Reading - Information Transfer in Y9 Food Tech

 As part of an ongoing focus on reading, our literacy specialist, Marc, has been coming to our department meetings. He has been taking us though information transfer and how we could possibly use it in our lessons. He showed us a couple of examples and asked us to try it with a piece of reading that the students have to do in our own subject areas.

I decided to have a try with it with my Year 9 Food Tech class. They need to read and understand recipes in the kitchen and they have not been very successful with that up to now.

This is the doc that I prepared for them. I took the method straight off the recipe on the class site and included a grid where they needed to look for command words, doing words and how well those things had to be done and equipment that needed to be used.

Chocolate Muffins

1. Preheat the oven to 200 degrees C.

2. Line 12 muffin cups with paper muffin liners.

3. Combine flour, sugar, 3/4 cup chocolate chips, cocoa powder, and baking soda in a large bowl.

4. Whisk yogurt, milk, oil, egg, and vanilla in a separate bowl until smooth. 

5. Pour yogurt mixture into the chocolate mixture and stir until the batter is just blended.
   Fill prepared muffin cups 3/4 full and sprinkle with remaining 1/4 cup chocolate chips.

6. Bake in the preheated oven until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean, about 20 minutes.

7. Cool in the pans for 10 minutes before removing to cool completely on a wire rack.

Command words (imperatives)	Doing words (degree of doing)	Equipment
	Stir until the batter is blended
		Large bowl
Pour

On advise from Marc, I included one example in each column as a guide as to what to put. We also did it kind of "as a team". I had a copy up on the screen and I was taking examples from the kids as they found the command words and was filling mine with their suggestions for them to see. With the middle column, which was the harder one, we did it one bullet point at a time. I said which one we were all looking at and they told me what doing word they found and what the degree of doing was. 

I didn't mind doing this activity as more of a team thing today as it was our first time through doing this kind of recipe analysis and reading.

Here are copies of 3 of the students work today.

1. Student 1
2. Student 2
3. Student 3