Looking for a new way to help students prepare for entrance exams? Have you tried teaching them to cook? Seriously, there’s even a book for it.
Charis Freiman-Mendal, an enterprising freshman at Choate college prep, has just published Cook Your Way Through the SAT, a cookbook in which the recipes are generously dolloped with 1000 typically tested words. For example, Freiman-Mendal’s recipe for Sweet Potato Souffle includes a brief digression on coconut oil informing readers that, in the 1950s, “After a scientific study ENCOURAGED nixing it due to PERNICIOUS saturated fats, the use of the anything-but-BANAL oil ABRUBTLY DESISTED.” Not exactly a sentence that Hemingway would love, but you get the picture.
Freiman-Mendal, a former homeschooler, wrote the book as a way to prepare for the verbal section of the Secondary School Admission Test (SSAT) when she was at the middle school level. “Integrating her passion for cooking with her need to acquire vocabulary made studying and learning less of a chore and more of an enjoyable activity,” according to a press release.
Food for thought, in any case.