Hook ’em with cookies
We all know the experience of walking into a kitchen and being engulfed by the buttery smell of baking cookies. It feels so good inside your nose, you want to bite the air. As we near the Most Wonderful Time of the Year, i.e. Cookie Season, this video wooed me as quickly as the first fragrant air tendrils of Tollhouse cookies.
This is inspiration: a lesson.. a UNIT… and yearlong THEME! If I were still teaching gifted, we could explore it all year: Why does it taste so good?
Start by brainstorming the questions that waft from watching this. The video makes us ask more than it answers. What else uses egg proteins? Are eggs from certain chickens better for certain cookies? Are there other emulsions that separate to make food “work”? Who figured out how to make cookies in the first place? Could we test some of the temperature variants and their impact on cookie results? How much of this do professional chefs know and how much do they care? This is more than simply food science. It is also human body systems, senses, and perception. (How ’bout that part about throwing away the timer?!)
If we took all the questions that a few fluent thinkers could generate, fueled by this video and perhaps a Tollhouse or two, we’d have enough inquiry to fill a highly enriched science curriculum and a group of kids hungry to attack it. The best part is that the questions come from the kids, so they spread like warm cookie smell. The only people who might object to a cookie-based curriculum might be those concerned about childhood obesity. So we make sure we include the nutritional side of decision making about our food. We might even look into WHY cookies appeal to us so much more than, say, broccoli.
Watch the video. Imagine and ask questions. As you sit down to Thanksgiving Dinner, you may find yourself wondering about the chemical reactions that turned that turkey such a lovely brown or made the mashed potatoes form a cement-like substance on the sides of the bowl. Maybe the experience will make you consider the possibility of hooking your students with cookies during the upcoming holiday season.
Bon appetit.
