Cooking

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

• providing an engaging arena for many life lessons: making choices, awareness of nutrition, ecology, increasing independence and self-reliance, and inspiring responsibility to self, others, and the global community
• serving as an antidote to the cultural imperative to live virtually though electronics rather than directly through experience
• appealing to  all kinds of learners: analytical, kinesthetic, and aesthetic, etc.
• improving connections and sensual immersion in content, so that all senses are used to embed information in the brain with maximum success for recalling and drawing upon that information to build upon in future 
• providing a stage for developmentally appropriate learning at all ages: teaching social skills, cross age-cooperation, and partner learning.
• cementing points of curriculum connection: math, science, art, language arts, 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 cooking looks like in the Middle School:

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