This week in my grade 8 Foods & Nutrition class I had my students direct one another in a blindfolded cookie lab!  YES…blindfolded!

This semester in Foods & Nutrition 8 we are working with questions. There is one over all BIG QUESTION followed by 4 Guiding Questions that all lead back to the BIG QUESTION.

So this week we were talking about success in the kitchen. I posed the questions – “What essential skills determine success in the kitchen?”, and thinking about our senses, “What does a foods class look like, sounds like, and feel like?”.

The lesson: On the board I wrote out a recipe (chocolate chip cookies) without labeling what it was. I had written the recipe out already divided into the wet, dry and other ingredients. I asked the group what all these ingredients had in common? What they could tell me about these ingredients? Immediately they started calling out things like baking, cooking, cookies, dry stuff & wet stuff, and measurements. Once we determined this we tried to imagine how all these ingredients would be incorporated together. As we talked through the method I drew an infographic on the board as their guide for the recipe. If you aren’t familiar with infographics it is a picture recipes in essence. Instead of writing out the method you draw it, like the image here.

Their goal for this recipe was to only get it mixed together, and up until this point they had NO idea that one partner was going to be blindfolded!! After talking through the recipe they were guessing that it was probably chocolate chip cookies. I still didn’t tell them what it was they were going to end up with.

I then had them pair off and then I put them into their designated units. After everyone was organized I passed out the blindfolds and told them that one person was going to be blindfolded. The blindfolded partner was to be doing all the mixing and gathering of ingredients while the other partner directed them. The look on some of their faces was priceless!! They had a few more basic instructions and I let them get to it.

It took some students a bit to get used to the idea while others were down to business right away. This was their first LAB, so it really was like the blind leading the blind! So much fun to watch, and we had no casualties in the process, just lots of laughs and confused faces!

This will be a memorable lesson for me as well as the students I think. Just for the mere fact that they were blindfolded! I liked this lab because student have to really think about their process. They are also needed to use proper kitchen language as they describe what tools, equipment, and ingredients their partner needed to gather. It challenges their senses in the kitchen and helps to break down barriers building a stronger community in the kitchen. They were bumping into one another, laughing, allowing themselves to be open and vulnerable to what ever was going to happen! It was wonderful to see.

For myself it challenged me to give vague yet clear instructions. It’s not always easy, especially being a new and inexperienced teacher.
I would 100% do this type of lesson again and I think I would even like to try something like this with my senior students. Doing this with Foods 11/12 students would be a completely different experience, but I think just as memorable!