5 Reasons to Buy Cooking Kits for Kids!

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Disclosure: This post was sponsored by KiwiCo. All opinions are 100% my own. Find our disclosure policy here for more information. 

5 Reasons to buy Cooking Kits for Kids

*UPDATE: Today only, Friday April 1st, get 50% off KiwiCo Crates using the promo code: FOOL at checkout. This will make the Yummy Crate just $11.98!

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We have long been huge fans of activity & science subscription boxes for kids & one of our very favorite subscription boxes are the KiwiCo subscription boxes. We have been using them for over 5 years (or more) & honestly I feel like they just keep getting better & better in the unique & creative options that they are providing for engaging fun & awesome learning opportunities for kids.

What I really love about the KiwiCo subscription boxes are that there are so many different kit options for every age & ability level and interest level. And this past fall in 2021, KiwiCo released their newest kids’ subscription box – the Yummy Crate. The Yummy Crate is a cooking subscription box that focuses on the science of cooking, creativity & cooking skills with their food subscription box for kids.

The Yummy Crate is perfect for kids & teens who are interested in cooking or science or both! Or if they are not interested in cooking, this is a great way to start teaching your child to cook with such fun & engaging activities they will enjoy! If your child loves science but is not so sure about cooking, they will love the science experiments & may discover that they actually enjoy cooking & baking, too, once they start thinking about the science behind cooking & all of the chemical reactions that take place when cooking.

If you have been debating about whether it’s worth it to buy cooking kits for kids, here are 5 reasons to buy cooking kits for kids & how it can help foster a love of learning and science!

Teaching Kids to Cook can Boost their Development 

When you spend time teaching your kids to cook, this can be so important for learning in so many different areas for your child. For younger kids, some of the skills they can learn as you cook together include important skills such as measuring, counting, following directions, fine motor skills, staying focused, taking turns & more.  It’s also a great opportunity for kids to practice their reading skills when reading the recipe.

Cooking is such a great language opportunity – they are expanding their receptive language (the understanding of language) by learning to listen closely or read closely & follow the directions step by step in order. They can also use their expressive language (the language they use to communicate & express themselves) by talking about what steps they are taking as they cook, thinking about what will happen next in the steps for cooking (using predictions), and describing the steps to make a recipe to another family member.

There are a lot of fine motor skills involved such as whisking, mixing items in a bowl, kneading dough, using cookie cutters, knife skills & more. All such important fine motor skills which will help kids with their writing & cutting skills for academics.

For older kids & teens, there can be a lot of math involved if they need to double a recipe or half a recipe working with fractions, figuring out measurements & which measurements are larger (1/4 cup or 1/2 cup),  adding up the ingredients for multiple recipes to make a grocery list & converting measurements from lbs, ounces, liters, etc. The more detailed the recipes that they try, there may be a lot more multi-steps involved for them to follow. Cooking recipes & participating in more meal planning for their family may also help to increase kids & teens confidence and self-esteem, too, as they feel proud of their food creations & want to keep trying more options at home.

With the KiwiCo Yummy Crate, my daughter was definitely using a lot of fine motor skills while squeezing the lemon juice, cutting the lemons, stirring the batter for the blueberry muffins, just to name a few of the important skills she practiced. I love the hands-on practice and it’s so much more fun for the kids,  too, when there is a delicious finished project to enjoy after they’re all done!

Teaching Kids Lifelong Skills in Learning to Cook

Cooking is such a critical life skill for everyone and starting kids cooking in the kitchen as early as possible is such a great way to foster more of a love of cooking & interest in food preparation & nutrition. Meal planning, finding healthy recipes and cooking preparation are all important life skills that kids will need the rest of their lives & I love that cooking kits like Yummy Crates make it so fun & engaging for kids.

When trying out a cooking kit, you can involve kids in the whole process – making a grocery list from the ingredients listed in the cooking kit, going shopping & choosing which ingredients are best (looking at brands, ingredients, costs, etc), evaluating your budget for meals, meal planning (deciding on when you will make these recipes in the kit & which meals they can be used for.

The actual cooking involves so many critical life skills such as food sanitation, hand cleanliness, using a knife safely, using the stove or oven safely & using protective measures, and learning what different kitchen tools are used for & how to use them. Depending on the recipe, they also may learn to use the toaster, slow cooker, Instant Pot, rice cooker, etc, depending on their age. These are all tools & appliances they may need to know how to use effectively & feel comfortable using once they move out on their own.

The more often kids cook in the kitchen & not only just trying recipes they are comfortable with & know how to cook well, but trying new recipes, this will help them feel more confident & successful when they move out on their own & need to start cooking for themselves. I love that cooking kits like the Yummy Crates provide unique & different recipes that might be different than things they have already tried at home & using unique & different ingredients, fruits/vegetables, etc to open & expand their palates, too, while also learning how to cook & serve those different ingredients & foods.

