This engaging and enriching project combines food, literacy, community, and personal history to make learning authentic and relevant to any student's life! Students will practice their perspective-taking with historical food cultures and share stories of food memories with each other! Then they will explore at least 2 mentor texts of food memory narratives, including creative nonfiction and fiction. The teacher will guide students through the techniques to make a food memory narrative of their own, but based on a loved one's food memory! They will learn about interviewing, plan and conduct one, and then write a narrative about what they learned from their loved one. After working with a partner to revise their story, they will reflect as a class on their stories, summarizing them nonverbally with images.

This has been a powerful project for students when they invest in it. They grow deeper relationships with their family and friends by sharing important moments in their lives. When done well, my class community improves greatly! But beyond that, I loved giving my students the chance to flex their creativity through creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. With the right tools, they can seriously impress!

The Value in Your Classroom:

• Mentor Texts: This lesson includes examples of exemplary narratives from interviews related to food memories to help your students succeed.
• Easy Preparation: Just print it or load it to your learning management system and you're ready to teach!
• 100% Editable: Everything your students will see is editable in Google Workspace, so if you want, you can modify it to the specific needs of your students.
• Engagement: Throughout the lesson, students are talking to each other and thinking through concepts, as well as trading work to review each other's work.
• Save Time: This lesson has materials from start to finish! No need to supplement with extra information, openers, extensions, or closing activities.

Here's how the lesson is structured:

• Engagement: Students engage with stand up comedy, descriptions of historical food cultures, and food memory narratives across genres. They analyze and compare these sources and identify a few techniques that they can replicate in their own writing to make it more successful.
• Conducting an Interview: Students learn how to conduct an interview, including generating questions (with lots of advice and sample questions to help!), selecting an order for their questions, and practicing with peers. They then have time through the unit to schedule and complete the interview and organize their notes.
• Writing a Food Memory Narrative: With the stories they learned from their interview and the mentor texts they examined previously, students are ready to write their own narrative of their loved one's food memory, including concluding with a reflection on how they as the authors have changed through the process.
• Concluding Activity: As a class, students reflect on the stories they heard and wrote, challenged to summarize them without words. They compare their summaries, identify connections between them, and note any patterns they see. It's a great reflective way to connect with others through this shared experience!

Here is what you get in this lesson:

• Full, detailed lesson plan (8 pages) with:
• Content Overview
• Lesson Objectives
• Assessments
• Suggested Lesson Procedure
• Materials List
• Differentiation and Extensions
• Introduction activity with links and examples of mentor texts to use, including creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry.
• A slideshow to inform students about interviews, help them create the best questions for their food memory interview, and guide them through practicing with their peers.
• A handout with information on successful techniques for writing food narrative, to help students annotate their mentor texts.
• A writing guide to help students structure their food memory narrative from pre-writing, to drafting, to revision.
• A rubric for students to assess a peer's work and self-assess their own work, with room for both praise and suggestions for improvement.
• A conclusion activity that guides students through a reflective practice to summarize their stories without words.

Works great as a stand-alone lesson or as part of my Food Memory Cookbook Mini-Unit!

1. Introduction to Food Memories
2. Food Memory Interviews
3. Creating Your Recipes
4. Constructing Your Cookbook
5. **The Entire Food Memory Cookbook Mini-Unit Bundle**

Looking for more Food Studies material? Check out my Food Culture Exploration! and My Food Culture Project.

Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns with this project, I'm happy to help! Please leave an honest review for this product, it helps both me and other teachers!

Thank you!!