As we shared in a recent webinar, classroom kits are an engaging, hands-on supplement to any culinary classroom. You can use them along with any textbook or curriculum you’re already using. Real-world activities engage students, while lessons often incorporate multiple assessment opportunities. Classroom management is improved because there are enough components in each kit for many students to practice simultaneously. Most importantly, culinary kits offer easy ways to teach units on specific culinary topics.
Here are five classroom kits you can use to grow your culinary toolbox and incorporate more engaging, hands-on learning opportunities into your curriculum.
Knife Skills Kit
This kit offers activities and lesson plans for a simple introductory unit on basic knife skills. Plus, it includes enough materials for you to facilitate up to 6 simultaneous small-group practice sessions.
The curriculum includes 3 lessons. They take students through the safe handling and storage of knives, the parts of a knife, different types of knives and how to perform several basic knife cuts. If you use it in its entirety, it’s about 1.5-2.5 hours of teaching time – although you can pick and choose the lessons as needed.
Curriculum overview: See our Knife Skills Curriculum Overview here.
You can use the models, clay and other hands-on items in the kit to facilitate several different activities in your classroom. In fact, our recent culinary kit webinar featured guest speaker Melissa Priester, a FCS teacher from Illinois. Watch the video below to learn how she uses the knife skills kit in her blended classroom this year (Melissa begins at 7:00).
Food Safety Kit
This kit is actually the first culinary kit we created here at Realityworks. It covers basic food safety and handling techniques that we found are used in culinary occupations and at home.
The Food Safety Kit includes 8-10 hours of lessons that address topics like basic food safety, foodborne illness and preventing cross-contamination. It also comes with enough components to facilitate up to 6 small-group activities simultaneously.
Sample lesson: Download a Basic Food Safety Sample Lesson here.
Depending on time, you can use the lesson plans in this kit to facilitate several fun activities with your students. For instance, you can coordinate a handwashing activity with the GloGerm Gel. You could also facilitate a research project on common pathogens. We think the highlight of this kit is the foodborne illness outbreak simulation. There are even instructions for a bacteria growing lab and a safe cooking lab.
Kitchen Safety Kit
New in 2021 is our Kitchen Safety Kit. This kit introduces students to basic kitchen safety concepts and techniques in an easy, one-week unit.
Our Kitchen Safety Kit works with any textbook or curriculum you may already be using. It includes activity cards, posters and hands-on activities that address sanitation, knife safety and hazard prevention and assessment.
Like our other kits, you can use this kit to organize up to six simultaneous kitchen labs. You can also use it to offer individual kitchen safety practice opportunities.
The curriculum helps participants learn about important kitchen safety techniques that may be used at home and in culinary occupations. It introduces four primary hazard areas in the kitchen: sanitation, burns, falls, and cuts.
Sample trivia card: Download a Basic Safety Trivia Card Game sample here
The Kitchen Safety kit culminates in a hazardous kitchen assessment that you can facilitate in your own classroom. Instructions are provided to walk you through taping off one part of your kitchen lab, then using items from the kit and from your own supply to create a “hazardous” area. Once the hazardous area is created, you can task your students with observing the kitchen, identifying the hazards and explaining how to mitigate or prevent each.
Food Truck Design Kit
Also new in 2021 is our Food Truck Design Kit. This is an exciting, relevant topic for your students to explore. Research shows that food trucks have seen exponential growth with the onset of COVID in 2020. In fact, in 2020, there were almost 24K active food truck businesses in the US. What’s more, the mobile food truck industry earns $2B+ in revenue per year in the United States.
We designed our Food Truck Design Kit to give teachers a way to offer hands-on design experience for students tasked with building a food truck business. This kit allows for optimal student interaction and learning while planning all aspects of a food truck business. It includes enough hands-on lab activities and lesson plans to teach a 3-week unit on food truck entrepreneurship.
Sample lesson: Download a Food Truck Design and Development sample lesson here
Food Science and Nutrition Lab Kit
Use this interactive kit to facilitate different hands-on lab activities focused on food science and nutrition. Lab activities include reading creating food plans, analyzing childhood obesity, extracting food DNA and more! Each one follows a comprehensive lesson on the topic. Use the included posters and student workbooks to offer discussion and reflection activities.
Curriculum overview: Download the curriculum overview of our Food Science and Nutrition Lab Kit here.
Learn more
Looking for culinary classroom resources? We suggest:
- Our complete on-demand webinar, “Using Classroom Kits to Grow Your Culinary Toolbox:”
- This free infographic on culinary and food service careers
- Our free culinary career exploration curriculum
- Explore all of the learning aids and resources Realityworks offers for culinary instruction, including the above kits, by downloading our 2021 FCS Program Catalog
