kid printable recipe writing template

kid printable recipe writing template

Designing Effective Kid-Friendly Printable Recipe Writing Templates

1. Introduction to Kid-Friendly Recipe Writing Templates

I have created three different types of writing templates so you can pick and choose which one works best for your class. One template is blank so that you can differentiate based on your students’ individual abilities. The second template is a bit more structured and helps students work on listing the steps of the recipe as well as drawing a clear picture. The third template is a comic-styled template. It is great for students that struggle with writing, but they are strong with drawing clear pictures. The third type of template also allows space for the students to write what the main character is saying, feeling, or doing.

When I looked for resources to teach my students how to write a recipe, I couldn’t find what I was looking for. The templates were too boring. They had too much to write on each step and they didn’t have room to draw a clear picture. I needed something else. I needed something that was more kid-friendly.

2. Key Components of a Kid-Friendly Printable Recipe Template

The printable recipe writing templates I have created contain kid-friendly designs that are both colorful but functional. The graphics and layout of the templates allow for mindful teacher time consumption and time management, as they serve as aids when gathering the correct ingredients and utensils for the day’s cooking class. The kid-friendly template sets the tone of the class and the mood with the children as they eagerly anticipate what they are going to learn to make, how it tastes, and most of all, how it will nourish their young bodies. With kids-focused illustrations such as cupcakes, ice cream, candles, popcorn cartons, cakes, donuts, and more, the children’s desire to cook is further ignited.

Using a kid-friendly printable recipe writing template provides routine and structure for the kids during cooking class. The children become aware of what is expected of them as well as the processes and sequences involved in accomplishing tasks. For students to fully enjoy cooking, activities have to be simple, multitasks to engage them, and make them feel that the result of their activities is delicious. This will fuel kids’ ideas and motivation to fully participate in their learning. During cooking class, children write the steps to each recipe they prepare. Writing a recipe should be fun and as simple as possible, so kids can be engaged in the activities involved in making the recipe.

3. Design Tips and Strategies for Engaging Children in Recipe Writing

The results section outlines the typical components found within over 160 different recipes. The result most salient for schools is that the majority of these recipes were easily adaptable to suit a classroom writing context. The approach section describes our thematic content analysis of these recipes. Both of these first sections will assist other researchers in making sense of and analyzing any other similar collections of published children’s recipes. The last section, design tips, draws upon the results and from our own experience of using these checklists of tips with a group of four and five-year-old preschool writers to demonstrate how to engage young children in a recipe writing process. The recipes we asked these children to write were for dishes that they had made in class with their teachers and that would be shared in a school picnic.

Despite children’s enthusiasm for recipe writing, our experiences and some of the research results suggest that it is a writing process that children do not find inherently easy or engaging. It is a dry recipe writing process, involving a lot of repetitive and instructive textual language but with very few opportunities for the expression of creativity that most literature-based writing invitations afford. One of the best ways of increasing children’s engagement with a school writing task is to place that writing within a motivating, real-world context. This article, therefore, outlines for teachers some design tips and strategies for creating this ‘best of both worlds’: how to design effective kid-friendly printable recipe writing templates for use in their classrooms.

4. Examples and Case Studies of Successful Kid-Friendly Recipe Templates

In order for both recipes to be used with children at most stages of recipe lessons, games such as “picnic recipe bingo”, the “blindfolded taste test of puppet favorite recipes”, cooking media featuring puppet characters and cooking classroom media that support kids cooking in the classrooms need to be employed. In order to be quite successful at teaching kids to cook effectively, the artful act of allowing kids to participate in cooking activities at most stages of recipe lessons must be an essential characteristic of elementary education. During cooking activities, the atmosphere in which the child cooks, the controlled talking in the kitchen spaces, the implementation of tasting the foods prepared and the enjoyment found in preparing the foods for others should all be supportive of the overall learning environment, reflecting cultural and individual diversity.

Following the evaluation of kid-friendly recipe cards by Bridget Hailey (2010) and Betty Crocker’s Recipe Cards for Young Cooks by Betty Crocker (1998) of the previous chapter and the aforementioned assessed design characteristics, two primary examples of effective design in kid-friendly printable recipe cards have been developed: one for schools and one to be offered exclusively through The American Dietitian magazine®. Currently, most printable recipe templates easily downloadable online in the school setting are adult-oriented templates that would only be successfully used in schools. As a result, efficient use of both instructional aids would suit both of these templates in a school setting and within the home.

5. Conclusion and Future Directions

Future work of this study will incorporate two areas. The study will extend to a larger sample with controlled procedures. The interviews can explore children’s narration of cooking stories through words and body language. After the narratives are compared, we can create a better image system, improve the flexibility of classifying content, and increase its understandability. The second part of the study is related to cultural background design. With this design, the next future work will have a broader ethnically diverse sample to interpret our results. In addition, by comparing children who have cooking stories related or unrelated to the curriculum, more can be learned about the interaction between personal nutrition, language development, and drawing skills. As a result, our interaction design will be based on a more detailed understanding of various areas of cultural nuances. This will contribute to the effectiveness and desirability of children using cooking packages and collocating food stories into not only a curriculum topic in class but also extra after-school activities in vernacular and multicultural educational materials. In conclusion, our work serves as the foundation for contributing interactive workshops and shared community events that children and parents can enjoy. Raising healthy diets early is more like a lifetime inheritance. The effect of nutritious food on all aspects of children cannot be measured in universal education, but it can be observed and reconstituted to be replicated. We believe that with our work, children’s interest might already have been lit, and their storytelling and presentation have been refined for their first cookery show on stage. Enjoy your delicious journey in cooking stories!

In this paper, we introduce a novel way for children to tell a cooking story through visual and written language. We conducted an exploratory study to investigate how children express food knowledge through illustrated recipe writing. We created seven different cooking-themed worksheets that combined writing space with visual aids of characters, animals, and blank areas for children to illustrate various elements of cooking such as utensils, appliances, ingredients, cooking instructions, and food. The kids each selected their own cooking story template to use. Drawings and writings were analyzed, and findings revealed that the visual complexity and written literacy were equally capable of supporting children to tell a cooking story. Our study makes the following contributions: Firstly, we were able to develop genuine personal communication between children and technology through the children’s storytelling process, which is an important component of digital literacy. Our children felt cherished and involved in the creative process. Second, children were motivated to express natural food knowledge about cooking in a suitable format through their passion for stories. Finally, we also created a design of a communication mechanism that combines visual and written language, although limited.