The Mission Society is cooking up STEAM lessons with our second Mission Nutrition series. All summer long, we’re sharing delicious dishes and kitchen experiments that will transform young people into seasoned scientists, artists, mathematicians, and more. In this piece, we’re sharing STEAM experiments that you can take from our classrooms and conduct using ingredients from your own kitchens.
We’re sharing recipes for fun this summer! Our educators whip up experiments and activities each day, many using ingredients straight from the kitchen. These STEAM lessons serve up important scientific principles and sharpen critical thinking skills that our scholars will use both in and beyond the classroom. Plus, they offer fantastic opportunities for students to build on their social emotional learning through artistic self-expression.
Keeping students engaged in this type of enriching, in-depth learning year-round is crucial. Many young people face the possibility of losing academic gains during the summer, setting them back before they even start their new school year. However, we can turn this around with a little kitchen magic. By using everyday ingredients and supplies from the pantry, all of us can cook up educational experiences that are not only full of summer fun but can also help our students stay sharp and keep those academic skills simmering!
Below, we’re sharing a few ideas for experiments and crafts that come straight from our classrooms. We hope you find an exciting new activity to enjoy with your family from the comfort of home!
When life gives you lemons, make a volcano! This experiment will delight the whole family, and all of the important ingredients can be found in your cupboard. Just add baking soda, dish soap, and food coloring to lemon slices, and watch it create a chemical reaction that mimics the eruption of a volcano. You can find a more in-depth look at the experiment HERE, alongside a breakdown of the experiment’s lessons that you can discuss with your young scientists.
Add a pinch of artistic fun to your day! In our classrooms, artists combined kitchen ingredients with crafts, making vibrant salt art creations. Start with some pre-created coloring pages or by drawing your own. Trace the design with glue, then salt, and add a splash of paint to spice up your piece. Not only will you have the chance to use your creativity, you can also transform ordinary table salt into works of art–demonstrating that opportunities for self-expression are at our students’ fingertips. Find instructions HERE to make your own raised salt paintings.
Our Power Academy students used baking soda, vinegar, and food coloring to create mesmerizing earth replicas. You can mimic this experiment with your own scholars at home by infusing the baking soda with vibrant Earth-like hues using food coloring. Then add vinegar–when it joins the mix, a magical chemical reaction occurs, causing bubbling eruptions that mimic the flowing movements of water. Head HERE for a similar experiment and ideas for additional earth-and-kitchen-themed crafts–including cookie decorating!
Pour a little self-expression into your day! Coffee filters make great and affordable materials for a variety of colorful crafts. In our classrooms, students have the opportunity to get creative with a common kitchen item and transform them into stunning butterflies. You can also make coffee filter flowers, monsters, and tie-dye decorations–the possibilities are endless.
This is a pretty sweet way to promote creativity in the classroom and at home! Our chefs whipped up something special in the play kitchen and you can too. Do you have a favorite recipe you want to explore with the young person in your life? You can create or find a coloring page with drawings of each ingredient, color them in together, and add them all into a paper mixing bowl. This site has a simple bowl coloring page, alongside different food and ingredient pages that you can download as a starting point for this craft.
We salted our art, and now we’re seasoning a science experiment with pepper. Just like our junior scientists, you can learn about water surface tension using pepper, q-tips, and dish soap. To start, you just need a paper bowl filled with water, and to sprinkle ground black pepper on the entire surface. Then, you can interact with the water using a q-tip–one with soap and one without–and see the different reactions you create. For the full experiment and takeaways, click HERE.
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