This year here at Central Middle School, with
the Life Skills Program, we've begun a weekly
cooking session that is hoping to incorporate
some very basic life skill rules and strategies,
and to help them be able to cook more independently.
So we change our recipes every week, we follow
a very visually supported recipe, and sequencing,
following directions, talking about ingredients
and taste and materials that are related to
cooking - microwave and toaster oven.
It has been very well received so far.
On the menu for today's cooking lesson we
made quesadillas, and so we discussed the
ingredients that were used - the flower tortilla
and the graded cheese - and then we followed
each step in order to talk about very specific
concepts like placing cheese on half of the
tortilla and folding it, or how many seconds
for the duration of the cooking in the microwave
30 seconds vs. 30 minutes.
We also emphasized safety, and using an oven
mitt to remove their plate from the microwave
so as to not burn their hands, and to wait
an appropriate amount of time for the finished
product to cool down.
We used knife for occupational therapy skills,
for cutting the quesadillas in sections, and
we also talked very much in depth about describing
words, adjectives, how does it taste, what
does it look like, what does it smell like,
so that the students could incorporate their
five senses into the experience.
