UKEdMag: Cooking your Curriculum by @3edmigos

After an immersive purpose for a ‘topic’? Look no further than a restaurant! This year, our Mayan topic was exactly that.

We simply broke down the process a restaurant might go through before opening (and visited our local Chiquito to ‘research’) and planned our topic around it. We began by designing the interior: learning Mayan myths, beliefs and culture and retelling these in our decor.

Restaurant designed, onto the food itself: evaluating modern Mexican food and cooking techniques as well as doing consumer research.

Shopping lists ready, our maths focussed on weights, measures, ratio and scale factor which all sat perfectly alongside considering percentages (profit margins) and calculating within the budget.

Google Sites for the classroom enabled pupils to collaborate on a restaurant website which was reinforced by persuasive writing; how can we really ‘sell’ the taste and aroma of our restaurant in a limited number of words?

Closer to the opening, we moved into ‘teams’ – managers, chefs, waiters, ‘bar’ staff…pupils had responsibilities and roles to carry out to ensure we operated smoothly.

All that was left was for the customers (25 parents) to come and enjoy their food cooked and served by the pupils!