Shopping basket: cook with my ingredients!

This activity helps pupils understand each other through food, traditional nutrition, taste and flavours. Pupils propose ingredients to use and trigger their foreign partners’ imaginations by encouraging them to combine these ingredients and come up with a new recipe.

Age group: 13 years and up

Level: Intermediate

Duration: 4 hours

ICT Tools: TwinSpace

Pedagogical Objectives

On successful completion of this activity pupils will be able to:

know more about their foreign partners through traditional food and nutrition,
create a new recipe based on ingredients selected by partners,
understand foreign culture(s) through traditional food and nutrition,
develop imagination,
experiment with new and unknown ingredients and tools.

Process

Step1

Each school decides on what ingredients – typical of their local cuisine – should be put into the shopping basket. The shopping basket can be a drawing or an interactive image map (for more advanced ICT users) with specific information included with each ingredient.

Step2

Pupils of each school should visit a local super market and find as many of the assigned ingredients as possible. They should then bring the ingredients in the class, taste them and discuss different ways of using them in a recipe. Another option for pupils could be to mix the foreign ingredients with their own traditional ones in a completely new cultural ‘fusion’ recipe.

Step 3

Pupils prepare their invented recipe and share their opinions on the results in the TwinSpace. They then propose their new recipe to their foreign partners and can discuss and create further.

Outcomes

Pupils learn about their partners’ culture(s) in a fun way, develop some creative cooking skills of their own, and build on their collaborative working relationship with their partners. Such an activity is a wonderful addition to any eTwinning project subject and brings schools closer together.

Tips

An alterative or secondary activity running along the same lines could be to explore fashion and music in partner countries/regions.

References

Images, used to create the shopping basket, were downloaded by various gourmet websites in the Internet.