Homeschool Step by Step: Cooking Lesson 6: Counting Calories

What is a Calorie? Calories are the energy within food. A calorie is the amount of energy it takes to heat up one gram of water. The average 8-year-old girl needs about 1,500 to 1,700 calories a day.

We are going to do a little practice with calories that requires you to use some math. Look at page 12 in your workbook. There is a list of foods and how many calories are in each food. Each yellow box lists the foods you are going to (pretend to) eat in one meal. Write down the number of calories in each food in the boxes and then add them up to find the total number of calories for each meal. This will give you an idea of how many calories you usually eat each day.

Do this worksheet now, then come back to this page.

******************************

Page 13 is similar to page 12, but it shows foods that you probably eat all the time but may not even realize they are unhealthy. After you add up the calories in these foods, you will see why they are so unhealthy. All those calories can give you a lot of fat that is hard to burn off! Do this worksheet for your homework.

Now we are going to learn something completely unrelated to calories, but it is something exciting! We are going to learn how to use a knife. There is a little video to watch below. When you are done watching it, we will practice cutting a potato like they do, then we are going to make a Chicken Salad sandwich. There is a recipe for the Chicken Salad, but I'm going to show you how to add or change things in a recipe to make it closer to how you like it!