Bringing the kitchen into the classroom
Coral Powell, Year 5 teacher at Hotham Primary School, recently won her pupils their own YouTube Kids filming day by downloading Kitchen Kid, the 10 lesson project combining instruction writing & healthy eating. Here she explains why she got involved:
When I started using a school Twitter account, I have to admit I was sceptical. Was this going to be another way of increasing the time I spent attached to my phone or laptop? However, one of my first ‘edutwitter’ finds was A Tale Unfolds.
“I want to do this cookery show video project,” I told my colleague, “I found it on Twitter.” She smiled, “You’ve got quite into this whole Twitter thing, haven’t you?”
I’ve always found teaching the instruction text genre difficult in Year 5. How do you make instructions engaging and challenging when the children have been writing them since Year 1? Over the years my classes have written instructions for tea for the Queen, instructions for cakes for a Mad Hatter’s party, tongue in cheek recipes for a school trip, Robinson Crusoe’s steps for survival… But without a doubt, my favourite instruction writing project (and the most successful) has been Kitchen Kid.
The Kitchen Kid resources take your class step-by-step through the process of cooking, writing and filming a recipe for their own cookery show, complete with easy to follow ‘how to’ videos and sample recipes from BBC Good Food.
Anything which reduces the time planning and resource making and inspires the children to have a real-life purpose for their writing is teacher gold dust. Not to mention a resource which is closely planned around the National Curriculum objectives for grammar.
The children’s sense of urgency when writing increased as they had the motivation of knowing that they needed material for their videos. Many of the skills which the children learned were above and beyond the English National Curriculum objectives in the lesson plans. Yes, they learned about parenthesis and adverbials (which was great), but they also developed their computing, group work, speaking and social skills.
The children loved the video introductions for each lesson and the excitement when a ‘real’ Kitchen Kid from A Tale Unfolds resources, Reginald Write, stepped into our classroom for our YouTube kids filming day was unforgettable.
It can be easier for children to see what needs to be edited in video than in writing. When you film five minutes of your friend grating a carrot and then have to watch it back you learn the value of ‘less is more.’ When you do a silly voice for every line and then realise it’s not really very funny, you learn about comic timing and carefully chosen repetition.
So what next? Well I’m planning to use the Plastic Times resources as part of our ‘What on earth are we doing to our world?’ project. And after my wonderful A Tale Unfolds adventure, it looks like I’ll be staying on Twitter after all.
To download the free Kitchen Kid project for your own Key Stage 2 class, and explore some of the other available literacy resources, visit www.LitFilmFest.com