My daughter had never used a citrus juicer but she had fun juicing the lemons to make her own lemonade & is excited to now have a citrus juicer to try it again with other fruits. And the knife skills are so important for practicing more & more often as she gets older & prepares to head off on her own in a few years. Plus, it’s important to learn to use a stove & oven, which she got practice with both using the Yummy Crate recipes.

Gives Kids Ownership in Choosing Meals for the Family

When your child tries out a cooking kit & experiences how fun it is to create meals that not only he or she enjoys, but the whole family will rave about – this gives kids a lot of success & enjoyment to want to continue cooking! By starting with a cooking kit, where it’s fun, kid-friendly recipes & with such easy to follow instructions & information about the ingredients, kids will enjoy the cooking process more.  This should hopefully lead to more excitement for them to be involved in the meal planning & cooking process more at home. When cooking is introduced in such a fun & creative way & they learn the science behind the cooking, it can really foster a love of learning to cook.

This seems to be especially true if you have a picky eater in your home. We have a very picky eater in our household & the more we encourage her to get involved in meal planning & cooking, the more open she is to trying new foods typically. When she has tried new recipes like from a fun cooking kit, she is more willing to trying more healthy options especially when learning about the body & nutrition & the science behind the food we eat & how it fuels our bodies.

Giving kids ownership & more input & opportunities to cook in the kitchen is one of the best ways to encourage kids to eat healthier foods, too. They can experiment with different ways of cooking vegetables, fruit, etc to find the ways they like to cook those things the best but still getting important nutrients into their bodies. When they put in the hard work in creating the recipe, kids are often more willing to eat healthy meals, too & see the value in eating healthier.

My daughter was so excited to cook for our family & have us all enjoy her delicious food she made with the Yummy Crate! We loved having the blueberry muffins for breakfast & the noodles for dinner plus a yummy lemonade drink, too!

Cooking Kits do all the Work for Parents with Healthy, Kid-Friendly Recipes

As a busy mom who works from home, I am all about opportunities that are ready-made & ready to go for a fun activity for my girls or for our entire family. The time it takes to put all of that together means I often have good intentions to do more cooking for fun as a family, but I don’t always follow through. So, I love that cooking kits like the Yummy Box have everything all put together for my girls to use right in the box – all I need to do is buy the ingredients.

The Yummy Crate is basically a cooking class in a box with such clear & easy to follow instructions that kids can get started on the recipes right away (as soon as you buy the ingredients).  Rather than mom or dad having to search out kid-friendly recipes (& even harder with an educational focus) & do a lot of research, everything is done for you! Each box comes with a specialty kitchen tool, that you would need for at least one of the recipes that you may not have in your home, too. Otherwise, it uses all basic kitchen tools & appliances, etc.

I love that the Yummy Crate includes both a grown-up guide with a checklist, so you know what tools & ingredients are needed for the recipe, as well as recipe substitutions for various diets (vegan, dairy free, gluten free, etc). The kids instructions & recipe cards with STEAM activities are so easy to follow & use for kids, too. The age of your kids will obviously impact how involved you need to be in the recipe making & science experiments, but the way it is all laid out, gives as many opportunities for independence in the different cooking steps as possible for your child.

My daughter loves to cook & had started a recipe binder last year with a baking class, so now she has some new recipes from the Yummy Crate to add to her binder & hopefully make again in the future! We are excited to buy more Yummy Crates so she can keep expanding her experience with new recipes & add more favorites to her list to make for all of us (we all love that she loves cooking so much as we get to reap the rewards :) ).

Learning Key Science Ideas from Cooking

Cooking can be both an art creating culinary masterpieces, but also a science, learning all about different chemical reactions & more. While you may not always realize it while you’re cooking, there is so much science involved in cooking and it is such a great opportunity to teach kids about scientific concepts through this hands-on application & learning cause & effect & seeing how different foods can create different scenarios or reactions, etc. There is a lot of biology & chemistry involved in daily cooking tasks & making recipes. However, if you are doing the cooking with your child on your own, it’s up to you to use those opportunities to point out what’s happening from a scientific point of view & that’s not always something that comes to the forefront of our minds when we are cooking.

So, I love that the Yummy Crate from KiwiCo has a strong focus on education & learning about the science behind cooking. This is one of the only cooking kits that I have seen that features such a strong education/ science focus when making the recipes & learning about cooking. Every Yummy Crate comes with 3 kid-friendly (& kid-approved) recipes, but also 2 related science experiments to explain the concepts further and explore those science facts more. You will learn about the scientific concepts thru their “Yummy Zine” pamphlet, which includes kid-friendly science facts & tips, stories, history, and fun food facts.

This was definitely the coolest aspect to the Yummy Crate as it really explored some great scientific concepts & brought them more to life for my daughter as she was doing the different experiments & making the recipes (which were also like science experiments, too). Even cooler, my daughter had just learned these exact same concepts in her 7th/8th grade science class a few weeks ago, so it was so timely.

She is in a hands-on homeschool science class and they had done similar experiments learning about pigment dyes & how different fruits can change the colors of foods & learning about the pH values of the different combinations of foods & liquids.

