Kitchen Measuring Skills: Adjusting Recipes Activities

My junior high students have always struggled with multiplying fractions when I teach how to adjust recipes. I didn’t realize how much until I implemented a pre/post-test as my student learning outcome (SLO) project for my teacher evaluation. Students weren’t grasping this concept and it was consistently showing up as a weak area. I realized I needed to add more practice to what I was teaching my students in class so I decided to make it a little more interactive. This lesson is very adaptable to the ISN if you are using them in your classroom.

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P.I.E.S: The Areas of Development

For anyone that is not familiar with the acronym PIES, it stand for the areas of development. P=Physical, I=Intellectual, E=Emotional and S=Social. Just as addition,subtraction, multiplication and division are the foundation for math and the alphabet is the foundation for reading, the PIES are the framework for child development. A child’s development is like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle…each piece is important to the whole puzzle just as each area of development is important to the whole child. When talking about the development of children, it is difficult to discuss the concepts that relate to the whole child without knowledge of the basics. Knowing the PIES helps students to understand the various ways that children grow and develop.

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Gluten Free Culinary Unit

Gluten sensitivities and gluten free preferences are on the rise in the US, but what exactly is gluten and why are people so effected by it? Below you will find some resources to teach about gluten and it’s role in food. You will also find links to several culinary labs that are gluten free. The only thing not being addressed in this post is how FACS teachers handle this with students who are gluten free in the classroom. If you have successful tips on how to handle gluten free in your classroom, please share them in the comment section below.

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Child Development Theorists Acrostic Poem & Demonstration Activity

Since child development is based on the theories developed by the expert psychologists and their research, I like to give Child.Dev.Theoristsmy students an overview of them. Later on in the year, as I go over specific concepts like intellectual or social development, my students at least have a knowledgeable base of this information from which they can build upon. This interactive lesson has students putting their writing, oral presentation skills and creativity to work right away! As always, you can make this lesson your own by pre-selecting the theorists and resources as well as deciding if this is to be an individual or partner assignment. How will you teach about the theorists?

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Basic Elements & Parts of a Meal Lesson

Does it really matter how food looks on a plate? Why do chef’s at restaurants, especially, go to great lengths to make your meal look so aesthetically pleasing? It’s all about presentation, the basic meal elements…whatever it takes to keep you coming back to enjoy another meal. Can we do the same thing at home, with an ordinary meal? Absolutely! We just need to know what makes up the basic elements of a great looking and tasting meal. This lesson strives to teach students the basic elements and parts of a meal as well as give them an opportunity, not only to analyze meals for the elements, but to take an ordinary recipe and make it extraordinary on a plate using the concepts learned in class.

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Family Life Cycle: PREZI Project

If you like power point presentations, you will love PREZI presentations! PREZI is a free web-based technology used to create smooth presentations. This tool is user friendly, allows for easy video, image, music, and text insertion, offers a lot of pre-made templates to choose from and allows you to store all of your creations in one place. You can also save and edit PREZI’s created by others too. This project is used to introduce the family life cycle stages in a different mode. In the past, my students have done this family life cycle project poster style, that is, until I discovered this tool. Students enjoy, not only making them, but also viewing them and since the video clips are inserted into the presentation, there’s no jumping from screen to screen via links. This project also saves trees as students just share their links to their project and I can pull it up for easy grading.

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