“In some cases,  the students had never made nor seen the specific Hispanic food, when this happened, the class would watch authentic cooking shows in Spanish to help them create these recipes,” said Mrs. Lopez.

Spanish 4 students are enjoying a tasty unit called ‘school lunches around the Latin American world.’

They’re learning grammar, vocabulary words and full phrases that allow them to talk about their likes, dislikes, opinions, healthiness of the food, the contents of the food etc.

“The grammar in this unit explores the vocabulary of the kitchen and taking command… students were introduced to a food commonly eaten in the Dominican Republic. The food is called "platano macho", in English this means "mean banana". These are not regular bananas but they can be purchased at your local grocery store.” 

They learned about the texture and taste (similar to a potato) previous to being in the kitchen. Once in the kitchen, students were given a never before seen recipe in Spanish. They had to work in groups to read through the recipe, collect items and materials, cook and then plate the final product. 

In another kitchen lesson they learned a recipe for " Flautas" or floaters in English. 

“Normally these tacos are made with chicken on the inside however, because some of our students observe the lent season, we made them the traditional Hispanic way (during lent season) with potato, onion and goat cheese!” Said Mrs. Lopez.

To make Flautas, students were challenged to create a recipe card after watching a quick- "Como se hace/how to" - video with no commentary on "how to make these -Flauta- tacos." 

Once they created the card, they needed to have it checked with Mrs. Lopez. If they used the appropriate materials, ingredients, spanish grammar and if they had all of the steps in correct order, they were allowed to cook. If anything was incorrect or missing, they needed to fix their recipe card and submit it again to Mrs. Lopez for revision. 

All students completed the task correctly and for some it took a few tries but all students were able to cook the Flautas.