However, these experiments with the Yummy Crate just took it a step further in that my daughter not only got to try the experiment, but she also took the cabbage leaves off the cabbage head, then used the blender to make the cabbage mixture & sifted out the cabbage juice, all further steps that she had not done.

Then she also got to learn a new aspect with using the cabbage juice, lemon juice & baking soda to get creative & decorate the bookmarks with these natural dyes, adding in an art focus which she also loves.

So, it really took it a step further & expanded a lot on what she had learned in her very hands-on science class, which was awesome. These Yummy kits provide such cool science experiments to try at home and expand further on concepts they may be learning at school or teach new scientific concepts they may not have learned yet.

What’s Included in the Yummy Crate:

Grownup Guide: This is a checklist of ingredients & tools that will be needed for both the recipes & the science experiements. The grownup guide also included a suggested list of ingredient substitutions for various diets such as gluten free, dairy free, vegan, vegetarian & nut free.

2 STEAM Experiment Guides – these include clear-cut directions with color pictures showing what kids will need to do step-by-step. These are very clearly laid out & simple to follow for any age child. These include a checklist of ingredients/tools (along with pictures of the tools needed), step by step guide & in one of our experiments, there was a place for kids to share their thoughts such as items used, their hypothesis about what they thought would happen & then what actually happened (the results).

3 Recipe Cards – Every Yummy Crate includes 3 kid-friendly & kid-approved recipes. These recipe cards include prep time, cook time, difficulty level, cooking skills involved (such as knife skills, stovetop skills, etc). The recipe instructions are in color with clear, easy to follow directions for kids. They are on durable thicker cardstock so you can save them & use them for future cooking sessions, too.

Specialty Cooking Tool – you will get 1 specialty cooking tool in every Yummy Crate. This might be something that you may not have in your kitchen tools but that is necessary to make the recipe.  In our cooking kit, they were making homemade lemonade, so our box included  a Citrus Juicer  to juice the lemons.

Yummy Crate Review

I think this Yummy Crate might be my daughter’s favorite KiwiCo box yet! I have to say that it’s definitely a kit that will get so much use out of it with 3 recipes and 2 science experiments. You can break it up into multiple days as there is so much to do in these activities & recipes.

The main focus of her kit was color-changing treats & learning about “Color Changing Anthocyanin” – Anthocyanin is a color-changing pigment that can cause changes in color for foods when you use certain foods such as blueberries, eggplant, cabbage, raspberries & more.

3 Recipes: 

• • Blueberry Muffins
  • Lemonade (w/lemons, cabbage juice & sugar)
  • Tie-Dye Noodles

Science Experiments:

• • Cabbage Chemistry – experimenting with pH levels & anthocyanins (foods with strong pigments to change the color of other foods)
  • Color-Pop Bookmarks (using chemical reactions to make art)

I love that the recipes are different options such as a snack/breakfast item, beverage & a dinner item. We could do these at different times so that made it nice to be able to spread them out for more fun activities on different days. With the lemonade, you will use the cabbage juice from the 2 science experiments, so that definitely makes the most sense to do those 3 experiments/recipes together, though.

As I mentioned earlier, my daughter had just been learning about color-changing & pH levels in foods a few weeks earlier in her science class,  so it was such great reinforcement & brought the concepts to life even more by doing these experiments & making these recipes at home.

She also got to practice using our high-speed blender, knife skills (cutting the lemons), baking & cooking skills, using the stove & so many more great cooking life skills that are so important to be practicing.

My daughter is 13 years old & these Yummy Crates say they are geared towards ages 6 – 14, but honestly I think older teens might enjoy these cooking kits, too, as they are great skills to learn & interesting recipes to try, as well as important scientific concepts to learn. So, I really think these could work for any age – elementary up to teen. {The only thing with older kids is that some of the wording/pictures might be more geared towards the elem/tween crowd, but other than that,  I think these really could work well for any age!

We also loved that the Yummy Crate included a new kitchen tool, too, that was perfect as we did not have a hand-held citrus juicer, so now we have one to add to our kitchen collection.

We definitely found the Yummy Crate to be a fantastic KiwiCo crate & I think it’s one of the most unique cooking subscription boxes available in the way that it incorporates so much science learning into the activities. You are not only learning such great life skills  while learning to cook but learning about science in such a fun way too.  These activities can really help to foster a love of cooking AND science, with some fun hands-on activities like this! Cooking kits for kids are such a worthwhile activity for kids to do at home!

Make sure to check out more details about all of the KiwiCo Crates & whether they are worth buying for kids! Plus, we have the most current promotions & sales happening on the KiwiCo crates, too!

Special Limited Time Promo:

There is a limited time promotion available now for 30% off your first month – the Yummy Crate is normally $23.95 for a monthly subscription box (even less if you buy more months at a time) – after 30% promo code: LEARN30 – the price will drop down to $17! Great price to try these new cooking kits for kids!