I'm in my third year as a middle school teacher. Last year I was the Advanced Academics 6th Grade English teacher at a large urban middle school.

As an additional project to our planned curriculum, I had the students bring in favorite recipes from home. Heavy emphasis was placed upon recipes that were "family" recipes. These students loved extra credit opportunities and they were given up to an additional 25 bonus points for writing a short story or essay centered around the recipe. My personal favorite was the surprising story that one girl handed in along with her recipe for a strawberry jello pie. The story was a hoot and it came with a disclaimer from the mother who wanted me to know that she (the mother) was not at all like she'd been portrayed in the story. The daughter assured me that the mother was every bit exactly as she'd been portrayed. The submissions were wonderful, most of the recipes sounded delicious and most of the stories were surprisingly well written.

Once all the recipes and stories had been collected I let the students know about the second half of the project - COOKING WITH CLASS. Basically, I took the recipes and stories and assembled a cookbook called COOKING WITH CLASS. We then took this 74 page cookbook and sold it. The cookbook sold for five cans or boxes of food which we collected in our classroom for the Rhode Island Foodbank. We sold over a hundred cookbooks to parents, teachers and friends. The Foodbank was delighted with the vanload of food I delivered once we were finally done.

The students all thoroughly enjoyed the lesson and several purchased extra books for Christmas presents for relatives. On another level, this project also fostered a lot of good will for our school and many visitors who came to checkout our school ended up with a copy of the COOKING WITH CLASS cookbook. This is a project I will do again.