Vegetable soup for kids is so easy to make, especially when you have a cute picture book to go along with it! When I was asked to review Garden Safari Vegetable Soup by the Kitchen Club Kids, I couldn’t wait to try the recipe with our preschoolers. You might recall when we made our own fruit salad when reading “End of the Rainbow Fruit Salad, by the same publishers. Both books tell a story about the kitchen club kids as they gather their ingredients and create delicious food. I love that we can read the story as we make the food, and use our color and counting skills, too!
Full Disclosure: I was provided a copy of Garden Safari Vegetable Soup. All opinions are my own. This post contains affiliate links for your convenience.
As with many of our cooking activities, we asked our preschoolers to bring some of the ingredients from home. I like doing this because it makes them feel more part of the process. They love knowing they have contributed.
As the children brought the supplies to class, we set them on the cooking table. They love showing each other what they brought. We even got a beautiful basil plant to keep!
The book tells us to use:
1 cooking pot
2 yellow onions
3 blue potatoes (we were given red)
4 stalks of green celery
5 orange carrots
6 plump red tomatoes
7 cups of golden chicken broth
8 scoops of brown rice
9 green basil leaves
We got to work preparing the vegetables.
I brought out our foam numbers to add some number recognition while counting the food.
As we counted, we found the correct number and placed it beside the vegetables.
We read the book and matched the numbers.
We tore the basil…
…peeled and sliced the carrots and potatoes.
We measured and placed all the ingredients in a bowl.
As a final counting activity, we passed the bowl around during circle time and counted together as we transferred from one bowl to another.
Because our preschool is only a few hours long, we did this in two steps. I added the chicken broth and put the soup in the crockpot and served it the following day. We all loved this delicious soup! The children proudly pointed out what they brought as we ate. You know it’s good when they ask for seconds!
If you are interested in cooking healthy foods with your children, I highly recommend these books (available from Amazon):
More cooking activities:
Thumbprint Cookies (Allergy Aware)
Cooking with Kids Pinterest Board
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Hi Sheryl!
Just put this book into my shopping cart on Amazon! Thank you for a great idea! Now I do have a few questions, but very few! First off, did you use a special children’s vegetable peeler? Did they do the dicing? For the cook time on the crock pot, did you do high or low and how many hours? Please let me know because I would love to write this into my curriculum!
Thanks again for a great idea (as always)!
Hi Deanna – I had the children use a regular vegetable peeler after carefully showing them how. As for dicing the vegetables, I first cut them small and the children then cut them a bit smaller. They loved tearing the basil! For the crock pot, I put it on low for 6 hours. It went longer than our preschool hours, so we ate it the next day. Thanks for asking!