Food is a wonderful way to grab your students’ attention and interest them in your lessons. One of the easiest ways to incorporate it? Use connected cooking activities!
They are a fun way to tie together different subjects and make sure your students stay invested.
What is Connected Cooking?
Connected cooking is when you use a book or resource that mentions food, food production, recipes, etc. to develop a hands-on lesson where students have an opportunity to practice cooking.
That cooking may be in the form of making anything from a pizza to vegetable soup. The sky is the limit!
How to Find Books That Work for Connected Cooking
When I first started off trying to use cooking in my classroom, I realized that there was a lack of resources available that would make these connected lessons easier to plan and implement.
So, I created my own unit studies based on books that worked well with my students in my classroom. There’s nothing better than a teacher-tested, student-approved activity to make teaching easier!
You can see all of the Connected Cooking Lesson Plans here!
A Connected Cooking Lesson
The first thing we do in the lesson is read the foundation book. This is the story upon which the entire lesson is based. It helps activate students’ prior knowledge, gets them engaged, and provides reading aloud time.
After we read, we do a survey about how we think the recipe will turn out. Will it be great? Will it be not so great? Or will it be just so-so? This gets students to discuss what they think and why.
Following the survey, we jump right into the visual recipe. The visual recipe features images of the ingredients and the supplies needed. It also includes the steps for making the recipe. Each step is shown in both words and images so that it’s accessible to a wide range of students. There’s even a small checkbox on the side so that students can mark off when they complete each step.
Once the recipe is completed, students can then taste their creations.
A survey follows and asks students to rate how they liked it, as well as, how easy it was to prepare.
There’s a writing page that comes next where students write about the steps that they did to complete the recipe. They can use the visual recipe pages as a guide if they so choose.
Also included in the Connected Cooking units are step-by-step directions for teachers and parents, as well as a large collection of related worksheet activities. They range in difficulty and are designed to meet your students where they are academically.
Vocabulary words for your word wall are part of the unit study and can be hung up or hung together on a ring.
There’s a core board mat, adapted book pieces, and more so that you can use the connected cooking lessons with all students!
Watch How It’s Done
Want to see a connected cooking lesson in action? Watch as I demonstrate how I would do a lesson and explain the components of the lesson in more detail!
