Sharing Our Learning

Silly me, I should have posted this days ago. It must have fallen off my radar because the cooking didn't happen in the classroom.

The World Geography unit is happening in collaboration with a Farm To School grant. Students all picked a continent to research and each week, starting last week, one group is cooking a dish that uses an indigenous grain and represents the cuisine from some part of the continent. The next day, they will share a bit about their dish in our weekly whole school meeting and then serve the dish at lunchtime.

Last week the South America group began the process. They left class for an hour and a half to work in the kitchen preparing a Peruvian Quinoa and Amaranth Salad. Anne, a talented parent  (also generous with her time) came in to document the process. All the pictures in this post are courtesy of her.

A good cook always checks the final product!

The next day they presented it to the school and served at lunchtime.

sampling cups are an option to try a little bit

Don't you want to eat at my school? There's an enchilada underneath all that salsa.

Toward the end of lunchtime, they went around collecting feedback about the dish. Would you eat it again? Definitely, maybe or definitely not?

Later, in class, they sorted through the feedback, with an eye toward sharing it with the kitchen staff. That work isn't done yet, but I was fascinated listening to them trying to figure out which math skills they needed to apply.

"We need to find the mean."
"No, we don't."
Finally they ask me what I thought and I suggested turning the responses into fractions.
"Percentages!" one sixth grader exclaimed.
Calculators came out and debates began about how to do this. (Sixth graders will soon be learning how to convert fractions to percentages, but haven't started this yet.)
When it was time to clean up, I had to ask them to stop several times before they did.  I just love it when kids get into math like this!

This coming week: the Europe group makes a multi-grain muffin...