Taco Day is October 4
In Mexico, food tells a story. In a bite of corn taco in a Mexico City taqueriá, taste 7,000 years of history and civilization.
* In the spicy moles and tasty chapulines of Oaxaca, savor the ecological richness and biodiversity of the Sierra Madre Valley.
* The flavors of a taco arabe in Puebla tell the story of Lebanese immigration and adjustment to life in the Americas.
* In Baja visit cheese makers, fishermen and enjoy the sophisticated flavors of Mexican nouvelle cuisine.
In Mexico, every region, every town and every pueblo expresses it’s own unique culture in the food cultivated, crafted and shared around the table. Explore farms, learn pre-Columbian cooking techniques and sample spices and chiles as you discover the link between geography, history and culture through the micro cuisines of Mexico.
As you can see from the quote above from the Mexico On a Taco a Day web site, Taco Day provides a wonderful opportunity for curricular experiences integrating many disciplines, content standards, literacies and 21st century skills!
- Deconstruct a Taco - This lesson, or project, done by a group of university students of architecture. They deconstructed a taco! The students wanted to explore the "local tacoshed". This is actually a very high level project involving economics, environmental studies and globalization.
- Tacos anyone? A truly excellent project, similar to the university project above, Deconstructing a Taco, but for preschoolers! In the article Tacos anyone? and its accompanying video (scroll down). You will be truly inspired by this amazing project with preschoolers!
- Nutrition Analysis - Another less comprehensive, and simpler, project would be to have students determine the nutritional value of various taco recipes.
- Cooking Show - one of my favorite activities is creating a cooking show - along the lines of Alton Brown's television show, Good Eats. If your school does not have the DVD series for this show, I highly recommend it. Begin by showing three episodes of the show to your students. Help them to identify the format of the show and create a list of segments common to each episode.
Three episodes I would recommend are: Give Peas a Chance (Season 9), The Cookie Clause (season 7) and Scrap Iron Chef (season 5). Alton integrates lessons from history, geography, cultural anthropology, physics, chemistry, math, mythology . . . . all in a very entertaining show!
Then, let the students form teams. Each team creates a cooking show episode based on a recipe of their choice. They can even put them all on a DVD or online and sell them as a fundraiser.
If possible, locate someone in the community to assist the students in this project. In addition to professional videographers and filmmakers, you can easily locate people in the television production industry. Don't forget nearby universities and their RTF departments where you may find a professor or graduate student interested in supporting the project. Then, there are always amateur filmmakers, perhaps even a parent!
- The Taco Stand - An Entrepreneurial Project - Students can create a real business selling tacos on campus. This would require developing a business plan, dealing with health department regulations, marketing and more. More possibilities . . . analyze and/or create a television commercial for tacos, how about art and music, gardening, shopping, dancing, poetry, creative writing, storytelling, create a cookbook and publish it digitally?
Taco Resources
Fresh Fish Tacos with Cabbage Slaw - a recipe from the American Institute for Cancer Research
Soft tacos with Southwestern vegetables from the Mayo Clinic
Soft tacos with Southwestern vegetables from the Mayo Clinic
Children's Literature
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Read the book, Dragons Love Tacos, then have a taco-making party! Here are some other children's titles:
Listen to a reading of Dragons Love Tacos and Dragons Love Tacos 2. |
Music
It's Raining Tacos, by Parry Gripp . Listen and read lyrics here.
Nonfiction Books
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Cookbooks
Research - books
Articles
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Videos - Curriculum
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Students at the Louisiana State University Child Development Preschool designed an amazing interdisciplinary, very high level project which integrated art, nutrition, cooking, farming (they grew their own beans and compared them to the beans in the tacos), research skills (yes, equipped with clipboards and cameras, these PK kids conducted surveys of college students on campus as LSU and toured a taco truck).
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A little bit of humor -
this cat may not be so happy about Taco Day
