Fall is a fun time of the year filled with changing leaves, pumpkins and spooky spiders. These fun cooking activities for kids will help you connect all things fall and Halloween into your classroom or therapy sessions. These Halloween cooking activities will provide a highly engaging activity for teaching a variety of skills.
If you know me, you know my love for cooking in the classroom. By weaving in skills instruction and practice opportunities through the cooking process, students don’t even realize how much learning is going on.
Every fall, students become fascinated with the changing weather, fall festivals, carving pumpkins, and Halloween. It is such an exciting time for students with costumes, candy, and spooky treats. Rather than fight against all these out of the classroom distractions, I decided to use it to my advantage with some Halloween cooking activities for kids.
PREPARING TO COOK
Cooking in the classroom is a little more complicated than cooking at home. You don’t have a stocked kitchen and it is likely that you don’t have access to all the same appliances either. But no worries – with a little planning you can engage your students with cooking in the classroom.
COOKING TOOLS
When I first started cooking with students, I purchased what I needed for each recipe. However, I quickly learned that stocking up on some basics made the process easier. If you plan on doing a lot of cooking with your students or clients, a good tip is to stock up on some basic materials/ingredients which you will certainly use. Here’s some cooking in the classroom staples that you can’t go wrong having on hand:
- mixing bowls
- measuring cups and measuring spoons
- baking sheet
- cutting board
- knife
- plastic silverware
- paper plates
- small disposable cups
Many, if not all of these items, can be found at your local dollar store! Having these things on hand allows you to focus simply on the ingredients for the recipe.
If you are just starting with cooking in the classroom don’t worry about needing to spend a lot of money. Buy these cooking tools as you need them and pretty soon you will have a nicely stocked cabinet with all your classroom cooking needs!
RECIPE INGREDIENTS
I like to pull together the recipe ingredients a day or two before our cooking activity. This way I know that I have everything I need and that the ingredients are fresh. But this doesn’t always mean a shopping trip for me.
While there are times that I provide all the ingredients for a recipe, there are also times that I ask student families to provide one item. The students love knowing that they helped to contribute to the recipe. It also sends a great message for working together to meet a common goal.
If you ask parents to provide an item make sure to do it about a week in advance to give them time. Too far in advance and they may forget, not enough time and they may not provide it if they don’t have time to get to the store. I also like to put the deadline for providing the items a day or two before so that I have time to grab any missing items without having to make a 6 a.m. store run!
And for a last minute cooking activity, don’t forget about grocery store delivery, services like Instacart, Shipt, or even Amazon. These services can really help you save time by doing the shopping and delivering for you.
HALLOWEEN COOKING ACTIVITIES
Let’s check out some of my favorite Halloween cooking activities that are both as delicious as they are fun! I have used these in my speech therapy sessions for years and they are loved by students year after year.
1. PUMPKIN PATCH DIRT CUPS
These delicious Pumpkin Patch Dirt Cups are sure to be a hit. They combine pudding and yummy crushed-up cookies to create a fun fall treat. While you can easily connect this recipe with Halloween, if you are a holiday-free school this makes a great fall treat too!
This visual recipe will guide you and your students through the creation of the Pumpkin Patch Dirt Cups. It is a visual recipe with step-by-step instructions which makes it perfect for classroom lessons and group sessions. With both pictures and words, it is perfect for readers and pre-readers.
But cooking in classroom is about more than just making a sweet treat! It is a great way to working on skills like following instructions, sequencing, comprehension, and listening skills too. It’s also a great “reward” system with each ingredient or step being a reward to skills practice.
This Pumpkin Patch Dirt Cup visual recipe includes the recipe, vocabulary cards, and comprehension questions. This alone makes a great activity allowing you to incorporate important skills.
2. SPOOKY SPIDER COOKIES
We can’t go through the Halloween season without making a batch of these spooky spider cookies. Not only do they taste delicious, but they are also so fun to make and definitely look the part as well! Who knew a spider could be so cute, right?
Similar to the Pumpkin Patch Dirt Cups, and all of my visual recipes, this resource includes the step-by-step instructions in both pictures and words. The vocabulary cards will help students with important words and phrases related to the recipe topic, ingredients, tools and processes.
After going through all the cooking steps, I follow-up with the included questions. This gives me an idea of students understanding of the process. This really helps me to target student language goals.
While my focus with the recipes is in a speech and language therapy setting, these recipes also make a great classroom activity. Create the recipe then have students do a “how to” writing about the process. Finish up a unit study with a fun, hands-on and interactive cooking activity. Add a cooking activity as a class reward or a Fun Friday activity. However you decide to incorporate these cooking activities I know your students will love it!
You will find both the Spooky Spider Cookies and the Pumpkin Patch Dirt Cups in the Visual Recipes for October pack. In addition to the Pumpkin Patch Dirt Cups you also get three more recipes that are perfect for October: Witch's Brew, Spider Cookies, and Monster Popcorn Balls.
NO MESS COOKING WITH DIGITAL RECIPES
You can provide your students with the experience of cooking without the mess or the food with these digital visual recipe activities. Using the Boom Learning platform, your students can cook virtually! While it might not be as yummy, it still provides all the same great skills practice and engagement.
Your students will work on following the step-by-step instructions for creating their spider cookie. Built right into the digital activity is a sorting activity, matching activity, comprehension questions, and more! You can use this virtual cooking activity as part of a group activity, or as an independent center.
You can also find the Pumpkin Patch Dirt Cups in digital form too! These Boom Cards will allow students to work on receptive and expressive language skills while following along with the recipe. Use these cards to target specific skills like, sequencing, vocabulary, grammar, following directions, expressive language, and more!
Grab three virtual cooking activities that are perfect for fall with this Boom Card Cooking Bundle!
3. MONSTER MUNCH FREEBIE
Last, but certainly not least, I have one more fun Halloween cooking activity for you to try! If you're looking to test out my visual recipe cards for yourself, I have just the thing! This Monster Munch Freebie is such a fun cooking activity for Halloween!
This activity uses the same step-by-step, visual recipe card format to help you target key speech and language skills in your sessions. You'll also find vocabulary cards to help children learn new words, target basic concepts and work on asking and answering questions. Students will love following along with this activity as you make this delicious snack mix.
This recipe uses popcorn, chex cereal, pretzels, white chocolate, and other "spooky" goodies to make the perfect sweet and salty, Halloween treat. The best thing about this recipe is that it's also, "no-cook"! All you'll need is access to a microwave to melt your chocolate and you're good to go! Take a peek at me making this recipe on IG if you'd like to see the finished product.
Once you've carried out your activity be sure to use the comprehension questions as well to follow up on all that your students have learned. This is a great way to bring the activity full circle and check in on their understanding. This recipe is perfect for Halloween parties or anytime you'd like to try a "no-cook" recipe with your kiddos! Grab the freebie here and get in the spooky spirit!
SAVE THESE HALLOWEEN COOKING ACTIVITIES FOR LATER!
Save these Halloween cooking activities to your favorite classroom Pinterest board so you can quickly and easily find them whenever you are ready to cook in the classroom!