For almost every class, you’ll be able to juggle 2 or 3 age levels at the same time. And what they make usually ends up coming together to make one meal or snack that everyone can enjoy! See the Curriculum Map for the intricate module integrations to see what your kids might do!
Some of the Beginner Level skills are appropriate for very young children, like ages 2-6 (i.e. careful pouring, building a colorful salad, spreading butter). Some of them are important foundations for any age, like peeling correctly, cross-hatch dicing, and measuring.
The Intermediate Level lays very important foundations such as sharp knife safety and stovetop safety. If your child has never worked with a sharp knife or at the stove, then they are definitely at Intermediate or Beginner, no matter their age. If you’re unsure about their ability in those areas, you can always watch part of the videos from Intermediate class 2 and 5 and see how your kids fare.
You can also pick and choose what classes to utilize and only teach a few from a level before moving on as well. I know of some young teens whose parents started them at the Beginner Level just for peeling and a couple of the other skills taught there. A teen could blow through those in combination with the Intermediate Level in a few hours. Many of our members with multiple children in the family have simply chosen to start everyone at the Beginner Level and move through all 24 lessons together.
The bottom line is that your child’s experience, personality, and your tolerance for new things and risks will direct where you begin, and our course will take them from there! Consider it a prerequisite for Intermediate that the child knows how to peel vegetables, cut with a dull knife, and measure accurately. To move to Advanced, a child must have some experience with sharp knives and the stove, as well as cracking eggs and reading a recipe on their own. Lots of foundational skills at the Intermediate Level!
If you have a child 8 or older and you’d like them to work through some lessons independently, consider the Kids Cook Solo independent training program, which is available by itself or as part of our VIP membership. See all membership options and pricing here.
If you only have older kids and you want them to work on the lessons independently, you might want to consider Kids Cook Solo independent training program, which has 15 videos from the Original eCourse arranged in a format kids ages 8 and up can do 95% on their own. Kids Cook Solo is available by itself, and it is also included in our VIP membership. See all membership options and pricing.
The easiest way to give the eCourse as a gift is to use the gift options provided during checkout.
Alternatively, if you already bought the course for someone else and you skipped using the gift option, shoot an email to [email protected] with the name and email address of the person you’d like to gift the course to, and we’ll set it up for you.
If you want a gift certificate that you can print and wrap, shoot an email to [email protected] and we’ll be happy to send you one!
The cost gets even lower if you have more kids! For a family with three kids who are all going to do every level, our $149.95 one-time fee VIP membership comes out to only around $1.50 per lesson! We’ve also added over $300 in bonuses to that level at no extra charge. A single level (Beginner, Intermediate, or Advanced) is $49.95 for 12 months of access.
Compare this to the nationwide average of around $50 per lesson for in-person cooking classes where you drop your child off and hope for the best. Often, parents find it difficult to coach their children in the kitchen after a cooking class taught by someone else, because the teacher didn’t communicate the expectations and new skills effectively to the parents so the learning can continue at home (or because a recipe was learned by rote, not foundational skills).
With the Kids Cook Real Food eCourse, you get the benefit of someone else teaching the skills, but you get to be right there connecting with your child and will be prepared to guide the practice as it happens in your own kitchen with familiar tools. We also back our classes with a 30-day happiness guarantee in case it’s not a perfect fit for your family.
An adult should always be involved once children are using knives, hot stoves and more.
The only thing members don’t have permission for is teaching others for-profit. That’s a separate For-Profit License.
If you’re part of a homeschool co-op or learning pod, you might be interested in our group discount on a three-month membership.
There are simple recipes like “potato hash” and “omelets” and more complicated things like homemade tortillas and meatless chickpea wraps (above). You can read all the recipe titles in the Curriculum Map.
The most important part though? They’re all 100% real food, from scratch, no processed stuff. We teach kids to cook with fruits, vegetables, whole grains, eggs, cheese, meat (in one class) – the basics.
The Recipe eBook is not just another “kiddie cookbook.” It’s packed with real recipes for the whole family to enjoy, as demonstrated in the video lessons of the eCourse.
For example, we make ranch and Italian – the sour cream base for the ranch wouldn’t work for a dairy allergy or vegan, but kids could still make Italian, so the skill still gets appropriate practice. Our pancake and muffin recipes use eggs, but an egg-sensitive family could easily practice the skills of flipping pancakes and making a recipe all by oneself with any favorite pancake or muffin recipe.
As long as the children won’t be traumatized by their experience not matching the videos exactly (we have a sensitive type here at the Kimball household, so I know how that can go), you should feel confident embarking on the course with any dietary restriction.
Here are some individual breakdowns so you can see how much you might have to adapt:
If you have other allergies, feel free to email a question to [email protected] and I’ll get back to you ASAP. If you get the VIP level with Facebook support version, I’d be able to help you find suitable allergy-friendly recipes to fit your needs for each skill as you work through the course.
