middle school cooking

At Redwood Day School we have a commitment to project-based learning throughout the curriculum. Cooking is a superb tool to enhance the learning environment.

• Cooking provides an engaging arena for many life lessons: making choices, awareness of nutrition, ecology, increasing independence and self-reliance with a concomitant (increased) self-confidence, and inspiring responsibility to self, others and the global community.
• Cooking provides an antidote to the current cultural imperative to live virtual reality though electronics rather than experience.
• Cooking appeals to “All Kinds of Minds”, incorporating accommodations for all learners, analytical, kinesthetic aesthetic, etc.
• Cooking improves the connections and sensual immersion in content, such that all senses are used to embed the information in the brain with maximum success for remembering and using that information to build upon with future topics.
• Cooking is developmentally appropriate at all ages teaching social skills, cross age cooperation and partner learning.
• Points of curriculum connection are endless: math, science, art, language arts, social science, history, etc.
• In conjunction with gardening, cooking provides a powerful tool to communicate sustainability, ecology, environmental awareness and global impacts of choices.

Here’s a taste of what it looked like last year:

• Middle school students sampled a wide assortment of vegetables at a Friday afternoon gathering. (Imagine those 8th grade boys elbowing each other to get to the jicama.)
• Sixth graders explored decimals, fractions and percentages while baking a cake, varying the quantities of sugar and using the scientific method to hypothesize and control variables.
• The seventh grade class made lamb meatballs in yogurt sauce and rosewater pudding during an Islamic unit, made bread while studying single-celled organisms in science, made carbonado (veggie stew) in Spanish class, and made samosas, injera bread, and sticky rice with mango in English literary groups.
• Eighth grade students read a primary source recipe from 18th century America to work through “An Herb Salad for the Tavern Bowl” wherein they deciphered directions such as, “Four times the spoon with oil of Lucca crown, and twice the vinegar procured from town.”