“Convenience Foods & A Can Do Struggle Meal Challenge” was another lesson I shared with Missouri FACS teachers during their July conference. This challenge was a big hit with my students! As a teacher, I love to see my students in full collaboration mode as they create, plan and execute their ideas!
Once again, I was in need of another way to teach cooking methods to my foods class that wasn’t a copycat of what I teach in the foods unit of my comprehensive FACS class. As always, I wanted a lesson that was engaging and interactive for my students. So, the cooking methods jigsaw puzzle project was created! This lesson assigns a cooking method to each student who must do the research to complete the informational puzzle piece. Once completed, students move their way throughout the room as they collect notes on all of the other assigned cooking methods. Students will use their notes and apply the techniques as they move through various cooking labs.
In July I had the privilege of presenting at Missouri’s State FACS Conference! For one of the presentations, I shared a series of lessons created around themes found in the Struggle Meal video series hosted by Frankie Celenza. “Let’s Get Stacked: Pancake Wars” is just one of the interactive lessons and lab that I created using this free, short, upbeat video series. Periodically, I will be sharing more lessons based on this series, but for now, check out how to teach and prepare savory pancakes in a very unique way!
In my opinion, knowing how to make a roux is a ” kitchen basic” that students should know how to create as it’s the base for many soups and sauces, including gravy. This interactive assignment incorporates a strategy that I’ve been seeing a lot lately, mostly in the ELA world where it’s used to summarize important text information. I thought it would work well as a way to highlight and summarize important food information. So, here is my rendition of a food related one pager.
My son recently introduced me to “starter pack memes” which I had to look up! He had to create one for a college “get to know you” activity and once I knew what it was, I thought it would make a great, fun and interactive activity. So, below you will find my starter pack meme ideas for topics that can be used in a variety of different content areas along with instructions for creating.
You might wonder why I have so many lessons and/or activities for the same topic. The truth is I teach three different classes where I need to cover “food safety” before I let students go into the lab/kitchen. I don’t want to do the same thing in each of those classes because many of my students I see again for other electives, hence, the need for variety! Even if you don’t teach multiple courses like I do, you may just want to shake up your own lesson or add this Food Safety: Web-Activity & Review to your arsenal of resources for future use!
Before I even think about letting my students into the kitchens to cook, I want to be sure they have a good working knowledge of the do’s and don’ts associated with kitchen safety. Kitchen Hazards Flipgrid Style is just one of the activities I use to convey and reinforce that concept. There are a lot of things I like about this activity. First, it’s mostly student-directed, secondly, it uses technology and third, it involves a variety of the 4 C’s: collaboration, communication, creativity and critical thinking.
Most teachers spend a few days at the beginning of the new school year doing activities that help them get to know their students better. These types of activities help teachers learn more about their students and also begin to help establish a positive teacher-student rapport. A Culinary Introduction: “My Slice of the Pie” is an engaging food themed activity shared by Sherwood High School’s ProStart teacher Lisa Gilbert of Maryland. Read on to learn more…
Grading cooking labs is challenging mostly because you can’t see everything all at the same time, never mind write it down. I see many requests for lab evaluations. Here is what I could find that other teachers around the country use. Some are better than others. There are at least enough ideas to get you started in creating your own lab grading method.
My students love cooking shows (especially the competitive ones) and so do I! With that being said, I wanted to be able to use them in an interactive way, not just with questions that had to be written out and answered. I wanted to be able to engage my students and have some educational fun at the same time. A former student of mine, who just happens to be a computer genius and good friend of my son, designed and gifted me with this computer generated Cooking Show BINGO board game. This Google Sheets program has the capability of creating different board versions at the click of some keys so it saves having to manually recreate and reproduce different boards for your students! How cool is that? Read on to learn more about how you can create these for your classroom use.
