MANVILLE: Students find a lot goes into making a product

Kids create a salad dressing with ‘secret’ ingredient

By Mary Ellen Day, Special Writer
   The Alexander Batcho Intermediate School cafeteria turned into an arena June 12 for 8th-grade students to compete to make the best salad dressing.
   Shhhh! Don’t tell them, but they learned about geography, marketing and cultures at the same time.
   This was the second year for the salad dressing invention project, said science teacher Lauren Kurzius.
   The enterprise begins with a garden that the 8th grade maintains as a way to teach about vegetables and spices.
   ”’”The entire class of 94 was broken up into groups of four. Each group picked a secret ingredient — cilantro, basil, poppy seed, tomato, sesame seed, thyme — from a hat and based their project on the taste.
   Teaching colleagues Maggie Balzano, Michelle Mongillo, Debra Joy, Leslie Lapotasky, Nicole Zullo, Cheryl Cojocar, Kate D’Angelo and Jennifer Fallone all developed a part of the cross-curricular project.
   The project had a component for each major subject area. For mathematics, students considered a cost analysis. In language arts, they designed an advertising campaign. For science, they made a cultivation brochure, and, for social studies, mapped the area where the ingredient originated and told about its history.
   The subject area teachers graded each section separately, said Ms. Kurzius.
   Students made either a salad dressing or a dip from scratch using ingredients after researching their secret ingredient. The entire class participated in the project by making display boards with the mathematical measurements, background research, country of origin and facts.
   They also had to develop advertising of an information brochure.
   It took the students two to three weeks to complete the project.
   ”The project was developed to teach the students how real-world product development works, how much work goes into research and development and how it applies to the real world,” said Ms. Kurzius.
   ”They then had to develop a recipe, make a dressing or dip and a salad to present to the judges. They created a recipe book,” Ms. Kurzius said.
   Fifteen judges, including administrators, teachers, Board of Education members and parents, visited each group’s display, reviewed the brochure, asked questions and had a chance to sample the salad dressing or dip. The judges graded the group as fair, good, great, excellent or outstanding and added personal comments.
   Parent Tina Riga had good thoughts about judging the project.
   ”Overall, it seemed to me that all the children worked very hard and had a lot of fun doing it,” she said. “This was a great experience for all; however, I feel that this in particular was a great experience for the boys. It may bring them one step closer to understanding that cooking isn’t just for women. Maybe, just maybe, they may enjoy being in the kitchen.”
   She said many projects tasted very good.
   ”A few that stood out for taste were jalapeno dip, cilantro dip with chicken wraps, chimichurri, Raspberry Extravaganza Dip and the Poppy Seed Paradise,” she said. “Overall presentation was the coconut milk dip. The team had multiple props, with write-ups that were neat, organized and very colorful. I hope the kids had as much fun preparing their projects as I had being part of the tasting and judging.”
   Student Kristina Rogalski, who was part of the “Ranchy Chives” project, made a dip with teammates Julie Fendt, Victoria Wanjohi and Olga Kaczor.
   ””“It was a fun way to combine all of our school subjects,” said Kristina. “It was unlike anything we did before because it really pushed you to do well by having you compete against other students’ projects. Not only did you want yours to be good, but you wanted to stand out against everyone else and have others want to come and try your salad dressing.”
   ”We learned a lot about advertising techniques (language arts) and how to manage finances while running our salad business (math). In addition, we got to actually make, taste and serve our dressing,” she said.
   ”A really neat aspect of the project was that we picked our special ingredient randomly; and our whole project had to be based on that ingredient. It was really cool because you had no idea what you were going to get. You could get something well known or you could get something you never heard of in your life. I think a lot of people liked that because it made you have to think about where can I put this ingredient so that it will make my salad dressing work and taste good. That was challenging but fun at the same time. Over all, I really liked this project and thought it was really cool and fun to do,” Kristina said.
   Fellow classmate Bruno Riga enjoyed working on the creative project.
   ”It was a great experience, and I’m looking forward to participating in other events similar to this one,” he said, “especially since I’m coming from a full-blown Italian family. I could definitely say that we all love to cook.”
   While researching his team’s ingredient, which was coconut milk, Bruno said he found that coconuts and its products all lower cholesterol.
   ”This was something I never knew that I thought was very interesting,” he said.
   ”This was a project that was both educational and fun. It gave the class some freedom by allowing us to cook a recipe of our own and it also put our minds to the test on how we could all incorporate our secret ingredient into our recipe,” he said.
   The winners received a pizza and ice cream party and bragging rights, said Ms. Kurzius.