Edible Crafts for Kids
Fun Candy Projects
We are all used to making gingerbread houses at christmas, and carving pumpkins at halloween. But there are lots of other edible crafts for kids to have fun with.
Playing with you food is fun - it helps your creativity and makes you look at food in a new light. There is a lot of educational value in food and candy crafts too.
Check out my craft projects to add a little something extra into your homeschooling.
|Homeschooling Edible Activities for Kids|
Here are my favourite edible crafts for kids. Click on a link below, or scroll down for recipes.
Cookie Decorating Ideas
Fruit and Vegetable Carving
Cookie decorating may seem like an obvious craft, but there are loads of ways you can incorporate this into your homeschooling.
Let the children develop their creativity by using the icing to decorate biscuits, cookies or cupcakes
Decorating is easy with powdered/icing sugar - or roll out some edible play dough
and cut out decorative shapes. You can 'glue' these to your cookie using jello or peanut butter.
This flexible craft can easily be adapted this to suit your homeschool project. Use a relaxed decorating session to review and chat about your homeschooling studies.
Here are some cookie decorating ideas you can use
- Decorate the cookies as flags as part of a geography project.
- For an art project decorate 'in the style' of an artist. Try the blues and greens of Monet, or the strong colors of Mondrian.
- Thanksgiving cookies - turkeys, trees, gifts, leaves.
- Use round biscuits and orange icing for Halloween pumpkins.
- Cut Autumn leaf shaped biscuits and use autumn colors.
- Use gingerbread men as historic figures, norse gods, vikings, knights, spacemen etc. How about a gingerbread timeline?
- Winter - snowflakes, xmas trees, snowmen, stockings, bells, stars, mittens.
- Summer - icecreams, bucket and spades.
- Valentine hearts.
- Draw numbers on the cookies and use them to make sums, or use letters to make words.
- St. Patricks day clover.
- Make self portraits.
- Spring flowers, ladybugs, animals, Easter chicks, bunnies, eggs.
Making your own dough and using shaped cookie cutters makes this a special decoration project.
Back to Top
Fruit and Vegetable Carving
Fruit and vegetable carving has its beginnings in the Far East. In Japan, both the food and dishes are considered to be a type of art. The more beautiful the food looks, more delicous, it is thought to be
Pumpkins are not the only vegetable that can be carved. With a little practice, even kids can achieve some pretty impressive results
Again, this is a craft that can be used with lots of homeschooling projects
. Take a look at the culture and tradition of foods around the world, before carving your own decoration. Celebrate a holiday. Make a spring vegetable flower arrangement. Or just study art and design - and let your imagination run wild!
When carving with children, safety is paramount
. I find sharp knives safer than blunt ones as less pressure is needed to get results. Show younger children how to hold a knife carefully, and chop away from their bodies. Start with larger vegetables (like pumpkins, potatoes and melons), or with easy to slice vegetables like cucumbers. Keep on the alert and offer help if it is needed
. Let the age and dexterity of your child guide how far you take this!
Start simple - you can make a bowl by chopping the top off a melon and scooping out the inside
. A potato peeler makes a useful tool for scraping a pattern into the melon skin. Use the bowl to serve a drink, or the scooped out melon balls.
You can also use it for a flower arrangement like the one pictured above
. Wooden skewers make great stalks - with radishes, carrot, baby corn, grapes and sliced mushrooms for the flowers.
Need a bit more help? Try these sites for step-by-step instructions
A great story book to go with this activity is Daniel's Duck
. It is about wood carving, but it's a lovely story that we enjoyed. For a UK copy click here
Back to Top
Modeling is fun with clay - but even better when you can eat it afterwards!
This is one of our favourite edible crafts for kids.
If your children enjoy playdough, why not let them experiment with some edible creations. Perfect for a homeschooling crafts session
Modeling is a great medium for homeschooling. You can build just about anything to go with your project. But sugarcraft modeling makes things even more fun.
Sugar sculptures have decorated banqueting tables since the seventeenth century
. Kings and Lords showed off their wealth with lavish table decorations - using artists to build sculptures of food, sugar and other edibles. Tiny sugar paste baskets were popular through the second half of the eighteenth century. They were filled with little bon-bons and 'jewel fruits' and given to the guests as gifts.
The first thing you will need for these edible crafts for kids, is to choose one of these easy edible play dough recipes
- and make up a big batch. Then get creating!
I looked for some sugarcraft sites to help you along, but they seem disappointingly scarce. So here are some clay modeling sites
instead - just subsitute edible clay for polymer :)