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blog by GREG MCCRACKEN listed in categories: Classroom

Wednesdays in my classroom, we cook. As part of our school cultural curriculum, and just because it’s fun, we work with a different mixed group of six 1st to 8th graders washing, chopping, slicing, and dicing vegetables and fruits. They cook rice, shell beans, sauté, boil, bake and broil dishes as common as penne with a vegetable marinara sauce and seemingly exotic as West African ground-nut stew. And every single student loves doing it.

All other week days except for Wednesdays, our students carry their lunches from home. We see quite a variety of selections. Some children bring excellent lunches – whole grain breads, fresh cut vegetables, fresh fruits – while others bring lunches that lean much more toward processed food items, many of them loaded with sugar and preservatives.

We often hear from parents that they can’t get their children to eat anything good; that the only thing they want to eat, and will eat, are the things they already like. They won’t try anything new, they won’t try anything different, they just demand the same thing over and over again.

I sympathize with them. As a parent, I’ve had my own battles with my kids and what they would and would not eat. I’m sure we all have. But we wanted our students to have a different experience with food, and meals. It was from this that our Wednesday lunch program was born.

My co-teacher and I knew from our experience as teachers that our students were much more receptive to trying new experiences and challenges if they got to participate in the planning and execution of those new experiences and challenges. We had experienced first hand the excitement and enthusiasm our students showed whenever we asked their opinion about something we were planning to do in the classroom. We found that they were not only more receptive, but more successful in meeting our expectations.

When we eat lunch on Wednesdays, it’s part of a bigger process that begins when we bring to the students recipes, and they offer ideas of their own. We plan our meal by making sure that we are meeting our bodies’ need for protein, fiber, carbohydrates, and fats. We discuss different ways of preparing ingredients, always keeping in mind that we want to keep what we are preparing as nutritionally intact as possible. And we talk about taste, something with which the children are often very concerned. The newest children to our classes, those in the first grade, are often concerned that what we are going to make won’t taste good, or that it will taste different, and that they won’t like it.

But then, on Wednesday morning, the group of students cooking that week gathers around the table in my classroom where we do all the preparation, having washed their hands and selected their tools. Some peel, some slice, some chop, all according to experience and preference. (For the youngest, most inexperienced students, there is always the peeling of the garlic, a perennial, favorite activity.) The children talk among themselves, asking questions about the best techniques for using kitchen utensils, checking to make sure that they are getting everything cut to the right size, offering each other advice when someone is having difficulty.

At least one teacher is there too, modeling the cooperative environment that we want the children to learn and offering encouragement and praise. When everything is ready, we move to the kitchen and put our ingredients together, blending vegetables and spices, sauces and beans. As the dishes come close to being ready, the cooks for that day repair to the classroom and, with their other classmates, wipe down tables, set out place settings, and get the cups and milk ready.

When we enter the room with that day’s fare, the children are attentive not just to making sure that all preparations are complete, but to the aroma and look of our food. They comment about how good our meal smells, and how they can’t wait to try it. They sit and wait to be called upon to be served, and then they wait patiently until everyone sits down at their place with a plate of food. With the evoking of “Bon appetite,” we eat.

And children who don’t usually like to try new things? If they have helped prepare the meal, they are much more receptive. They try, they like, and they want to try more. Parents report back to us at school that their children are trying new things to eat at home; their children are talking to them about nutritional values and how to make home meals healthier; sometimes they are even offering, without prompting, to help with the meal (although, we have been told, never with the clean-up.)

We’re so happy to hear that.

Posted in October, 2007