30 Food for Bonding – Activities
Authors: Mary Beth Cancienne, Hayes Davis, Teri Cross Davis, Brian Hannon, TJ Hendrix
Target Group: Middle School (7th-8th grade)
Originally from Food for Bonding, Food for Resistance Unit Plan
Icebreaker: Ask your students:
- What is your favorite dessert?
- What is your favorite family dessert?
- What is a traditional food in your family?
- Instruct them to walk around the room and share their responses with their peers. After 3-4 minutes, have your students take a seat and ask a few of them to share with the whole group. (5 minutes)
Quick Write: Have your students write about a memory that includes either their favorite dessert or a traditional family food. (5 minutes)
- What does the food taste like?
- What sound does it make when you eat it?
- What does it smell like?
- What does it look like?
- Describe its colors and textures.
Mini-lesson on imagery/sensory language. (3 minutes)
Have your students practice the concept of sensory details in writing using cookies, chocolate, or another food. Students will be responsible for developing one descriptor for each of the five senses (i.e., taste, smell, feel, see, hear). (10 minutes)
Read aloud “Bread Pudding Grandmamma” by Darrel Alejandro Holnes (Furious Flower 2019, pp. 47-48).
Break the students into groups and assign each one a specific stanza. Each group is responsible for annotating the stanza, circling the imagery and sensory details, and writing how/why the language contributes to the poem’s overall tone or meaning. In other words, ask the students to identify how the imagery/sensory language makes the poem “feel.” (20 minutes)
Ask each group to share their annotated stanza with the rest of the class. As the students present, ask the rest of the class to make additional annotations based on their peers’ responses. (20 minutes)
Hold a whole class discussion of the poem, focusing on the sensory language of the piece. Students can discuss how the sensory language contributes to the tone/feeling of the poem. (10 minutes)
Ask your students to return to what they wrote during the quick write and revise it by writing a poem using the structure of “Bread Pudding Grandmamma” (4-6 lines), focusing on writing more sensory details and utilizing them to enhance the meaning of their poems. Ask students to title their poems. Students can share voluntarily when they are done. (10 minutes)
