Kitchen Science
From NSDLWiki
Teaching science in the kitchen is a popular tactic in elementary and middle schools because you can hold students' interest with the promise of a yummy payoff. Here are a few NSDL resources on Kitchen Science. Feel free to register and add your own favorites.
Cooking with the Sun is a TeachEngineering activity for grades 3 to 5. Students learn about using renewable energy from the Sun for heating and cooking as they build and compare the performance of four solar cooker designs. They explore the concepts of insulation, reflection, absorption, conduction, and convection.
The Cook's Thesaurus is an award-winning cooking encyclopedia that covers thousands of ingredients and cooking tools. A section on equivalents is a great way of introducing fractions and measurement; a section on substitutions yields ideas for teaching the basics of chemistry.
The Accidental Scientist: Cooking , from San Francisco's fabulous Exploratorium, is a veritable portal of recipes, activities, and Webcasts. Read scientific workups of eggs, pickles, candy, bread, and meat; make a virtual visit to an organic egg farm; or visit the forum to learn why pouring salt on eggplant makes it less bitter (hint: it's osmosis). This site has so much good stuff that it can be overwhelming, so you might want to visit this one first:
Middle School Portal a popular NSDL Pathay, is an evolving resource for teachers of math and science in grades 6 through 8. Enter "Science of Cooking" in their search page and you'll get about a dozen hand-picked resources form the Exploritorium website, along with several others that have been evaluated and enhanced with lesson plans and assessment strategies.
Chocolate: The Exhibition is a web capture of an exhibit created by Chicago's Field Museum. The site includes interactive features that allow you to explore chocolate manufacturing "From Seed to Sweet", play The Chocolate Challenge, and visit a cacao farm.
Cook and Eat Chemistry is one volume of a Food Nutrition and Science curriculum developed for the Utah State Board of Education. It is a curriculum guide of learning experiences that link chemistry and food preparation. The guide focuses on the food chemicals in fats, carbohydrates, sugars, and water and how they interact during the process of cooking. Other volumes in this series focus on nutrition and fitness.(***************just for 08im group 13**************)
