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Cooking Education

Lake Country School boasts a fully outfitted commercial kitchen for our cooking classroom. Known as the Community Kitchen, this classroom offers a space for students to explore culinary curiosities through project-based learning with the support of the Kitchen Coordinator.

Child wearing colorful sweater with a chef's cap putting dishes away in the commercial kitchen.

Executive Function

When a child chooses to learn about a subject by way of a kitchen project, they have the opportunity to practice executive functioning skills. First, the student must sign up for a time slot that is available in the Community Kitchen. Next, they get to practice research skills by finding a recipe in the library. Once working in the kitchen, students are encouraged and supervised by the Kitchen Coordinator to follow recipe instructions closely and coordinate each step of their cooking. Once their project is completed, students prepare a cart with the necessary supplies to serve the food and present their project to their class.  

Intercultural Appreciation

After choosing a project, students will often discover they cannot find all of the ingredients needed for their recipe through a major grocery store. When this happens, students seek out local intercultural grocers to help them find the ingredients they need, leading to broader cultural experiences and interactions both in and out of the kitchen. 

If a student working on the project identifies with the culture being researched and studied, it is a joyful experience to be able to share their culture this way. Through learning about and following recipes from an array of cultures, students begin to develop a sense of intercultural competence and appreciation, as well as byproducts of empathy and personal understanding. 

Math and Science

Students must learn to apply math and science skills to any project carried out in the Community Kitchen. Almost every cooking project involves a fraction lesson, and most involve factoring, division, and unit conversions. If a project requires boiling or freezing, there will be a lesson on the states of matter and a discussion on how hot and cold temperatures affect molecules. Students begin to understand density, surface area, temperature, and weight organically. Additionally, students love to see the science and math that they learn in the classrooms play out right in the kitchen. The Community Kitchen is an experiential learning playground.

Fully outfitted commercial kitchen that students for project-based learning

 

To pairs of hands with towels uncovering risen dough read to to be baked in our community kitchen
risen, braided bread ready to be placed in an oven
Two students, both wearing red chef's hats, process zucchini for a zucchini bread recipe
A student wearing a blue chef's cap fries Latke's with a community volunteer who wears a white chef's cap.