Use food to help teach your students about life in other cultures and to embrace their own cultural heritage by giving them a taste of foreign cuisines. Choose a few simple recipes to prepare, allowing students to sample different cultures. Use this experience to explain the cultural meaning behind sharing food and give students a look into the cultural history of many of their favorite dishes. This theme is also good for older students, because you can use the opportunity to have them conduct research on cultural cuisine.
A student garden gives children hands-on experience with science concepts such as botany, biology and chemistry. If your school has the space, help your students to grow and cultivate a class garden. When the vegetables are ready, harvest the crop and throw a big classroom feast, allowing the students to help make a tossed salad. Your students will get a feeling of accomplishment while learning to make healthful dietary choices.
Make history come alive by teaching your students how to create meals as pioneers did on the trail. Your students will get a better understanding of what early American culture was like by participating in activities such as grinding wheat, churning butter or drying fruits and meats. Discuss with them how early settlers had limitations on what they could bring with them and how that affected the types of food they were able to eat.
As a classroom project, cook up a pot of stone soup (see Resources). Read the story of stone soup with your class and ask each student to bring in a vegetable from home. Start the soup with decorative stones that have been cleaned and sanitized, and have each student take turns adding his ingredients to the pot. When serving the soup, be careful not to serve any stones. This is a good lesson to teach about the importance of sharing and the value of working as a community. At the end of the lesson, clean off the stones and hand one to each student to reinforce the theme.