It’s a fact, students love food and in the world language classroom they frequently ask for food days. A few years back I began bringing in fruit typical to Latin America for my students. I began doing this because many of them indicated they hadn’t ever tried fruits like mangos or avocados as well as to move away from asking students to bring food from home. In my attempt to simplify the prep for a food day and get away from me having to spend so much time cutting up fruit, I started having my students make their own guacamole in class.
Honestly, I was concerned the whole idea would be a disaster, but it has turned into the best food day ever and it is so easy! Here is how I prep for my guacamole food day:
- Purchase all the ingredients the week before my intended food day. My list includes: bowls, spoons, tortilla chips, avocados, tomatoes, onions, salt and lime juice. I usually buy multiple small bottles of lime juice so multiple groups can use it at a time. For the sake of simplicity, I don’t buy cilantro, chiles or jalapeños even though I personally really like those in guacamole.
- Monitor the ripening of the avocados, that is the trickiest thing about this food day, the avocados need to be ripe. I usually try to tie in the food day with days we are watching a movie in class so that if I need to adjust the food day I have more flexibility. Also, you can always put ripe avocados in the fridge for a few days so they don’t go bad!
- The night before the food day I use my food processor to chop up the onions and tomatoes. It saves so much time!
- The day of, I set up an assembly line with all the ingredients.
I think it is important that food days aren’t just stand alone experiences for students, so each year I do a mini-lesson before they get to make their guacamole. I teach in a block which gave me time to do this in one day. Here’s my guacamole food day lesson plan:
- Read about fruits and vegetables from Latin America. I use a reading found in the Realidades 1 textbook, but I’m sure there are other resources available!
- Watch this video to learn how to make guacamole from a girl from Mexico. We watch the video twice and the second time I stop it to highlight the ingredients or other interesting information, like the fact that limón can mean lemon or lime. I always warn them that the girl talks very fast sometimes!
- Have students break off into pairs to make their guacamole. I recommend they find someone in the class that has similar food preferences to their own.
- I cut the avocados in half and give each pair a bowl, spoons and half an avocado. If students haven’t tried avocados before I recommend they try a little bit. I start with half an avocado for each pair and then give them more later if they ask for it so that we aren’t wasting food.
- Students make their guacamole! Since we’ve just watched the video they know to begin with smashing their avocado and then add in their desired ingredients.
- Students enjoy their guacamole! Again, I normally time this food day with a movie day so students can eat it while they watch and I can clean up or get things ready of the next class.
I’ve been so impressed with how seriously my students take their guacamole preparation, they enjoy trying to make theirs the best and are excited to try each others’ final products. I end up taste testing lots of different guacamoles during the day! One of the things I love about this food day is that students get to try something different, that is easy to make. Some students who have never had avocados and/or guacamole before are excited to try it and others who swear they don’t like guacamole discover they really like it when given the opportunity to make their own. As a teacher, I love that my students are experiencing new things, especially something healthy (and delicious!) like avocados!
