It’s fall, apples are in season and they are relatively inexpensive! Varieties of apples are sold everywhere from roadside stands to grocery stores so why not incorporate them into your foods class?  That’s exactly what Jessica Uplinger of Field High School, Ohio did.  Jessica created this lesson and lab because she has very large classes and needed a thematic unit where she could divide up her class and have half of them in the kitchen preparing a lab while the other half is engaged with an assignment.  The end results? Her students ended up enjoying every aspect of this lesson, especially the labs!  Why not give it a try in your foods class?

Set

• Sit all of the apples out on a demo table.  Ask students to do a quick guided free write about apples; whatever comes to mind about them.  Some within close proximity wrote about how they could smell them. Some wrote about ideas of what we could be doing with them. Some wrote about never seeing so many apples at once besides at a grocery store.

Materials

• Varieties of Apples
• Lab Supplies
• Laptops

Activities

• Class (half or all depending on size) completes the Apples Web-Activity where students have to use their descriptive words to describe how apples look and then again after tasting.
• Students then do some research to learn more about apples using the internet.
• Then the class (half or all)  prepares apple strudel muffins using this recipe.
• Students also prepared an apple dip using this recipe and then participated in an apple tasting activity.
• For Jessica’s class size the lesson and lab spanned five days: 2 days in the lab with the muffins, 1 day researching, 1 day taste testing, 1 day making the dip.

Attachments

• Apples Web Activity (PDF)
• Adjectives for describing foods (PDF)

Resources

• Washington Apples Website
• Allrecipes

Credits

• Image courtesy of kornnphoto at FreeDigitalPhotos