When Recipes and Sketchnotes Collide!

Sketchnotes have changed the way students take notes in my culinary classroom.  It’s been a powerful shift as students have come to understand the power of connecting their text to images and making their learning meaningful.  In Culinary Arts it has been especially powerful when giving food demonstrations. As students observe the steps to the culinary and baking methods, they make connections to the terminology and ingredients being discussed by drawing the images and text on paper or a digital app like Paper53.  In an elective class, this form of visual notetaking has been especially helpful as my students have a wide range of educational needs.

At the end of the demonstration, students have a recipe sketch that they can refer to when they transition to their culinary kitchens to practice what had been demonstrated. The beauty of these recipe sketches, is that they can use them to reflect, study, and can continue adding to them as they practice the methods themselves. Some have found as I have, that adding color, text, and images after the initial sketch helps further cement the learning.

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Students enjoy this visual note taking method so much that I decided it would be awesome to create a Culinary Mission aka Side Quest (for my gamification friends) where students create their own recipe incorporating any of the methods learned about in the unit and turn it into a recipe sketch. I announced the mission and posted it on Google Classroom. Students could choose to accept or decline this mission, and as I do with all of my Culinary Missions, included an expiration date and time. (expiration dates sounds more exciting than due dates and giving a time like “midnight” sounds cooler too.)  Students who completed the mission in time earned 1000 XP. Not everyone accepted the mission, but those who did had a blast creating their own recipes and sharing it in the form of a recipe sketch.

This month, as I was scrolling Twitter I saw my friend Stefanie Crawford post this:

Inspired by Michael Matera and Carrie Baughcum and their #five4five challenges, Stefanie Crawford decided to join in with 5 days of recipe sketches. Monica Spillman joined in the fun too and even created a digital deck for ebook of all the recipe sketches being created!  She took it to another level and called them #sketchipes.  WHAT?! Genius...why hadn't I thought of that!  Click HERE to view this beautiful Sketchipe book.

Being the lover of all things culinary, challenges, and sketchnotes, I couldn’t let this opportunity pass me by... I had to create a sketchipe too!  

Taking part in this fun challenge made me reflect on how powerful this activity was with students and inspired me to think of other ways to take it to the next level.  How fun would it be to compile all of my student's sketchipes in a digital collection as Monica shared and have students share out on Twitter!  Even better, what about launching a global #sketchipe challenge with culinary classes from across the world and create a digital collection on Padlet, Book Creator, or Google Slides! So many possibilities! 

Want to give #sketchipes a try?! Please post on Twitter and tag me (@tishrich) on your creations  Also tag, @MrsCford_tweets, @mospillman, and @heckawesome and @mrmatera! In fact, make sure you are following them....they all ROCK!

Have any other ideas for incorporating #sketchnotes or #sketchipes into the classroom? Please share! We are all #BetterTogether.

Learn more about how I've used #sketchnoting in my class here:
Introducing Sketchnoting to Students
Hooked on Sketchnoting