Part of Lesson Plan: Culture and food (2 of 4)

Activity Overview / Details

(This lesson follows lesson 1 in the series as the students will have just been acquainted with the 5 Themes of Geography in the previous lesson) (50 minutes) 

(5 minutes) Introduce activity / have students make grid as described below (or print one out for them to fill in - see example attached, example is geared towards the country information from foodbycountry.com)

(Teacher Note: any resource of different cultures can be used for this activity - text book, article or web site - the site that I use is foodbycountry.com, I have attached several links to help you get there easily.  The vocabulary words below are words that may not be familiar to all students that are used in the foodbycountry.com summaries.  I have condensed the countries to word docs as I do not have computers in my room, so having the students work directly on the computer is not an option.  A couple of samples of those word docs are attached.)

Note: there are a couple of ways that you could divide out the countries:

1) Hand out a different country to each student in the class, then re-group students so that they are not sitting with anyone from their kitchen group; once they have shared within their "new group" and filled out their grid, have them go back to their kitchen groups and between all members they will have been exposed to as many countries as there are students in the entire class.  This will be good exposure for when they choose their country for their project tomorrow.

OR

2) Have students stay in their kitchen group the whole time, hand out as many different countries as there are students in that group, once they have shared out with the group, the exposure will be to the number of countries there are people in the group.

(30 minutes)  One person in each group skim a different excerpt from a text about different food cultures taking notes on how geography, climate, indigeneous vegetation, people, etc  have affected the food traditions/culture in that country or region, popular dishes.  (each person makes a grid to fill in their information and then everyone else's while they share - example attached)

(15 minutes) After everyone in group has finished, each student has 3 minutes to share out with group teaching what they learned about their region/country. (filling in grid with group members information)

Students will use the grids in the next lesson when they choose their country for their final project.  If you used option 1 above, the groups will have collectively been exposed to as many countries as there are people in the class.    

 (Vocabulary Note: I added some definitions to the lesson for words that may not be well enough understood by the students in order to get the most out of the assignment, feel free to work in at your discretion)