Culinary Lesson Plan Ideas for Middle School and High School
Creating culinary arts lesson plans can be tricky when you are a busy teacher! Whether you are a professional chef or a transitioning teacher, creating a new lesson plan for every day of the school year can be a challenge. We have ready-made, no-prep lessons for middle and high school students that will help you introduce each topic before students begin cooking. Each lesson can be taught through google classroom or with PowerPoint presentations and include student handouts in both formats. Presentations and worksheets are a great way to fill your course so you have enough materials for the school year.
How to Set Up Your Lessons
For instance, providing instruction and background knowledge of types of knives, knife cuts, and knife safety when teaching a topic like knife skills can be a better way to give students a complete lesson rather than jumping into having students cut veggies and fruit. Teaching meats in culinary arts and family and consumer science can seem boring to the students, but there are ways to make it interesting. There are so many unique facts about poultry that can hook your students and pique their interest, and some good videos to help reinforce the basics.
Organizing your lessons this way ensures you have an anticipatory set to set the stage for your culinary class and an assessment to check for understanding.
Here is another example of how you can set up a lesson on teaching a topic like poultry.
Start with Fun Facts
Begin with a hook or anticipatory set to get your students thinking about the topic that you are about to teach. Using bell ringers or bell ringer journals is a great way to establish a classroom routine and start your class each day.
-Turkeys are originally from the Americas and were not introduced to Europe and Asia until the Age of Exploration and the Columbian Exchange in the 1500s. The indigenous people of America were cooking a turkey for centuries before the rest of the world!
-Chicken is the most sustainable meat option. Free-range chickens are one of the most sustainable and ethical choices of meat. Free-range chicken farming leaves a very small footprint on the planet and is super tasty.
Learning and labeling poultry cuts is an important part of learning about poultry.
1- Show a video of Chicken Fabrication- Show a video on how to butcher a chicken. We made one in our kitchen, and it shows the step-by-step process of chicken fabrication. Students benefit from seeing how the chicken is whole and what each portion looks like.
2- Present a slideshow on chicken cuts- Present a slideshow about the different cuts of chicken and the different types of poultry. This poultry slideshow lesson includes questions, guided notes, and a web quest that gets us started when teaching poultry. I love web quests because the students can do them independently without much guidance, and they learn a lot! We love to teach lessons this way as it helps to provide background info. For students, before they begin to cook and participate in food labs.
You can take a virtual field trip and explore a website at a poultry farm or poultry manufacturing plant. This is also a cool way to introduce your students to occupations in the food industry and possible career opportunities.
3- Cook– Start the poultry lab. Some options include breaded chicken, such as chicken tenders or breasts. It is a nice way to incorporate cooking methods if you decide to sauté the chicken in a frying pan or bake the chicken in the oven. Additionally, you can review food safety when starting the lab. You could also teach students the breading process and cover that skill. Familyconsumersciences.com has this great chicken or turkey burrito recipe that the author, Kim, used with her students.
Another option is to make poached chicken and have chicken to make chicken salad, enchiladas, chicken fajitas, and chicken pot pie.
Assess What Students’ Learned
4- Assess- Chicken Fabrication Cut Out Activity– Have your culinary arts students cut out chicken parts and put them back on a whole chicken! You can use metal fasteners or just tape! This is a fun culinary arts bulletin board idea as well!
Additional formative assessment ideas are tickets out the door or exit tickets. You can ask the students a question that aligns with your objective and have them write it on a half sheet of paper. This allows them to show you what they learned and helps you to see if your instruction was effective and if you need to review any material again the next day. These tickets can also help you to create your unit test or summative assessment because they are big-picture questions.
Our full no-prep poultry lesson downloads right into your Google Drive. It includes a slideshow, questions, a web quest, and more! We also have other meat lessons, including beef, fish, and more! The visuals and scaffolding in a lesson like this can also help your special education students.
A Poultry 101 video is a great way to introduce or review poultry basics and culinary techniques with your students. The USDA is a great reference for teaching meats as a government organization. The WebQuest in our lesson has students looking at the USDA website to answer questions.
You can incorporate poultry into making soups. Check out our 4 Soup Recipes for Culinary Arts blog post.
No-Prep Culinary Arts Lesson Plans
We have a scope and sequence for a year-long course that can help you set up and prepare for your school year. It also includes a semester-long intro to Culinary, Culinary 1, and advanced Culinary arts class pacing guides.
Want to avoid all the planning and spend time with your family and friends? We also have a growing bundle of instructional materials if you want to skip all the planning.
Do you need detailed lesson plans for an Intro to Culinary semester course? Check out our full semester curriculum, which includes assessments, editable lesson plans, and activities. These are great for Prostart teachers, home economics, family consumer science, and foods teachers.
