Published: August 20, 2009 01:49 pm      

COOKING UP LESSONS: Breakfast teaches Grant Line students how to deal with the unexpected

Take a few eggs, milk, vanilla, cinnamon and some bread to create a lesson that students at Grant Line Elementary won’t soon forget.

After hearing about the project from another teacher, Heather Finn decided it would be a good idea to get her fourth/fifth grade split class, all accelerated learners, to cook as a way to learn math by measuring out ingredients, teamwork skills and more — such as what to do when the burners blow all the fuses in the classroom.

For the first day of school, students split up into small groups and attempted their hand at making something similar to Tootsie Rolls. On Wednesday, they went a step further, using portable burners to make French toast.

One group started off too quickly, putting all their ingredients, including the bread, in the frying pan and started cooking.

Quickly the concoction started to clump, resembling more of a dried up giblet gravy than French toast.

“Ew!” Christine Labby, 10, exclaimed as it started to cook. “I’m never making this again, unless we do it right.”

Finn said her teaching technique, since this is an accelerated group, is to keep it mostly hands off, letting the kids make decisions and learn how to handle and deal with their mistakes.

“Now, where were your ingredients supposed to go?” she asked the group after one brave member put the cooked chunks on a slice of bread and ate it.

“In the bowl,” they answered in unison.

The group near them fared much better, creating a final product that smelled and looked like French toast.

“We had to double the recipe, because we didn’t have enough for everyone,” 10-year-old Madison Thomas said as she grabbed the first completed piece of toast and slowly placed a piece in her mouth.

She threw her thumbs up in approval.

“It’s really, really good!” she said, while grinning and reaching for the syrup.

Another group struggled to get theirs to cook. Team members took turns flipping the partially dissolved pieces of bread on the pan, hoping for something to turn out.

“It’s disgusting. It’s all sloppy,” 10-year-old Madison Stewart said. “At least it’s not for a grade — well, I hope not!”

Turns out, it wasn’t what they weren’t doing. It was all in the outlet, which Finn soon realized as each team started having trouble heating their toast.

They had blown all the fuses in the outlets.

With no where in the room to cook, Finn took the burners to the hallway, placing them on the floor and plugging them in. Students resumed what they started.

“It was cool, because I never thought we’d be cooking in the hallway,” 10-year-old Grace Winternheimer said.

Her group was able to finish cooking something that didn’t look too much like traditional French toast.

“It looks kind of gross, but it tasted good,” she said. “[I learned that] definitely you’ve got to pay attention to what you’re doing and put the right ingredients in or it won’t taste right.”

“I think it was fun, but it’s hard, because you think it’s going to turn out and you put all the ingredients in right, but it didn’t turn out for us,” 9-year-old Tayler Johnson said, whose group had trouble with a burner that quit halfway through.

However, her group did taste their “finished” product.

“I think it’s pretty good,” Johnson said. “Just really soggy. It tastes like soggy French toast.”

Finn said she hopes the students take away learning experiences beyond the cooking.

“I think the problems are a beautiful part of it,” she said. “If it worked out well, they wouldn’t learn as much from it.”

Finn said as the year continues, she hopes to cook with her students once every two weeks or so, making the recipes harder and taking away some of the measuring cups, so that they have to do more math.

However, she thinks this cooking lesson is one for the history books.

“They’ll remember this forever,” Finn said, laughing as she looked at the children hovering around the burners on the hallway floor. “We cooked French toast in the hallway.”