Chemistry in Cooking Lessons

In this lesson, students will learn how cooking is an everyday example of STEM. To do this, students will read a STEM story or watch a STEM story video. Students will then write their own cooking STEM stories by interviewing a person from their community about a food dish they enjoy(ed) cooking or eating.

Lesson Plan

Linked Resources

This lesson reinforces the idea that STEM is everywhere by showing students that baking is an example of STEM. Through a baking demonstration, the students will learn to determine whether a chemical reaction has occurred (a new substance was formed) or whether the change was a physical change (no new substance was formed).

Lesson Plan

This lesson is a multi-day lesson that serves as a second practice for students to determine whether a chemical reaction has occurred (a new substance was formed) or whether the change was a physical change (no new substance was formed). Students will bring back the recipes they have collected from their STEM story interviews. Working in pairs or trios, students will share their stem story, review each recipe, and identify where physical changes and chemical reactions have occurred. Then they will work together to create illustrated pages of their recipes and a classroom recipe book.

Lesson Plan

This lesson will dive deeper into chemical change by asking students to think through a cooking challenge: how to make fluffier pancakes. Students will experiment with acids and bases to create chemical reactions that add more “air” to the pancakes. Through observation of the properties of these reactions, students will work together to figure out which materials would be good for detecting acids.

Lesson Plan

This lesson continues the theme of cooking and STEM. It starts by using kitchen cleaning TikTok as a vehicle for introducing the idea that matter is made of particles too small to be seen. Then students will work on the penny lab to figure out where the oxidation on the penny went after dipping it in a cleaning solution.

Lesson Plan

Linked Resources