Culinary Artistas

Culinary Artistas' mission is to provide fun cooking classes for kids that help them develop creative minds and healthy bodies. We offer many products and services aimed at children age 2-12 and local schools including studio classes, after school enrichment at schools, day and summer camps, onsite field trips, offsite workshops, and weekend birthday parties. Our studio classes take place at Ghirardelli Square and serve 35 students weekly. Our after school program is currently in two schools, a Mandarin immersion school and Italian international school, where we work with 66 students weekly. We host about 5-10 birthdays a month ranging from 10 children to upwards of 35 children. We also run day and summer camps from 9am-3pm during holidays and break weeks as well as during the summer for up to 20 students per camp for 12 weeks serving close to 240 students annually. 

Because our program works primarily with early chidhood and elementary age students, we embed our teaching and pedagogy with developmentally approrpriate practices to best serve the students. This includes a focus on multisensory learning by giving students the chance to taste, smell, and touch all ingredients before they are cooked. We incorporate inquiry into our instruction by allowing students to ask questions and guess what we are making. We maintain a library of childrens books related to cooking and use songs and chants to engage our young learners. Our behavior management centers around responsive classroom and logical conseqences with a focus on reinforcing positive behavior and an understanding of childhood social learning.

With regards to our content, we allign our curriculum with common core state standards and use the next generation science standards. Each week's recipe includes two items: one that is familiar to students' taste and pair it with another that will challenge their pallette. Each lesson also focuses on a sensory concept (taste, texture, color, etc) for early learners as well as a science and nutrition concept for elementary learners (acid, Vitamin C, sodium, salinity, etc).

We are a young program and are excited to continuing growing and serving students in San Francisco and have plans to expand to the East Bay.