Cooking and Nutrition Lessons | Life Skills Unit

Nutrition, meal planning, grocery shopping, and cooking breakfast, lunch, dinner, breads, and sides are each taught through a discussion outline, linked videos, recipes, and a homework slip in this life-skills unit.

Grades: Grades 6–7, High School, Middle School
File type: Multiple File Types

Updated Feb 27, 2023

Subject: Life Studies
Topic: Cooking Lessons, Nutrition Lessons
Resource types: Lesson Plans

From the author

About this resource

Independent living skills are built across nine linked life-skills lessons — Nutrition, Meal Planning, Grocery Shopping, Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Breads, Sides, and Recipe Templates — each opening with a discussion-outline handout that a teacher can use for a class conversation or hand out for small-group or homework reading. Every lesson links to six QR-code videos on its topic (with plain-text URLs as a backup), and several add practical tools such as a weekly and monthly meal-plan template, a grocery shopping list, a hot-cereal cooking ratio chart, a USDA food-safety internal-temperature chart, and dozens of tested recipes ranging from scrambled eggs and pancakes to meatloaf, chowder, and homemade bread. Each lesson closes with a short homework slip asking students to cook a real meal or complete a related task at home and requires a parent signature confirming completion, and the unit ends with recipe-template pages so students can build a personal recipe book. The unit is credited to Simply Schoolgirl and, based on its references to college life and living independently, appears aimed at older students preparing for life beyond their family home.

In the classroom

Teaching tips & learning objectives

Learning objectives

Apply basic nutrition principles, such as eating whole foods and balancing food groups, to everyday food choices.
Plan a week of meals using a meal-planning template and build a corresponding grocery shopping list.
Follow food-safety guidelines, including USDA minimum internal cooking temperatures for meat and poultry.
Prepare simple breakfast, lunch, dinner, bread, and side dish recipes independently.
Practice smart grocery-shopping habits, such as budgeting, comparing brands, and reading price patterns.

Teaching tips

Assign lessons in the unit's own sequence (Nutrition, then Meal Planning, then Grocery Shopping) before the meal-specific cooking lessons, since later lessons assume students already have a meal plan and shopping list.
Use the homework slips with parent signatures to extend practice into real at-home cooking rather than stopping at the discussion-outline stage.
Pre-test the linked QR-code videos before class, since several route through a third-party link shortener (qrs.ly) that could change or break over time.
Have students start their recipe book early using the recipe template pages so it accumulates new recipes across every lesson rather than only at the end.

Skills covered

Nutrition literacy — students apply principles like eating whole foods, balancing food groups, and moderating treats to real food choices.
Meal planning — students build a weekly meal plan and shopping list using provided templates and a personal meal idea list.
Food safety — students reference a USDA internal-temperature chart to determine when meat and poultry are safely cooked.
Practical cooking — students follow real recipes to prepare breakfast, lunch, dinner, bread, and side dishes.

Good to know

Questions teachers ask about this resource

Why does the unit ask students to track their diet for a week and write about what they're doing well, rather than just quizzing them on nutrition facts?

The homework slip frames nutrition as an ongoing personal practice rather than a one-time test of facts, having students reflect on their own real eating habits and identify areas for improvement, which fits the unit's overall goal of building independent life skills rather than testing recall.