Cooking in Lower School

Redwood Day School integrates cooking and gardening into the academic curriculum at all grade levels.

Why cooking?

Students engage whole-heartedly around anything to do with food. The more connections a brain makes to a body of knowledge, the more deeply the knowledge is understood, and the more it is available to be built upon with increasing complexity and perspective. Each year, our cooking specialist works with core teachers, weaving cooking tightly into academic subjects areas. We have found that when we focus on topics teachers are passionate about, the lesson sings.

Students learn self-confidence, pride, and independence by cooking. Nutrition is also a driving focus. The brain is only 3% of our body weight, but uses 20-30% of the calories we consume. In our cooking curriculum we pay significant attention to what we are feeding our brains. By increasing children’s awareness of their choices, and giving them options they might not have experienced otherwise, we set them on the path of active involvement in their own nutrition.

Here's a taste of what it looked like last year:

Kindergarten compared Fruit Gushers (“Oooh, they really do stick to your teeth.”) to dried fruit and fresh strawberries (“I don’t eat those!” …four strawberries later, “Wow, those are good!”).
First grade sampled a huge variety of lunch choice items from pickled veggies to nut butters. “What new item would you like in your lunch box?”
Second grade reinforced a fraction unit making gingerbread. “I’m really good at fractions because I bake a lot.”
Third grade brought in family recipes while exploring immigration and had a global feast celebrating the countries of origin of the students’ families.
Fourth grade gathered acorns, ground them with metates while singing traditional Yokut songs, leached the flour, and ate acorn pancakes and porridge.