Cooking Lessons for PYP 4

CAS has been a big change in my life. It has showed me how important and meaningful our daily activities or activities can be for learning. The 3 main aspects, Creativity, Action and Service have been quite a challenge during school but it was worth it. Creativity has been the most important to me as it involves my passion, which is food. My main creativity aspect has been an almost two yearlong internship at the Brazilian restaurant Boteco. This has shown me how to be creative with food. I learned new techniques and skills in the kitchen and how to present food in a creative manner. This also helped me to create my CAS project.

For my CAS project I chose to teach younger kids how to prepare small dishes that they can easily make if they were ever hungry and they didn’t know how to cook. In other words giving them a valuable life skill, which is cooking. It took quite a while before I could even start this project. I had to get permission from the primary head and the PYP 4 teachers, the kitchen staff and the DP Coordinator. Once all of this was sorted out I to talked with the PYP 4 teachers to explain the project in more detail. Afterwards I gave a presentation to the PYP 4 students so they understand what I would be doing with them over the next month. I explained that every week I would bring 10 students to the PYP cooking classroom and I would show them small dishes that they can easily make on a daily basis or once a week, depending when they felt like making it. It would be a wide range of foods, from cookies to fruit salsas and so on.

I learnt many things during this project like leadership skills, demonstration skills and as well as preparation skills. The hardest part of all of this was preparation during the whole project. Mainly because of having to decide on the dish, days before I could create it, asking for the ingredients to be prepared for me 48 hours ahead of the day, asking the students what they would like to see, etc. However I enjoyed working with the students as they were always enthusiastic.

By Oliver Tso (DP 2)

Demonstration of a DP CAS Project: A creative engagement of students in the IB Diploma Programme is the experiential Creativity, Activity, and/or Service learning project. This authentic project-based-learning experience is one that best shows the stages of investigation, collaboration, preparation, action and demonstration.

 

Photo courtesy – Harjyot Malhotra