Cooking and Skyping....All in a Day's Work

Last month we completed a unit of study titled "Cooking/Combining". We learned about kitchen safety, practiced using different kitchen tools/appliances, talked about healthy eating and read six chapters and answered comprehension questions about a boy named Mark who attends cooking classes with his sister. Check out our crazy good kitchen skills below:

 Making sure our produce is clean...

 Learning to use an apple slicer.

 Who doesn't love some grated cheese?

 

Grating cheese the old fashioned way...

 What are we going to do with all of this cheese?!

Chopping away...

 

 And more chopping...

 Peeling carrots (yes, we sampled EVERYTHING!)

 We wrapped things up with some good old-fashioned knife skills. 

And then we chowed down.

 

One of the great things about technology it that we now have the ability to take a community trip without leaving the comfort of our classroom. To go along with this unit, we had the great fortune of being given a virtual tour of the award winning Chicago restaurant,

To read more about this FABULOUS restaurant, click here. I just can't say enough good things about this place...or its lovely, talented owners!

 Chef Edward Kim used Skype to give our class a behind-the-scenes look at how a restaurant kitchen works. He showed us all of the appliances his staff uses and walked us through how to properly chop an apple (without losing a finger or ten).

Here we are waiting to meet Chef Kim.

Very cool stuff~Chef Kim looked larger than life...

almost like the Wizard of Oz ;)

 Giving us the low-down...explaining kitchen safety and the importance of cleaning hands, workspace and food.

 The Q&A- our class did a great job taking turns asking Chef Kim different questions about his restaurant. We practiced turn-taking, generating wh- questions and initiating interactions. Very speechy stuff! Chef Kim told us all about his favorite foods (and we told him ours!) and explained what kinds of food he likes to cook (he was very gracious when one of our kiddos asked if Pop-Tarts were his favorite food!). It was a great experience for everyone involved, and we hope to be able to do more Skyping soon!