Monday, June 25, 2007

Grammar soup

Recent rain has seen the vegie garden and herb spiral produce some spectacular looking produce. And captured here, on a rare sunny afternoon, the garden is looking very tasty indeed.





With school holidays only days away it seemed a good opportunity to turn ripe vegetables into a learning experience.

After picking and washing the vegetables we took them back to the classroom for closer inspection. We talked about using fresh, organic vegetables with no processed ingredients. We also talked about safe methods for chopping the vegetables and how chopping smaller pieces would help speed up the cooking. Unfortunately our cooking technology was a Crock Pot that dates back to the 1970s and was not very speedy at all. But students were astonished that soup could be made in a classroom without all the usual trappings of a kitchen and this was an important lesson too.

So while the soup simmered away the class wrote a procedure for making vegetable soup.



Procedure


The method was as follows:
1. Soak the soup mix overnight.
2. Set up the cooking pot and add the soup mix.
3. Turn on the power.
4. Gather vegetables from the garden.
5. Prepare vegetables by washing, peeling and chopping.
6. Add prepared vegetables to the pot.
7. Carefully stir the soup then cover with a lid.
8. Cook till the vegetables are soft and then serve.

As we wrote the procedure we stopped to identify the verb in each procedure point. The word "carefully" was discovered to be an adverb so then we made soup-related sentences and worked out whether the describing words were adverbs or adjectives.

For example: "The soup is cooking slowly" and "We are writing on a dusty blackboard".



Despite insufficient cooking time and the need for an extra stock cube, the students declared that Grammar Soup was delicious.

Task 1: Follow the procedures to make your own soup.

Task 2: Find the verbs in the procedure list (above).
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