Reading, cooking works for RES students

Third grade students Jose Sop-Diaz and MaKayla Gann knead dough during a cooking class at Russellville Elementary School on Tuesday.

Cooking and reading go hand-in-hand – that is, if you’re a third grade student at Russellville Elementary School.
This past week, third grade students at RES had a chance to get some hands-on experience in the school’s kitchen to apply towards their current reading lesson.
According to third grade teacher Paula Pounders, students have been studying a reading unit that focuses on what happens when families combine cultures.
“We just finished reading a story called ‘Jalapeño Bagels’ and the main idea is that the child in the story has a mom who has a Hispanic background and a dad who is Jewish and they live in New York City,” Pounders said. “In the story the child’s family owns a bakery and he is supposed to bring a food to school for International Day. He has a hard time choosing just one thing from the different cultures so he combines them to make a jalapeño bagel.”
To give the students some real-life application, Jo Ann Pearson, manager of the schools cafeteria, held a cooking class for each third grade class where they learned how to knead dough and bake it into a breadstick and a roll, which they were served for with their lunch that same day.
“When our students were reading the story and it talked about ‘kneading dough,’ some of them had no idea what that meant,” Pounders said.
Pearson said the reason for this is because many families today are much busier than families used to be.
“Not everyone has the time to sit down and do things like knead dough by hand and bake homemade bread,” Pearson said. “Kids just think bread comes from the store and they don’t think about where it came from before it got to the store. This really teaches them where food comes from and how much healthier something homemade can be.”
Pounders said the unit has also been good for the students because it has allowed them to learn things about cultures that might be different from their own.
“We have such a combination of cultures in our classroom that the kids could really relate to this story,” Pounders said. “Sometimes it can be hard to integrate different customs in that you may not be used to. You can explain something all day long, but to really get that hands-on experience is something they’ll remember forever and we appreciate Jo Ann helping us with this.”