Art You Can Eat: Wyandanch Seventh Graders Break In Their School’s New Kitchen Classroom |
At Milton L. Olive Middle School, a new Family and Consumer Science room has a cooking club experimenting with food as art, and a year of from-scratch pizza dough, cinnamon buns and pretzels ahead. |
SCHOOLS · WYANDANCH
At Milton L. Olive Middle School in Wyandanch, the newest classroom is built for cooking. And a group of seventh graders is already putting it to use.
They are members of the Edible Art Cooking Club, led by Laurie Siegel and offered through SCOPE Education Services. The club meets in MLO’s new Family and Consumer Science classroom, and the idea is right there in the name: students experiment with ingredients, practice real cooking techniques, and turn food into something imaginative to look at before anyone takes a bite.
In the district’s telling, the room itself is part of the story. It is spacious, and working there, students are building confidence in the kitchen and picking up skills that last well past the school day. Siegel sums up her approach as learning, creating, experimenting and having fun, “because the best art is sometimes the kind you can eat.”
The club is only the start. This school year, MLO’s Family and Consumer Science classes will use the same room to study kitchen safety and sanitation, food preparation and cooking techniques. Students will also learn to make food from scratch: pizza dough, cookies, cinnamon buns and pretzels.
For principal Dr. Michelle Darby, it is about more than snacks. Every student, she said, should have the chance to learn the basics of cooking. She called it “a life skill that brings enjoyment,” one that supports healthy living, builds independence and can lead to a career. She also admitted to one of the perks of the job: the staff gets to enjoy what the students make.
Plenty of us learned to cook by standing next to someone at home. In Wyandanch, a new classroom means more kids get that same chance at school, in a room made for it.
If you have a seventh grader at MLO who wants in, ask the school or SCOPE about the club. And if a tray of homemade pretzels comes home this year, now you know where it came from.
Stock photo, not the Milton L. Olive cooking club. Photo by Magdalena Zofia Kmiecik on Unsplash. |
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