I’ll let a happy member tell you in her own words about her experience with safety:
“My kids can safely work at the stove! THANK YOU! I have always been too afraid to go there and you gave me and my kiddos the right info we needed to do it safely.”
One necessary item for Intermediate and Advanced Level kids is a knife that fits your child’s hands. Any paring knife will do for the Intermediate Level, but the Advanced kids use a chef’s knife. You should have access to a sharp chef’s knife that’s no longer than 6 inches in length for best success with smaller hands (or something like a 4-inch Victorinox knife that can be used on many chef’s knife tasks). See our resources page for easy order links and ideas.
You can request emails once a week for about 9 weeks as if the course was live and weekly, just a way to help keep you accountable and remind you that you have this awesome course at your disposal. You can stop and start those weekly reminders over anytime.
I’ll also send reminders at key points of the year like school breaks to remind you in case you forget!
5 Videos:
There are also 4 “Foundations 101” video lessons to establish basic skills before embarking on the course, and if you’re a VIP member, there’s a bonus 4-video Hospitality Class too.
Single Level access includes the Adult Guide and All-Kid videos, plus the level you chose.
Written materials in each lesson:
You can upgrade a standard membership to VIP at any time once you’re in the membership area.
Truly, I am, and we’ve been continually improving upon the course since it was released, always listening to our members for way we can improve.
The videos were all filmed and edited professionally, and you’ll find that the written materials will answer all your FAQs before you ask them, even if you’re an FAQ person (which clearly you are, because here you are on the FAQ page).
If you don’t agree, there’s a 30-day money-back guarantee on all digital products for any reason, no questions asked. (Well, truthfully I might ask questions so that I can improve others’ experience and help you out, but you’ll still get a full refund no matter what your answers are.)
Starting when you receive access to the course (immediately after purchase), you’ll have 30 days to try out the course in your kitchen.
If you’re teaching all 3 levels at once to multiple kids, it’s totally doable, but you’ll need to set aside at least 2 hours so kids can rotate through the kitchen and not feel rushed. One class per week or every other week is just right for many families.
Although there are technically 8 classes in each level, many members split up some of them and teach part the first day and part the next, plus there are some bonus lessons, so it could take 10-12 weeks to fully complete.
Some folks really like to print, laminate, 3-ring punch, etc. That might a few hours up front getting everything prepared, and then just 5-10 minutes a week taking care of the details for each lesson.
Many of our member families have jumped in with zero planning, and had great success! As long as your kids don’t mind watching the lesson video to learn a skill, and then shopping for any groceries that might be needed to practice the skill later that week, this approach works perfectly fine.
VIP members will have the ability to download the videos after the refund period is over. PDFs are always available for download.
Single or all-level access membership are for 12 months. A lifetime upgrade is available in the member area. Videos are not downloadable with a basic 12-month membership.
Please note that our payment plan option is not a subscription. When you sign up for our payment plan you are committing to pay the entire amount, like a house mortgage or car payment (but much smaller!) and can’t cancel partway through. Like all of our products, the payment plan does still include our 30-day happiness guarantee. If you’re not completely happy with the classes for any reason, you’ll get a full refund within the first 30 days.
Flash drives include a $10 service charge to return and of course the product itself must be mailed back. Other physical products are non-refundable.
If you get a VIP Membership you can download the videos after the 30-day refund period is over (or if you chose the payment plan, you’ll be able to download after the final payment is made).
I recommend downloading at the lowest quality so it doesn’t take up so much space on your computer. The PDFs are always downloadable, no matter your membership level.
You can use the flash drive to watch the videos on Roku, AppleTV or FireTV as well as to access your course when you don’t have Internet. You may not share the drive with others; it’s still your membership.
We don’t offer DVDs at this time.
The most important part to your kids, however, is that there are real kids in the videos. In fact, many members report that their kids call our kids their friends and love watching them. The “cast” of the eCourse videos includes 3 Kimball kids and their dear friends:
There’s nothing comparable to the positive peer pressure of seeing real kids doing the work of cooking, enjoying eating vegetables, and even making mistakes.
Kids don’t need special junk food just for them!
We commit to teaching kids about food that fuels their bodies, and more importantly, to pass on the skills so that they can nourish themselves throughout their lives. Let’s work together to redefine a kids’ meal as one a CHILD has cooked, and their generation wins!
I was just looking ahead at the next lesson when my daughter peeked at my phone, so I went ahead and streamed it to the TV so we could all watch the videos.
We didn’t have the foods used in the lesson but I needed to make soup, I and had a lot of veg to peel and dice and some hotdogs, so we got busy!
After slicing and dicing the hotdogs and smelling the spices, the big kids took to the stove and picked spices to add! They all gobbled it up!
My 9 year old son’s mind just started rolling with ideas of what to cook next! He felt so empowered when he realized he could cook!