Red Rice Apple Salad

Mini-Lesson Ideas: English and Social Studies

1.GEOGRAPHY: Red jasmine rice is a type of rice that comes from Thailand. Rice is very important for the culture and economy of the Thai people. This is where some of the best jasmine rice in the world is grown! Thailand is the world’s leading exporter of rice. Look at a map of Asia and find the country of Thailand to answer the questions below.

a)What is the capital of Thailand?

b)What countries border Thailand?

c)What body of water is to the East of Thailand?

d)What continent is Thailand a part of?

e)Is Thailand north or south of the Equator?

f)Can you think of any other types of rice?

Vocabulary:

  • Economy: The way a country manages its money and resources (such as workers and land) to produce, buy, and sell goods and services.
  • Exporter: A person, business, or institution that sends products (cars, food, clothes, oil) to another country to be sold there.
  • Equator: An imaginary line running around the widest part of the Earth. It is halfway between the North Pole and the South Pole.

2. WRITING: Similes

A simile is a type of writing called a figure of speech. A simile compares two different things to each other by using the words like or as. Examples: She was fast as a cheetah. The strawberry was red like a fire engine.

Give each student or groups of students an apple. Have students think about adjectives to describe their apple. Tell them to think about size, texture, shape, smell and color. Then have students use their adjectives to create similes about the apple. Example: My apple is smooth like glass. My apple smells like a sweet flower.

3. FARM TO SCHOOL: From a tiny blossom on an apple tree to your Red Rice Salad, the apples you eat have had quite an adventure growing and then traveling to you! Below is their story, see if you can put the pieces in the correct order.

a. ___Trucks take big bins of apples to the packing and processing warehouse

b. ___Cooks at the MPS Culinary center make the Red Rice Apple Salad.

c. ___In April and May the apple trees begin to blossom. Bees fly from flower to flower drinking up the nectar and moving pollen from one apple flower to another.

d. ___The pollinated apple flowers make fruit that grows and ripens.

e. ___Apple growers buy small trees from nurseries and plant their orchards.

f. ___Many farm workers carefully pick the apples and put them into deep bins.

g. ___For four to five years, the young apple trees take in nutrients, sunlight and water from the air and soil. After this time, the apple trees are ready to start making fruits.

h. __At the warehouse, the apples are washed, chopped up and packed in boxes. Then trucks deliver the boxes to the MPS Culinary Center.

i. __Many workers pack up the Red Rice Salad and the MPS drivers take the salad to your school.

j. __Students enjoy the Red Rice Salad with Apples as part of a delicious and nutritious lunch.

Vocabulary:

  • Pollination: This is a very important process for plants. Insects, birds, bats and the wind take pollen from one flowering plant to another. When pollen is moved between plants, then plants can make seeds, fruits and vegetables.
  • Orchard: A place where people grow fruit trees.
  • Warehouse: A place/building where products and goods (in our case, food) are stored to be distributed on to another place.

4. CULTURE and FOOD: Rice is a staple (meaning very important) food in the diets of over half of the world’s people. Three of the world’s four most populous countries – China, India and Indonesia – eat mainly rice for their daily grains. (That’s 2.5 billion people!) In Asia, the average person eats rice two to three times a day.

  • In China, Thailand and Bangladesh, instead of asking “How are you?”a common greeting is “Have you had your rice today?”
  • In China, at the beginning of the New Year, people don’t say “Happy New Year!” instead they say “May your rice never burn!”
  • In Japan, people do not think of eating as breakfast, lunch, and dinner. They think of the different meals as morning rice (asagohan), afternoon rice (hirugohan), and evening rice (ban gohan).

Ask students to think about foods or dishes that are important to them and their families. What are the main ingredients in those foods?

Can students think of dishes or foods that are important to the Twin Cities, Minnesota or the United States? (Examples: wild rice and Native American tribes, apple pie and “America”, lefse and Scandinavian immigrants, corn and Mexican/Central American immigrants, flour and the Twin Cities grain industry, etc.)

Can students think of different fruits, vegetables or foods that are associated with certain states? (Examples: wild rice and Minnesota and Wisconsin; sweet corn and Iowa; oranges and Florida; jambalaya and Louisiana; cheese and Wisconsin; potatoes and Idaho; Maine and blueberries; cattle and Texas; peanuts and the Southern United States; Georgia and peaches)

Answers:

1. a = Bangkok, b = Myanmar, Laos, Malaysia, Cambodia, c = Andaman Sea, d = Asia, e = North, f = wild rice, white rice, brown rice

3. a = 6, b = 8, c = 3, d = 4, e = 1, f = 5, g = 2, h = 7, i = 9, j = 10

References:

Yakima Valley Museum:

The Eden Project:

Asia Rice Foundation:

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