PLAY-based Lessons with Fresh Vegetables

Kid Kitchen makes veggies fun for kids! In our classroom enrichment offering, we bring fresh produce into schools for children to play and explore. We engage in Montessori-inspired activities and games that are sensory-based, providing raw ingredients for touching, smelling, and tasting with fun tools like tongs, child-safe knives, and spice grinders. Among friends, kids are often excited to try the same veggies that they refuse at home (the good form of peer pressure)! We’ve even seen Brussels sprouts become a coveted item — just say it’s something we’re saving for the end and suddenly every child wants to try.

Lessons also include interesting facts about plants, from how they grow to how they’re often served and how a plant can help our bodies. We utilize full color slides with photos so kids can see what plants look like in the wild or in different recipes. It’s a big world out there with countless edible plants and even more delicious dishes — how amazing and fun it is to learn about them all together!

Our teaching philosophy pulls from the work of Maria Montessori and encourages child-led learning alongside a curiosity for the natural world. We also love bringing herbalism and botany and anything garden-related into the classroom. The curriculum draws additional inspiration from TasteEd and the Sapere method, two European programs which have had great success nurturing confident young eaters. Following these models, recipes are intentionally kept simple or excluded altogether to allow for experimentation. This approach can help a child grow confidence in their tasting abilities.

Sample Lesson (below): After a brief discussion of textures, the kids played a few rounds of “guess the mystery vegetable.” Then it was time to explore!