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March 07, 2008
Curriculum Spotlight: Kindergarten 3-7-2008
Kindergarten Curriculum Spotlight
by Steve Manseau, Kindergarten Teacher
The kindergarten class has spent the last few months consuming our latest unit of study – food! My teaching partner, Shericka, came up with the idea last fall of having the class work on a project involving the creation of a restaurant, and we are setting the table by reading, tasting, and drawing and writing about many different kinds of food.
We began the unit by brainstorming and listing our favorite foods, and after coming up with a “sweet tooth” oriented list, we moved on to fruits and vegetables. A trickster tale by Janet Stevens, Tops and Bottoms, involves a hare tricking a lazy bear out of the best parts of various plants (for example, the hare gets the bottoms and the bear gets the tops of carrots). After listening to the story, the class tasted six parts of plants: root (golden beet), stems (broccoli stem), leaves (red butter lettuce), flowers (the broccoli crown), fruit (navel orange), and seeds (corn), and I would say there was about an 85% approval rate!
The “stop that pickle” theater company stopped by our classroom for a performance of the book of the same name as the company, and we tasted the actors after the show. Even though the pickle escapes in the story, we ate it up anyway.
The class helped out with several cooking demonstrations, as we kneaded them to help make pizza and bagels from scratch. Boiled bagels are the way to go! Students listened to a book, Bread Bread, Bread, which shows many different kinds of bread from around the world (chapatti from India, baguettes from France, horno bread from the American Southwest, etc.), and we followed this with a bread tasting session.
In the spirit of Chinese New Year we read two books about special foods from the holiday, The Runaway Rice Cake, and The Story of Noodles, both by Ying Chang Compestine. The “rice cake” story is similar to the “gingerbread man” tale, as it tries to escape being eaten. Using the handy recipe from the back of the book, we made the rice cake, chased it down, and ate it. The noodle story explained how three brothers, who liked food fights with rice but not the cleaning up part, accidentally invented noodles out of dumpling dough.
Finally it was time for dessert – and we got The Scoop on Ice Cream (a book by Gail Gibbons), which describes the step-by-step process of making ice cream, including the origin of ingredients. All in One Cookie goes through the same pattern of how a chocolate chip cookie is made (and the book also has a great cookie recipe in the back which we took advantage of!). One more book about a sweet topic – How Chocolate is Made – traced the course from cocoa bean to chocolate bar. The class tasted a variety of chocolate, from non-sweet baker’s chocolate (I warned them before tasting!) to milk chocolate.
We are now in the stage of designing menus with the help of our sixth grade buddies, and will soon begin work on creating a feasible menu to present for our “Kinderant” restaurant (Shericka helped the children to think of restaurant names, and “Kinderant” came up a winner). The class is being assigned various restaurant jobs, such as servers, hosts, coat checkers, etc., and we will hopefully begin serving sometime in the next few weeks.
Bon Appetit!
Steve
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