Introduction to the kitchen TRANSITION TASTER UNIT Primary to Middle/High School

In this unit, students are introduced to the kitchen environment and basic food technology concepts. They explore kitchen safety and hygiene, kitchen tools and equipment and simple food preparation techniques. Students develop an understanding of the nutritional composition of food and how food meets energy requirements. Emphasis is placed on hands-on learning and making connections between everyday life and health.

This is a transition taster unit and does not require an assessment task. It is purely a unit of work that introduces primary school students into middle school cooking (or primary into high school cooking, and can be known as year 6 into year 7 depending on where you are located!).

Included in this unit:

• 10 week program
• Student theory work booklet
• Student recipe booklet
• I can read a recipe homework task booklet

All topic information sections in the theory workbook are written in an easy to read manner and accompanied by simple tasks such as identify the kitchen hazards, the 5 main components of a recipe, rank the activities from least to most energy usage. All recipes include a short extension task that can be completed by fast finishers in the practical or for all students after a demonstration, such as wordsearches, mazes and word in words literacy tasks.

While this is a complete unit of work, if you only have one lesson a fortnight and need it to be practical - just use the recipe workbook, no theory required! The practical lessons form the main component of this unit and cover all but one of the outcomes identified in the program.

During this transition taster class it is important to familiarise students with where they will be working in the kitchen. These bonus worksheets are included:

• Food lab seating plan/Explore my kitchen worksheet
• What’s in the cupboards worksheet

The program, explore my kitchen and what’s in the cupboard worksheets are in an editable MS word/Google Doc format. The theory workbook, recipe workbook and homework task booklet are in pdf format.