The cost of groceries for eight cooking projects is $488, including <a target="new" href="http://www.donorschoose.org/html/fulfillment.htm" onclick="g_openWindow('http://www.donorschoose.org/html/fulfillment.htm', 300, 800, 'fulfillwindow');return false;">fulfillment</a>.
Every Monday we have "Maravilloso Monday" in my classroom at Thousand Oaks School in Berkeley, California. On Marvelous Monday, the children in my English speaking second grade classroom cook food with our Spanish speaking second grade next door neighbors. The children cook together enough food for everyone and then they set up the classroom for everyone with tablecloths, fresh flowers, and candles. We all enjoy each other's company and we share delicious food together. It is a beautiful occasion which the children truly love and look forward to. We sometimes dub it the day we "cook up community" because the children truly bond in real authentic ways cross-culturally. The children not only share in a positive social experience, but they do academic extensions together from the cooking. At the end of the year, they make a Maravilloso Monday cookbook which includes all of the recipes. We ask families to share a favorite family recipe at the beginning of the year and we try to incorporate the family recipes through the year as well.
Our yearlong project helps children develop genuine relationships and connections with each other and their food sources. It will allow them to experience the joy and wonder of learning about where food comes from.
We are choosing to use cooking as our focal point because of all of the myriad ways that cooking, and food in general, can be at the heart of community building. We envision our cooking project as a way for children to acquire both the competence and caring that is necessary to create a sustainable future. Weekly cooking for the classroom communities combined with learning about the connections between food and our environment will help students construct their understandings about the importance of sustainable food systems to healthy human communities and to their own health and well being.
In order to do this project, we need to buy groceries on a weekly basis in order to feed the 40 children.
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