Setting Goals

Prior to choosing recipes and activities, it is important to consider your objectives in designing a classroom cooking experience. What are your goals? Think about how you can incorporate this programming into other learning within a specific discipline (math, science, language arts, etc.), with prior food system experiences like a farm visit, with the school lunch program, or with locally sourced and in-season produce. Thinking through this at the beginning of your planning process will help you choose activities, plan your space, and identify other resources or research needed. The following are examples that may reflect your goals:

• Introduce a new food

• Promote school meal consumption

• Incorporate new kitchen skills

• Help students activate all five senses while learning

• Connect to curricular units (e.g., utilize math and science to complete and follow a recipe)

• Apply mindfulness when tasting foods

• Give students ideas to take home

• Link nutrition to wellness concepts

• Identify and practice food safe steps

To help guide your planning, we have provided a pre-session checklist to be completed prior to the classroom cooking event. *(PRINT READY RESOURCE)*

Other resources to help you help brainstorm and outline your goals:

• Check out the Baltimore City Schools Menus to see what is being served and if your lesson can connect to the components of the meal.

• Use this page to find a farmers market in Maryland.

• Use this page to find what produce is in-season for Maryland.

• The University of Vermont has a Sensory + Organization Planning toolkit with many suggestions of goals and planning.

• The Partnership for Food Safety Education has a website dedicated to safe food handling.

• Nutrition Matters provides a guide for kitchen skills at every age.

• Cooking Matters includes suggestions of goals for different age groups, especially in the sections on “Cooking Basics” and “Kids in the Kitchen.”

• The National Heart, Blood and Lung Institute offers suggestions of goals for different age groups.