Recent Curricular Integrations

4th grade students visited the Teaching Kitchen to make a dish inspired by the immigrants they are studying in their Ellis Island unit. Students learned the reasons eastern and southern Europeans chose to leave their homelands for the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, what those journeys were like, and how the immigrants were received in New York Harbor. They also examined the connections immigrants kept to their homelands and the traditions and customs they brought with them. The kitchen provided the perfect opportunity for the students to see, smell, and taste those customs while making a traditional Italian meal: orecchiette with tomato sauce. 4th graders also learned the practical lessons of how to hold a knife and how to appropriately salt the water for boiling pasta. Andrew Preston

Students in Computer Science 0 have been learning the importance of using precise, detailed, and clear instructions, and finding an effective way for humans to communicate with a “computer” or “robot” (a new language!). In the TK, we focused on key programming concepts: instruction sequence, clear communication, and attention to detail. Students were given a recipe to make lemon curd, however, the instruction sequence was out of order, and some words were jumbled, and only half of each cooking station's group could be in the kitchen at a given time. For each group to succeed in making velvety lemon curd rather than lemony scrambled eggs, students used knowledge shared by Chef Jaz and unscrambled the instructions, and practiced communicating with their teammates as they cooked in "relay" team style. Jessica Valarezo