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Professional
Development Workshops for Teachers
1. Using Food to Enliven the Curriculum
Everyday foods can enhance lessons in
math, science, language arts, social studies and more,
by sparking new interest in teachers and their students.
In this workshop Tom Hughes
explains how reconnecting students to their food is
a vital step in addressing our nation's nutritional
health challenges: childhood obesity and eating disorders.
By not taking food for granted, by not falling victim
to commercial interests, by exploring the full story
of what food is all about, children can learn to make
reasonable food choices and lead healthy lives.
In
a one hour workshop, among other ideas, teachers discover:
That
food can be used to explain the world.
Take, for instance, the potato, a naturally nutritious
and historically influential vegetable. Wherever the
potato, a native of Western South America, was introduced,
chronic malnutrition was eliminated.
And
yet globalization of fried potato products has contributed
greatly to our current obesity problems.
But
the potato can be used also to:
• demonstrate the Fibonacci spiral, and many other
math concepts.
• reveal the inner chemical makeup of all foods.
• help children become avid story tellers once
they meet and befriend their “own” potato.
• tell how food has changed the world.
As
a bonus, Tom will suggest what teachers can do with
food to enliven that tired old classroom holiday, Halloween.
Teachers
will engage in group hands-on activities and also see
how to make good use of
The FOOD Museum’s website with their students.
Workshop
cost: $450.
2.
Discover Local Food Heritage Sites with Your Students
As
The FOOD Museum travels the country with museum outreach
programs during the next school year, we also will be
researching the rich heritage of America’s food
history sites for an upcoming book.
We
are inviting schools to participate in this research.
We will present the program, Discover
Local Food Heritage Sites with Your Students,
in a professional development workshop that explains
the following adventure in project-based learning:
1. Classroom students will explore their neighborhoods
and larger communities, seeking out food heritage sites,
and recording the stories of the people and the history
behind these specific sites. They will make use of the
Internet, local institutions, libraries, and their own
curiosity.
2.
The results of their efforts—writeups, photos,
videos and the like—will be logged into a special
section of The FOOD Museum website, www.foodmuseum.com.
Once reviewed and edited, the results will be made public.
3. Some of the information collected will be included
in an upcoming book on food heritage sites of the United
States, with full credit given to students and schools
for their contributions.
