Junior Secondary Boys: Sequencing a Recipe

As a part of their studies students learn healthy life skills; one of these skills is learning to cook and how to clean and prepare for cooking. Using this lesson as a basis for a series of later ICT lessons, students take photo's of each other capturing the steps involved in cooking something. In a later lesson students use their photo's to create a descriptive sequence in Microsoft Word using tables:


Having sequenced their images students add descriptions and instructions explaining how something is cooked. After doing this students then create their own movie version of the cooking how to using Windows Movie Maker (it comes free with Windows XP). This gives students extra practice in multitasking and reusing common skills such as copying and pasting in unfamiliar programs like Windows Movie Maker:

This learning sequence has helped students to understand how bigger projects require multiple stages: planning, organising, reviewing / reusing, editing. Furthermore, these lessons also support students to learn that you can reuse and recycle your exisiting work. In addition to this, students also learn that they can transform a word document into a movie. Students also learn that unfamiliar programs use common and familiar sequences such as clicking on FILE >> OPEN or FILE >> SAVE. Students also learn that copying and pasting work can be done in the same in almost all programs. So students also learn that ICT skills can be transported between applications.

Perhaps most importantly of all creating both a Word Document and a Movie also allows students to critically understand and evaluate how using different ways of presenting information will influence how people respond and react to that information.