Baking and cooking are important life skills everyone should know. They’re valuable thrift practices that can save hundreds of dollars every month. They’re also excellent practice for academic skills including measurement and other forms of math, chemistry, and reading. With a holiday coming up, why not incorporate the symbols showing up in your seasonal books and unit studies into a Halloween meal? Halloween food projects are a great way to apply learning to real life and create fun memories.
Different Halloween food projects have different goals and values. Let’s look at a few types of Halloween food project experiences.
Academic opportunities
Practice shapes and knife skills with Jack o’ Lantern quesadillas. Put grated cheese on one tortilla. Cut three triangles — eyes and nose — from another tortilla. A mouth can be a simple semicircle. Put the second tortilla on top of the first and either bake it in the oven or cook it in a pan with a bit of butter until the cheese melts.
Ready for measurement? We like to make other kinds of fillings, too, to mix it up. Try equal parts black beans, green peppers, and chopped chicken as we did in the photo above to keep a Halloween color scheme.
We made this creepy-looking but delicious salad with a recipe from the Harry Potter: Official Christmas Cookbook. It’s useful to be able to put something together with simple instructions, but following a recipe from a cookbook lets you practice lots of skills:
- Reading comprehension
- Reading detailed information
- Following instructions
- Measuring
In fact, since this recipe requires cutting varied things according to varied directions, which include measurements in inches and fractions of inches, it’s a pretty sophisticated review of many types of measurement. Volume, length, and temperature all come into the mix.
Seasonal symbols
All those Jack o’ Lanterns connect with your pumpkin studies. We also like to use pumpkin-shaped tureens for soup, as you can see in the photo. Alongside, we have some kid-made hot dog mummies. (Click through to learn about Ancient Egyptian mummies.) Just wrap refrigerated crescent dough strips around hot dogs and bake them at 350 degrees for about 17 minutes. We put on googly eyes, because who doesn’t love googly eyes?
Halloween cookie cutters make it easy to include bats, ghosts, and pumpkins.
Cut ordinary sugar cookie dough, top with sprinkles and don’t forget the googly eyes. Bake them as it says in your recipe.
Older kids can try piping and using sanding sugar to practice manual dexterity.
The great thing about decorating with ready-made icing and sprinkles, though, is that all different skill levels can still get great results! If you don’t have these things on hand, grab a Halloween cookie kit to make it easy.
This kit has everything you need to make all the cookies we showed you.
Bones candy snacks are easy to make with pretzels, mini marshmallows, and candy melts.
- Poke the ends of the pretzels into the marshmallow to make a dumbbell shape.
- Melt the candy melts in the microwave.
- Dip the bones into the covering.
- Set them on parchment paper to dry.
Meals
Work together to create meals for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. They don’t have to be Halloween food projects — or at least not all the dishes need to be. Be a little seasonal with your color scheme and choice of dishes and get the lessons of cooperation and the satisfaction of making a meal for your family.
Those are special lessons.
