Children

Kid's Kitchen with Miss Virginia

Jan 18, 2023

$1-50

Byline

Adah DeRosier, Library Director, Highgate (Vt.) Library and Community Center

This program is run once a month by a local cook and educator. She teaches children in grades second through sixth how to cook using our new mobile kitchen cart (Charlie Cart) here at the library. Participants gain culinary skills and use creativity and math skills to bake, cook and create.

Advanced Planning

We began planning this program soon after we received and put together the Charlie Cart mobile kitchen. I reached out to Virginia, a local teacher and cook, to see if she would be interested in running a children's cooking program. Virginia has free reign to come up with her own programs and she decides what is cooked each month. We provide all of the materials she will need including all cooking supplies.

Marketing

We promoted this event via Facebook, our website, our local online community forum, posted flyers and through the local elementary school. We also posted about this opportunity in our monthly e-newsletter. We had four children take part in the first program and it seems that the program is growing month to month as we already have five children registered for the next event.

Budgeting

For each program we budget around $50 for supplies.

We received ALA's Peggy Barber Tribute Grant in 2022 which helped us fund the purchase of the mobile kitchen cart.

Day-of-event Activity

The Charlie Cart is already set-up and ready for use by the day of the event. All items are pre-purchased before the program and ready to go day of.

Program Execution

We had excellent feedback and the kids not only learned what goes into creating the recipe they also had a lot of fun. The Charlie Cart mobile kitchen worked perfectly and has been a wonderful addition to the library thus far.

We now have a standing monthly Kid's Kitchen program and the parents who registered their children were very happy with the program overall. Those same children that attended are already registered for this next month's program.