Food in the Classroom: Delicious Challenge

Bringing real food to the classroom may turn out to be a challenge, especially when you think of all the things that could possibly go wrong – allergies, accidents, poisonings… Ugh!

Well, I want to share three activities where I have used food with my students – they worked really well and nobody was hurt. Quite contrary, my students really enjoyed these activities and we had a lot of (educational) fun. So, if these ideas worked for my students, they might also work for yours, only make sure to ask about any allergies (or if you work with kids, ask their parents!).

Make your own cookbook

This is a great idea for older students. I got inspired when I was reading “Language Learning with Technology” by Graham Stanley and I saw one of the ideas. Then I proposed a challenge – one cake per fortnight, homemade and delicious, but! followed with a recipe in English. Believe me, that was a great activity – my students were happy to talk about their likes and dislikes, learnt about giving/receiving feedback plus had some tasty cakes.

I wrote about this activity some time ago (click!)

Yummy revision

I’m not ashamed to admit I have used food as a form of bribery. I found it a good tool to relieve the tension of grammar revision classes. The review before tests is usually the worst part of the routine for my students, so I try to brighten it up as much as I can – by bringing films, making projects etc.

It turned out my students, especially teenagers, love baking cakes for those classes, as – a scientifically proven fact! – sugar intake boosts your mood and no amount of grammar exercises can destroy its beneficial effect. One of my groups made a recipe project – I brought 500 Cupcake Book and everyone picked one recipe to translate. During the following review class we could judge the quality of translation when everyone had to bring the cupcakes they made according to their chosen recipes – click! to see what my talented students made!

Projects (especially STEAM-related)

When it comes to younger kids, I love using food for experiments. I’m a huge fan of mixing language learning with STEAM – it proves that a language is not a goal of learning itself but just a means of gaining new knowledge about the world.

You can use food in awesome experiments, like Naked Egg Experiment (click!) or Sugar Crystals (click!) – kids love them, and you can practise Present Simple or future forms!

Learning numbers is fun – but you can learn them with M&M’s chocolates, compare the numbers, introduce less/more than construction… and then you can paint with M&M’s (really give it a go!):

You can also use various kinds of food as simple building materials – you can use corn crisps to build whole cities (and help revise all those confusing names of the buildings and directions), and spaghetti + marshmallows will make splendid towers (not to mention revising comparatives and superlatives):

You can read more about my STEAMed activities with food in Get Creative magazine.

As you can see, these ideas are simple and engaging – and they prove you can both have delicious fun and learn something new!