swept through and she manages to thoroughly disappear whenever I come looking for her to tidy up.

I've got a couple of big pegboards in progress that I'm using to organize and store most of these craft supplies, but even the categories themselves, just the slime supplies, for instance, or just the Perler bead supplies, need to be better organized so that we can use them better and store them more neatly.

I don't have slime or Perler beads completely under control yet, but I HAVE conquered polymer clay and Prismacolor pencils!

For polymer clay organizing, I used this YouTube video as my inspiration:



I took all of the old, grody, unsorted clay that's all mixed up together, put it into like batches, and ran each batch through my pasta machine umpteen times--

See all that grody clay in the bin back there? That's what I started with!

--until it came out pretty and nice and new! All the clay stored in the bin below started out grody and mixed up, and now it's clean and tidy and Syd has already been into it:

All of our polymer clay and our few clay tools fit easily into two of these exact plastic organizers. Taking another crafter's advice, I covered the bottom of each organizer with waxed paper to keep the clay from reacting with the plastic. Each organizer has a plastic hanging loop at one end, so I can hang it on our giant pegboard, and with the addition of a shelf to set the pasta machine on, that will be the polymer clay all stored and organized!

I might add another, smaller plastic bin to hold polymer clay that's been sculpted but not yet baked, as it's kind of killing my soul to keep turning on the oven so that the kids can bake, like, two things. I'm imagining, instead, storing them and baking them in batches, kind of like a kiln-firing. Maybe? We'll see...

Prismacolor colored pencils were a lot simpler to organize, even though there's a lot more of them. Our big family set of colored pencils now lives in this big, 72-pencil colored pencil roll:

I even put all the pencils in rainbow order so that the kids can easily find the color that they want, and since every space is filled, it *should* be obvious where each pencil goes back. This pencil roll now lives in a basket on the pegboard.

Will has her own personal set of Prismacolor pencils that stay in their tin and live wherever she wants them, and each kid has her own personal small set of Prismacolor watercolor pencils that stay in their tins in their work trays and that they use with their schoolwork (they work fine as regular colored pencils, too!). Syd uses this larger family set of Prismacolor watercolor pencils--

--on the Monster High dolls that she alters, so those, too, will likely live on the pegboard. Syd also informed me that she's used up the black in both this set and her own personal set, so I guess I'll be doing a little back-to-school shopping this week.

We school year-round, and thus don't really have a particular day that feels like the beginning of a school year. Nevertheless, summer, when the kids are often gone for their various camps, does feel like more of a break, and it feels especially nice to be able to spend the time that they're away refreshing and renewing things for them, sharpening their pencils and sorting their supplies, making things look different and temptingly fun. 

Kind of like walking into a familiar classroom for a new school year, don't you think?

A Passion for Perler Beads

Well, the kid finally did it.

As I've been telling you, Syd has been longing to make Perler bead My Little Pony figures ever since Comic Con, when we saw Perler bead My Little Pony figures in the exhibit hall (and did not purchase them). We actually had a wee stash of beads and some plates from a few years ago, when I thought the kids might like them (they did not), so all I had to do was order the packs that contain the colors that pattern-makers have been using for their My Little Pony templates (Why u come unsorted, Perler Beads?!?), and we were off!

Syd is making Rainbow Dash's cutie mark.

Even Will likes Perler beads, although she has less patience for fussy patterns, and most likes to fill in a pre-shaped board. I've promised to buy her this dolphin plate at my earliest convenience. 

One of my promises to myself as we shift around how we do school these days is that I will work *with* the children whenever possible--I'd gotten into the habit of shifting off the kids' schoolwork to them to do independently, and while they're certainly capable of that, I of course know that it's far more tiresome to work that way. And so as the kids made Perler bead flowers and fish and ponies and cutie marks, I made cupcakes!

Syd caught my enthusiasm, and made some cupcakes and "ice cream scoops," as well:

Ironing them is the worst part of the process--tedious, fiddly, and nearly impossible to get even with my admittedly pretty crap iron--so now that I've somewhat gotten the hang of it, myself, I plan to show the kids how to iron and let them fuss with it themselves.

I have reserved my cupcakes to make a charm bracelet for Syd, but her cupcakes, lollipops, and wrapped candy pieces (she created the patterns for the latter two herself) will become party favors for her candy-themed birthday party next month:

My favorites of my own Perler bead creations:

I modified this star pattern a little.

The Perler beads have stayed out on the table for the past two weeks, never unused enough to be put away, although I think that the enthusiasm may be waning enough now to give them a bit of a break. It reminds me of when the kids were a little younger, and one of my weekly homeschool plans involved setting out an open-ended project like this as an "invitation" that would stay for a week or so, being picked up and put down and explored and enjoyed during that time. This is something that I certainly think that I should again include in our days. 

With that in mind, my goals for both kids for our school week include math, grammar, spelling, and reading aloud every day; handmade gifts for a birthday party this weekend; a lesson on the causes of World War II at some point during the week; our regular extra-curriculars of volunteering, robotics class, horseback riding class, playgroup, and math class, and extra ballet recital rehearsals for Syd and the Trashion/Refashion Show this Sunday for all of us; and for Syd, with Will invited to participate if she'd like, a daily hands-on project, including a "DIY ocean" based on our aquatics class last week, more seed starting with me, experimenting with dyeing play silks, and upcycling spaghetti jars into vases in preparation for a Girl Scout troop meeting on flower arranging next week.

