Category: Foods & Nutrition

Basic Baking Ingredients: What’s My Function?

When I teach my quickbread unit I like my students to know the function of the basic ingredients they are working with. InIngredients.Foldable order to do this, I like to do a mini-pancake demo made up of rounds. Each round adds a new ingredient to the mini-pancakes. Students must taste test the mini-pancakes during each round and try to figure what the purpose or function of the basic ingredient is and describe the pancake’s taste, texture and appearance. After sharing their guesses, students create a foldable of ingredient function notes and then apply it to the pancake demo in a follow-up review.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Kitchens of the Future: Design Project

This past spring Ikea joined Concept Kitchen 2025 at the Milan Design week to explore how the kitchen “as we know it” will change in the future. Concept Kitchen 2025 surveyed students from Lund University and the Eindhoven University of Technology about their assumptions of the kitchen in ten years and then teamed up with Ideo innovative design firm to develop prototypes for the future 2025 kitchen. According to the analysis the kitchen of the future will include more technology, and will be more practical and environmental. This whole concept had “project” for CTE & STEM class or an Interior Design class written all over it. So…below you will find some ideas of how to incorporate this into your curriculum.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Fish Unit

Doing a unit on fish and seafood can be expensive so most programs leave it out. I had the privileged of working at a high school with a fish market adjacent to the school. We took a walking field trip to the fish market for a demonstration of how to select and cook fish. This was an awesome opportunity for students and helped mitigate the costs to the culinary department. With a little creative thinking, you maybe able to incorporate a seafood unit into your culinary program.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Time to BAKE the Doughnuts!

Whether you are celebrating Fat Tuesday, National Doughnut Day or just need a fun, tasty dessert or snack, this lesson brings you donutsome healthy ideas for incorporating this usually unhealthy treat into your class. Continue reading for some historical background on these mini-pastries, along with how they are commercially made and then bake up some sweetness by preparing a healthy version of the baked vanilla doughnut. And don’t forget the healthy topping too!

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Project Brainstorm: Let us help you! This month’s topic is Microwaves

We are going to pose a topic and ask you to “help us help you” by just sharing one thing you did whether it be an activity, a video clip, infographic, reading, TPT product, etc. when teaching that topic. We believe everyone will win in the end as you’ll have a new lesson or at least a lot of new ideas and resources to pull from. Check back often as this page will be updated as resources come in.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Fun with Foods: Bento Box Lunches for Kids

When my children were in elementary school they thought it was cool to take their lunches in a fun lunch box. Sometimes I would surprise them with a clever, creative food inside. The memory of this, plus knowing I wanted to teach my child development students about healthy foods choices for children triggered this lesson and project. I assign this as a take home project but this could easily be done in a foods lab or even as a creative competition!

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Desserts in a Jar: Lab Ideas

Who would have thought that the age old canning jar would be perfect for dessert food labs! When choosing recipes for labs I try to select recipes so students get a nice sample to taste, but leave very little, if any leftovers. Not only does this cut down on waste, money spent on ingredients, but it also forces students to practice portion control and eliminates arguing over who gets the extras.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Use This, Not That…Healthy Substitutions

A close family friend was recently diagnosed with some serious health problems and was encouraged to change his diet. He came to me looking for some suggestions on how he could adapt some of the recipes he already liked and was using. After researching, I realized there are a lot of healthy substitutions to be made with very common ingredients. This made me think that this knowledge could be useful for my students as well since it’s highly possible that they might need to use this information in the future for themselves or their own families.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

The Mini-Book Project

Every once in awhile I find myself without technology access due to school wide testing and I need an alternate assignment. This was how the mini-book project came to be. You could consider this an interactive foldable where students must use class notes and resources to complete. The beauty of these is that they can be used with any age group and can be as simple or as elaborate as you want them to be. Below you will find a few ideas on how mini-books can be used with FACS related topics.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Childhood Obesity…The Rest of the Story Activity

Critical thinking and problem solving skills are definitely needed for today’s teens to prepare for the real world and life The rest of the storyon their own or with their future families. What better way to prepare them than to provide them with a real life scenario that needs to be solved. In this activity students are introduced to a problem and must work together as a group to figure out and creatively write and present the “rest of the story”,as the late Paul Harvey would say on his radio broadcasts. The beauty of this activity is that you can create a scenario that needs solved using any crisis type topic. I used childhood obesity, but you can use other important topics such as bullying, eating disorders, teen pregnancy, financial debt, finding quality day care, divorce, dating violence, aging and more. So let the scenarios begin!

Print Friendly, PDF & Email