Hands-On: Real-life Lessons for Middle School Classrooms is a comprehensive program that provides teachers with the professional development and materials they need to teach their students about food safety within the context of state mandated curriculum standards. Hands On provides all the materials and supplies for the implementation of the curriculum free of charge; this is a $600 value.

The Hands On food safety topics have been integrated to meet state curriculum standards and include lesson plans for math, science, social studies, language arts and vocabulary.

Math Social Studies
Target areas:
  • concept of scale (ex: magnification of bacteria)
  • exponential growth (ex: bacterial growth)
  • simple statistical analysis and graphical representation of data (ex: mean, median, mode, range, box-and-whiskers plots)
 Target areas:
  • Understanding standards of living throughout the world
  • Informal research skills
  • Geospatial mapping skills
Science Language Arts
Target areas:
  • Scientific Inquiry (ex: how to set up a lab, identifying variables, gathering data, etc.)
  • Learning about bacteria (ex: what causes it to grow? How can we kill the bad bacteria?
  • Basic cell structure and function
 Target areas:
  • Reading non-fiction source material (ex: reading for detail and understanding the main idea)
  • Process writing (ex: expository writing)
  • Verbal and written communication (ex: group activities, writing a press release)