AND an open-ended invitation set out somewhere accessible. Snap circuits, perhaps? Clay? 

Ooh, maybe sketching supplies and a still life!

Kid-Made Rainbow Cupcakes

I'm certain that we eat too much white flour, and too many sweets.

But baking them is so much fun!

Syd wanted to make rainbow cupcakes last week, and it was a project that she did almost completely independently. Hence the mess:

Which she cleaned up, incidentally--I'm still really struggling with getting the girls into the habit of cleaning up after themselves on a regular basis, but they do clean up after their projects very well (with prompting).

Sydney made the batter, following the instructions that I read out loud to her from our vanilla cupcake recipe (I usually use the vanilla cupcake recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, which is yummier, but this one seemed easier for a kid to make by herself), then divided it while I dragged out the dregs of our food coloring stash:

I've used the Wilton gel coloring for years, but as the colors have been running out I've been considering upgrading to healthier food coloring. I'm waffling, however, which means that right now we have neither healthier food coloring NOR a good selection of Wilton gels anymore. So Syd had to get a little creative!

Paper plates are NOT what I would have steered her to if I'd been making these cupcakes. We buy paper for road trips and birthday parties, and then I always try to hide the extras away until the next road trip or birthday party, and yet somehow the kids and Matt always find them! Mark my words, I'm probably going to have to buy more paper plates for next week's road trip, now, so that the vicious cycle will continue.

These poor cupcakes took almost 24 hours to make. Syd started the process early one afternoon, then had to put it aside because we had our volunteer gig that afternoon, then worked on it some more after dinner that night, then had to put it aside for bedtime, then got it back out after breakfast the next day, and then FINALLY had the rainbow cupcakes of her dreams!

And then, apparently, she got my camera out, because I did not take the following glamour shots of these rainbow cupcakes:

See? White flour and sugar!

But also math, independent work, practical life skills, creative thinking, problem solving...

And yummy dessert.

Tutorial: Easy Rainbow Cake

NOTE: The following post was originally posted a week ago for just a few hours before Blogger crashed and deleted it. Fortunately, it was recently recovered back to my draft posts, so here it is again!

When you were a little kid, did your parents have a "special" cake, the one that got baked for all the special occasions, the one that you ALWAYS requested for your birthday or a celebration or any time that you got to be in charge of picking the cake?

When I was a little girl, Mammaw's chocolate chip bundt cake was THE cake.

For my little girls, I think that my rainbow cake is now the cake. We had rainbow cake last year for Sydney's birthday, and then for her birthday party--made sense, because her party theme was rainbows. This year, however, for Sydney's birthday, with a choice among all the cakes in the entire world--cookie cake, ice cream cake, chocolate cake, pink cake--her request was, again, for a rainbow cake.

Now, you can do a rainbow cake two ways: the easy way, or the hard way. I do the hard way for the birthday party, and the easy way for the birthday. The easy way still, obviously, takes more work than just buying a birthday cake from Sam's Club, but it's really not that hard, since you can even use a box of cake mix if you want, and the impact of the finished cake is giant.

Here's how to make rainbow cake the easy way, because you are definitely going to want to do this yourself. It's that fun:

Prepare a double batch of white cake using your preferred method. I have made white cake from scratch and have used white cake mix for this recipe--it works either way. If you're a total baking newb, however, double-check your cake mix box to make sure that you're buying white cake mix. When I was a total baking newb I brought both yellow cake mix AND white cake mix to my aunt, who was making a giant dinosaur cake for Will and needed two boxes of mix--she was not pleased.

I advise making a double batch of cake mix because you'll have more cake batter to dye, and so it'll be easier to work with as a whole. If you only need one cake or one batch of cupcakes, then just bake the rest and freeze it for later--rainbow cupcakes make a nommy breakfast treat!

Separate the cake batter into as many separate bowls as you want colors in your cake, and dye each bowl of batter separately, using a clean spoon for each:

For a traditional rainbow cake you want to go ROY G. BIV, but this is just a fun project for Sydney's birthday, so I let the girls choose any and all colors that they wanted.

I highly recommend using better-quality gel or paste food coloring for this project--the point is the carnival colors of the cake, and those colors are just more vivid with better coloring.

If you're making this cake yourself, as the adult, you can work a little more systematically from this point, but, especially if you're baking cupcakes (as I am here), this project is a fabulous one to let little kids do themselves from here. Especially for cupcakes, which cook fairly quickly, this would also be a fun party activity to allow little party guests to design their own cupcake.

Arrange all the different bowls of colored mix so that they're accessible, each with its own spoon:

Don't mix up the spoons!

Using the dedicated spoons, drop spoonfuls of cake batter into the cake pan however you'd like:

You can smooth out a certain color, of course, but don't stir, because you don't want to blend the different colors together--you've already eaten brown cake before, haven't you?

You can use this same cake technique for a full-size cake pan, a smaller individual cake pan, as Sydney has above, or for cupcakes:

 

When you're finished, bake as usual.

I think that you'll be really pleased with what you end up with:

The birthday girl seems pleased, doesn't she?

I wouldn't actually let her put her treasured cupcake IN her brand-new decorated treasure chest (thanks, Abby!), so on top had to suffice:

Stick around, because Syd has already requested a star-shaped layered rainbow cake for her star-themed birthday party this weekend, and so if I'm making a layered rainbow cake, anyway, well, then I might as well write a tutorial!

Here's the food coloring we used: