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Resource Downloads & Teaching Advice

Blog Cooking Elementary High School Middle School Visuals

25 Visual Recipes for Snacks and Lunches

Looking for some visual recipes for snacks and lunches? Whether you cook in the classroom, homeschool or just want your kids to cook at home-check out this post! You will gain tons of visual recipe ideas for kids!

25 visual recipes for snacks and lunches (NO oven or stove needed)

If you have followed me for long, you know how important teaching life skills are to me. Cooking is one of my absolute favorite life skills to teach. Whether you have students in elementary, middle, high school or older, teach them to independently make a snack or meal. This life skill will benefit them greatly in life. I cannot stress enough how important it is to cook in the classroom. I have created many visual recipes for special education over the years such as:

Cooking Through the Year

Basic Cooking

Advanced Cooking (Kitchen Needed)-Perfect for middle or high school!

Visual Recipes with Cereal

Nursery Rhyme Visual Recipes

Recipes that do not require a kitchen

Today, I want to share 25 Visual Recipes for Snacks and Lunches that do NOT require a stove or oven. ALL you need is a microwave and a refrigerator! A few recipes may use a toaster but no heavy duty kitchen appliances are needed.

microwave is the only item needed for cooking with 25 visual recipes for snacks and lunches
A microwave may be needed for these!

Let’s chat really quick about HOW to set up cooking in your classroom for students. Follow the simple steps below for success!

1. Carve out time

First, pick a day of the week or time to do this in your special education classroom. When I was in the classroom, I loved having cooking group on Friday afternoons. It made it a “Fun Friday,” was easy for planning and gave us a treat to look forward to.

students cooking in special education

2. Identify student’s goals

Next, look at your student’s strengths and what goals they need to work on as far as independence goes. Do they need a lot of fine motor help? Will they have to use hand over hand support for each recipe? Do you need to start very basic with them such as pouring cereal? Are they older and need to learn how to work an oven?

Fine more life skills goals here!

3. Adaptive cooking tools

Most of these visual recipes are easy cooking recipes for kids. However, you may still need to invest in some adapted tools for cooking group. This will depend on your students’ needs.

adapted spatula for cooking in special education
Adapted Spatula for cooking! (Affiliate link)

4. Use visuals when cooking

Visuals, visuals, visuals….they are just so important in special education! Students LOVE and NEED visuals.

Find this recipe for Hot Cocoa here! (it’s free!)

Some ideas for cooking group:

-Use social stories to discuss cooking and what the expectations are.

-Read books to build background knowledge on certain foods.

-Follow visual recipes so that students can be independent while cooking (even non-readers!)

25 visual recipes for snacks and lunches-nachos recipe
Find this nachos recipe inside the snack and lunch set!

25 Snack and Lunch Recipes for Students in Special Education

Do you love to cook with your kids but need SIMPLE recipes that do not require an oven or stove? The 25 Snack and Lunch Visual Recipes Bundle is exactly that! You may need a microwave or fridge. Some recipes could use a griddle, toaster oven, or mixer, but you could use the microwave for all. This set includes “real life” recipes that students will actually want to eat each day.

WHAT’S INCLUDED FOR EACH RECIPE?

– Visual Recipe

– Tools and Ingredients List

– Sequencing Page

– Survey (How was it? Did you like it?)

– Tools and Ingredients worksheet

Some favorite recipes are nachos and peanut butter fudge!

Get the Snack and Lunch Visual Recipes here!

Let me know below-do you cook in your classroom?

You can learn more about cooking in the classroom here.

FREE DOWNLOAD

Try cooking in the classroom with this free recipe!

Learn more about Simple Self-Contained Setup 101®: the bingeable online course made specifically for self-contained special educators! Reduce overwhelm and anxiety during back-to-school season with the proven methods I teach you in this course! Click here to learn more and join the waitlist now!

25 Visual Recipes for snacks and lunches-read now!

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5 Important Skills that Cooking in Special Education Promotes »

Comments

  1. Angie says

    February 11, 2022 at 7:42 pm

    Add me to your email list.

Hi amazing teachers!
I'm Alyssa Shanahan -- a former Elementary Special Ed & Life Skills teacher. My classroom focus was always to keep things simple, increase communication, and build independence. Simply Special Ed's goal is to help teachers and students reach their full potential in and out of the classroom!

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