Teaching my Classmates how to Cook!

As we prepare to move into the next part of our lives, Ms. Fleming has been arranging “Life Skills” sessions for us during our CAS and SAC classes. So far we have learned about money management in university, basic car safety, and self-defense. The next life skill that Ms. Fleming wanted us to learn was cooking! As you all probably know, I love to cook, so naturally I was looking forward to this session and getting a chance to cook in school. I assumed that a parent would come and teach us the basics of cooking, and eagerly waited for the session. Then, at break a few weeks ago Ms. Fleming came to find me, and asked me if I would be interested in teaching the cooking life skills session! Of course, I was honoured that she had thought of me and immediately said yes. She also told me that I could choose someone to help me out, so I asked Ohana to join me as I know he has some experience cooking as well.

Once we had confirmed the date for the session, we dove into planning it. We decided that we would split the class in two, because as cooking was a hands on skill it would be easier to work with smaller groups at a time. Then we worked out the finer details of how we’d run the session, what we would teach them, and what all we’d need. After the initial planning stages, we felt ready to run the session! But we decided it would be best to do a practice run. I invited my brother and a few of his friends to be our “students” and we ran the session we had planned with them, just to check if we had planned the timing and other details appropriately.

Then came the day! It was time to teach our fellow classmates how to cook. We began with a short introduction in which we gave them a few cooking tips. After that, we divided the students into 3 groups. The first group was called “What is a pan?” and consisted of complete beginners. This group learned how to make teriyaki chicken, and scrambled eggs.

The next group was called “A pan is a metal utensil used to cook” and consisted of people that somewhat knew their way around a kitchen, but still felt lost. This group learned how to make fried rice.

The third group was called “Certified pan users”, and consisted of people that had some experience cooking, and knew their way around the kitchen. This group made quesadillas.

Overall, the sessions were a lot of fun and quite successful! My main concern was that we would run out of time, but fortunately everything went as planned, and we were able to enjoy the delicious food everyone had cooked at the end of the session. I hope that we were able to teach our classmates more about cooking, and that this will help them in university! I was grateful for an opportunity to share what I knew with everyone.

Learning Outcomes:

1. Identify your own strengths and develop areas for personal growth. – Cooking is definitely a strength of mine, and combining this with teaching provided me with a fun challenge in which I could take my cooking skills to the next level.

3. Demonstrate how to initiate and plan a CAS experience. – Ohana and I planned this session entirely by ourselves, and fortunately it was quite successful!

5. Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively. – I’m glad I had Ohana to help me teach the session, as it would not have been easy to supervise and assist all the students in the grade all by myself. We were much more efficient working as a team.