New Mobile Kitchen Offers Learning Opportunities to Students
Order up! Midway students now have the opportunity to learn basic cooking skills and apply them to lessons in Math, English Language Arts, Science and Social Studies. “I saw one of these kitchens being used at a school I taught at in Birmingham, Alabama”, Woodgate Intermediate School teacher Jennifer Stanley said. “I saw what amazing things they were doing for their kids and I wanted the same for our students!” This mobile classroom is an amazing resource to reach students in a way that goes far beyond sitting in a desk. Teachers hope to see the students’ eagerness to learn culinary arts transfer to other core-curriculum subjects. By utilizing the mobile kitchen during students’ When In Need time (WIN), enrichment opportunities present these Intermediate students the chance to learn basic nutrition and cooking skills. Compared to a regular classroom, this hands-on experience easily allows up to ten students to fit around the mobile kitchen and be able to tangibly see lessons that they have learned in core-curriculum classes and how they apply to real life situations. “In our sixth grade science class, we will use the kitchen to teach energy transfer, forms of heating, and chemistry. The mobile kitchen lets us have the students doing more instead of just watching the teacher conduct the demo”, Stanley said.
This mobile kitchen was provided by funds from Midway ISD Education Foundation’s Grants for Great Ideas program. With the help of grant sponsors like H-E-B Tournament of Champions, Midway ISD faculty can develop new ways to implement more fun and engaging learning tools, like this mobile kitchen, to be used to improve students’ overall learning experiences.
