International Kid Chef – Culinary Montessori Activity with Dough

Introduce your kids to international cuisine with this game where they become International Chefs and have to use their creativity (and dough!) to cook different foods from around the world. Free Printable Menu guide and paper Chef’s hat included.

This post is a guest piece by Kids Activities Designer Rodrigo Macias.

What do you need?

• Different colors of dough (any kind is cool, even homemade)
• (Optional) Tape, a printer, and paper to get this Menu Guide and Chef’s hat.

How to play:
 1. Make an easy paper chef’s hat for your kid using 2 sheets of paper and tape. If you are feeling fancy, go to this page and print the International Chef’s hat specially designed for this activity and use it as the front part of the hat.

2. Either print and fold this little Menu Guide or show your kid on your iPad, computer or whatever you’ve got handy (mind that they might get it a bit dirty with “doughy” hands…) the following pictures of these 4 international foods: Mexican Tacos, Japanese Sushi Rolls, Russian Syrniki and many kids’ favorite: Italian Pizza!

I didn’t include the names of the foods or countries in the Printable Menu Guide because they vary depending on the language that you speak to your kids. This way we keep the activity multilingual-friendly and if you want you can write down the names of each dish and/or country using your preferred language.

3. By looking at the pictures, the kids use the dough and their creativity to think about how the ingredients from the left became the dishes on the right. Then it’s time to dough-cook!

* Note * The original ingredients for each dish have been simplified in order to make this activity simple and doable for any kid who has no culinary expertise. If your kid is a bit advanced in cooking, why not come up with more dough ingredients and add them to the recipes?

Idea twists:

• Tell the kids to invent their own country name, flag and traditional dish for an imaginary country that they make up.
• Let the kids draw on their Chef’s hat flags from around the world before they put them on their heads. Google is great for flag references.
• Pretend-play International Restaurant either you and others being the customers in your kitchen or helping the kids set up a mini restaurant with their toys so they can take their order, cook it, serve it and somehow get paid for their work (great to start teaching entrepreneurship skills at a young age).

Bon appetit!

Menu and Chef’s Hat Printables Page

About the guest author:

Rodrigo Macias is the creative behind The Box of Ideas (his website) where he merges his experience working in Childcare and Design to produce free high-quality printables and playful-educational activities for kids.

Rodrigo’s social outlets:  Pinterest – TpT – Instagram – Google Plus

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