Fun With Food: Getting Kids Excited About Learning With Themed Dinners

A fun way to incorporate a book, learning activity, or concept into your daily routine is with a themed dinner. The activity can be as simple as a dinner and a movie or very structured with a dinner based on a book and complete with discussion questions or craft.  If the activity is something I have planned in advance I like to get the kids excited about it ahead of time.

For instance,  we did a lesson on the book Stone Soup by Marcia Brown. My daughter was sick this week and I decided to forgo my planned lesson to make soup.  Not wanting to waste a "school" day, I decided to make "Stone Soup".  I didn't have a copy of the book, so I went on YouTube and found a version of the book being read aloud by Liz The Story Reader.While I was cooking, I played the video of the book being read aloud.  We talked about what I was adding into the soup and about the book.  There are some great discussion questions about Stone Soup that can be found online also, if you are interested in creating a more structured activity.

Our "Stone Soup"

Here are a couple of other Dinner/Lessons:

• Spaghetti dinner when we learned the "On Top of Spaghetti" song (we could have also added the Columbia/Sony movie "Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs" for fun or the book Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs by Judi Barrett)
• Ratatouille dinner and watch the Disney/Pixar movie "Ratatouille"  (Fun activity with teaching the five senses - Taste and Smell)
• Cowboy Chili and watch a cowboy movie like "Ballad of Little Joe" by VeggieTales