Cooking Recipe English Lesson – Developing culinary life skills curricula and helping administrators and others know how beneficial it can be for our students can be challenging. Cooking activities in the classroom must go beyond the simple act of preparing a recipe. There are so many skills to learn, pre-teach and review that we can spend a week focused on one cooking activity: one recipe. And we can differentiate it with different goals to help all students participate.
But with everything else happening in your classroom, it can sometimes be difficult to justify the time spent on cooking, which students and staff find unique and fun. It also seems like a huge headache trying to cook more than once a week. And sometimes even that is too much. So let’s see how you can plan weekly activities from the cooking unit. We could probably extend it to two weeks, but I think that would be enough. However, don’t be afraid to repeat the recipe or make the same recipe two weeks in a row. Knowing recipes and food can help students gain more skills than always something new.
Cooking Recipe English Lesson
First, I’ll start with examples of lesson plans. Please don’t let them bother you because I swear they are easy to maintain once you set them up. In this post, I will talk about lesson plans in more detail.
Teaching Literacy And Math Skills Through Cooking
And I know many of you won’t be writing lesson plans. And in this post I talk about how I think lesson plans are important and useful for all teachers. A key element in this is that curricula tell all staff not only what the activity is, but also how to do it and what the objectives are. This can be important when you need staff to set up independent activities rather than asking students. It helps if they know WHY it’s important: what skills they’re working on.
In this example of lesson plans, you can see that the class did not cook every day. We also had art and community skills. The class cooked twice a week. I’ve worked with classes that had it as a daily activity and others had it weekly. Even if you don’t want to cook on your daily schedule, the activities I’m going to describe here can be done throughout the week by layering them in with other activities. So you can use the presentation in the morning meeting. And it is possible to do the first sequence in direct teaching with the teacher. Later they will work independently on the sequencing part.
Obviously, what the activities will look like when you write your cooking life skills lesson plans will look different for different levels. The complexity of the cooking activity will be different. So you might be cooking lunch with an elementary school classroom. But with high school, you may find yourself planning your entire meal, shopping, and more. Because we prepare life skills curricula in high school and the need for independence in cooking is important as a life skill. But for younger students, the focus may be on independence in steps, but cooking activities will serve to develop language skills, social skills, reading, math, etc. I always talk about life skills curricula that work on as many skills as possible.
Of course, the first step in planning life skills lessons is choosing what the focus of the activity will be. I will select units that are available in my TpT store. You can do these activities without them. However, trade units have ready-made lesson plans and pacing guides that can save time if you incorporate them into your lesson plans.
English Class A2 Reading 6.1 Cooking Verbs Worksheet
When choosing a cooking activity, you will naturally choose one that fits the resources of the classroom. Don’t have a heat source like a stove or oven? No problem, make a no-cook recipe like a tossed green salad. And you have to think about the safety and skills of the students. For example, are your students cutting with knives or objects that should be cut in advance. Or can you assign different tasks to students based on their abilities?
Step 1 is to review the recipe and the activity you will be doing. For example, for the Lettuce unit, you would review a slide show of the recipe steps. It can be used as a closed activity where students fill in the blanks by raising their hand to answer or using a communication device. You can do this in the morning meeting as a group.
Then ask students to predict whether they will like the salad. They can display their answers graphically on the template by naming their prediction in the box.
Students can review a visual (or non-visual) recipe to learn the steps. You build vocabulary, identify components, and with the prediction activity, you can also work on graphs, interpret graphs, and more.
How To Make Your Cooking Classes More Engaging
Part of the cooking life skills curriculum is both learning new foods and cooking. Therefore, it is helpful for students to take some time to review the components. They can also work on placing the components in the classroom. And you can practice expressive and receptive vocabulary.
It is also a tool to send home for homework. They can work with a family member to find ingredients in the kitchen and talk about it.
You can use the visual recipe as a tool to help students learn which words identify which components. Or don’t use the pictures and practice your reading comprehension with the ingredients list.
I would always start by re-examining the recipe first. You can give students a chance to taste the ingredients by cooking with their own materials. If they work in a group, they can be assigned a specific job.
You Don’t Need To Impress Your Friends With Your Cooking
This step can involve a lot of academic work in addition to fostering independence in life skills. For example, have students measure ingredients. Or count the number of objects.
And of course, the best part about cooking is that you can eat it too. So it gives you another chance to see if your predictions about liking the item were right or wrong. You can then add the answers to the graph and compare the two graphs with each other. This could also be a writing activity if you need to compare and contrast.
After cooking, it’s a good time to review what they did the next day. This is a good time to complete a visual worksheet or a reading comprehension worksheet. Shown here is from my tossed salad cooking unit. Curricula such as the Unified Learning System often include these types of activities with cooking activities as well.
It may be helpful to visualize the steps of the cooking activity, such as in a slide show, before completing the worksheet to refresh your memory. At this step, you can also add a journal for students who need to practice their writing skills. They can write down the steps and whether they liked the activity or not.
Pizza Recipe Activity Worksheet
This is a good time to practice language skills and talk about the activity. Many of our students have difficulty narrating the event and determining the steps of what happened. You can use visual recipes and other activity tools to help you remember what they were doing. And then have them order the steps. This could be by putting the pictures in the recipe in order, or writing the steps in order, depending on your students.
If each of your students had a different assignment, this is a good time to explain to the class what their assignment is. This allows students to hear more about different parts of a life skills lesson that they may not have directly experienced. You can also add additional questions, such as what was your favorite ingredient. Or which salad did you like the least?
There you have it, 5 days of cooking-based activities. To make it even easier, the cooking units in my store, as shown above, have lesson plans with defined objectives and steps for previewing, cooking and reviewing. This makes it very easy to incorporate them into the lesson plans for your classroom. They also have visual recipes, a slide show, and a communication board to help students communicate while cooking.
So if you’re looking for simple classroom cooking life skills plans, grab two units in my shop below. I have one more to add for the Ants