By Thelma Lancaster
Thanks to the Parent’s Association, I received a grant one summer to design a way to implement cooking into the curriculum and to purchase the hardware necessary to set up a kitchen for cooking. The shopping was fun, reliving my early bakery days of going to auctions, used equipment dealers, and yeaa, ebay, to get a heck of a deal on a professional 6 quart Kitchenaid mixer. But the spark for me that lit the flame to illuminate the treetops, was the discovery of marvelous books such as “Slumps Grunts and Snickerdoodles, What Colonial America Ate and Why” to help us weave the concepts into every nook and cranny of our curriculum at Redwood Day School. (After all, I am Chief Interstices Director, who delights in crannies.)
The possibilities are infinite. When 2nd grade was studying fractions, we measured out a gingerbread dough filled with halves and 3/4. When 4th grade was studying Ohlone Native Americans in the Bay area, we gathered acorns, dried them, cracked them, ground the meats with metate, mortar and pestles, leached the flour, and created pancakes and gruel with a delightful nutty flavor (with the additional understanding of why acorn culture died out in the world). Art/Science class in 1st grade made bread bug sculptures, capturing the essential parts of insects. Eighth grade history explored the corn culture of Native Americans impacting European colonist with Indian pudding and corn oysters. They continued this exploration 100 years later during the Revolution with snickerdoodles, Thomas Jefferson’s sweet potato biscuits, and the labor intensive beaten biscuits developed in the south with slave labor. Literary groups in 7th grade made Ethiopian injera bread while reading "The Return" by Sonia Levitin, samosas and Pakistani tea (courtesy of Myra Syed, first grade teacher) based on"Shabanu" by Suzanne Fischer Staples, and sticky rice with mango sauce to complement "Rice without Rain" by Min Fong Ho, situated in Thailand. Middle school discusses and experiments with the role of food in emotional moods, cognitive capabilities (one more donut please), and body image with its concomitant peer impact as they study nutrition in science.
Redwood Day School has a strong commitment to Dr. Mel Levine’s All Kinds of Minds approach to learning styles. Recognizing that every person has a different set of "learning tools" in their toolbox and employing many strategies to convey information will ensure that everyone "gets it". Cooking provides the access to a broader range of learning tools that automatically engage students, reinforce classroom content, and open the door to success for some students otherwise challenged in a traditional classroom. The 7th grade boy previously unengaged in science, beamed with pride at his well-formed loaf of bread, and discussed the roll of the single celled organism with aplomb. It creates a kinesthetic and, may I say, visceral connection to information such that it is more deeply processed. After making some steak into beef jerky and letting some just rot to the odiferous education of all, Fourth Grade was connected to wagon trains and the arduous path to the Goldrush. Learning is relationship, and the more ways a teacher can connect a piece of knowledge to other information stored in the brain, the more a student builds understanding. Grinding wheat into flour and making it edible in pancake and porridge turned on light bulbs all over the 6th grade class studying the agricultural revolution.
Additionally, au fond to this drive to integrate cooking throughout the curriculum is recognition of the crucial nature of these skills. Every student in school has been introduced at least once to basic safety (especially around knives and hot objects), hygiene, reading recipes, and the use of kitchen tools. The importance of understanding food and nutrition in our lives, and the confidence and ability of each child to take care of themselves is paramount. Increasingly we see a nation and culture of obesity and children with little exposure to the knowledge and tools to choose differently. By weaving this knowledge into the woof of the curriculum our students gain a powerful lifelong skill that reverberates into so many areas of understanding: culture, biology, anthropology, history, psychology, sociology …
Why did the man stare at the can of Orange Juice?
Because it said concentrate!
