Teacher of the Month: Karen Conklin

Karen Conklin has been a Family and Consumer Science teacher for 19 years and she is currently teaching middle school in central Connecticut. I had the distinct privileged of interviewing her while she was attending the Twist Craft Fair–a craft show she says is “inspiring, a place to get ideas, and keep up on the latest trends.”

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Introduction to Vegetables

Vegetables, is one of those topics that is just lacking luster nevertheless, I start my second year culinary students off with the vegetable unit-but in an exciting way that I like to call the “be brave taste test!” In this introductory lesson, students get to taste ten different vegetables prepared a variety of ways, as well as learn how vegetables are classified.

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Stitching Paper

Do you remember when you first learned how to sew on the sewing machine? For me it was when I was a little girl. I had to prove myself by sewing on paper before I was allowed to use thread. (Thread meant the challenging task of threading the sewing machine properly). So this lesson is designed for students completely new to sewing…starting with the basics.

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Picture My Diet

A picture is always worth 1000 words and in this case can reflect your health. Inspired by the IPhone app called dietSNAPS, this unique lesson for visual learners allows students to track and assess their diets. The dietSNAPS app for the IPhone is a photo journal that allows users to take pictures of everything they ate and drank even pictures of themselves exercising and even send it to someone else for accountability. The app is fairly cheap at $1.99 and has generated a social following on Twitter and Facebook.

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Food Science Links

Website Yeast Experiments Lesson Plans Bacteria’s Role in Food : This lesson allows students to experiment with bacteria’s role in food. The students make their own yogurt and an oriental dish to explore the role microorganisms played in the taste…

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Love is Like a Fairy Tale

So often our view of what love is comes from the stories we’ve read or watched as a youngster. Heck, even weddings these days are fairy tale themed. But is love like a fairy tale or are we merely setting our students up for “love failure” if fairy tales, Hollywood and television are the primary sources of their expectations. This lesson challenges students to reread romantic fairy tales with their relationship glasses on to see how the characters’ relationships would hold up in the real world and determining the realities of “happily ever after” for each story.

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