# Lesson 1.22: Careers in Nutrition and Culinary Arts, and the Unit 1 Test

**Unit:** Unit 1, Kitchen Skills and Smart Eating (Nutrition and Wellness)
**Topic:** 1.4 Plan, Shop, Cook: Meals on a Budget
**Grade:** 6 to 8 (written at grade 7; see Differentiation for the grade 6 support and grade 8 stretch)
**Days:** 1 class period of 40 minutes (18 minutes careers, 20 minutes test, 2 minutes closure)
**Room:** Either (classroom or FACS lab; no cooking today)

## Standards

- NYS module line: NYS N&W 4. Career Pathways a) Investigate careers in nutrition, wellness, and culinary arts and identify the pathways to reach them
- NYS module line: NYS N&W 4. Career Pathways b) Assess personal knowledge, skills, and interest in careers in nutrition, wellness, and culinary arts and evaluate personal suitability for these careers
- CTE theme line: CTE CCO 2. Career Clusters a) Identify and use career resources to obtain information about careers and employment trends
- CTE theme line: CTE CCO 3. Employability Skills a) Identify personal characteristics such as abilities, interests, and values and examine how they might impact career choices
- NYS FACS Learning Standard 3 (Intermediate), Key Idea: Students will understand and be able to manage personal resources of talent, time, energy, and money and make effective decisions in order to balance their obligations to work, family, and self.; Performance Indicator: Students identify their own abilities and interests as possible guides to career choice.
- CDOS Standard 1 Career Development: Students will be knowledgeable about the world of work, explore career options, and relate personal skills, aptitudes, and abilities to future career decisions.
- National FCS 3.0: 1.2.1 Examine possible careers to find what each one requires and offers in knowledge, skills, attitudes, and openings.
- National FCS 3.0: 9.1.1 Explain what people in food science, food technology, dietetics, and nutrition careers do.
- National FCS 3.0 Area 14 career line: none. Area 14 (Nutrition and Wellness) has no career competency in the 3.0 text; the food careers lines are in Areas 8 and 9, so 9.1.1 is cited.

## Enduring understanding and essential question

**Big idea:** Every plate in a restaurant, a hospital, a school, or a factory passed through a chain of people with different training, different pay, and different days. Some of those jobs start at fourteen. Some take a master's degree. All of them start with what you did in this unit.
**Essential question:** Which job in the food chain would I actually want, and what would it take to get there?

## Objectives

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:
1. (Low) Given ten career cards, sort them by the education needed (none beyond high school, a certificate or two-year degree, a four-year degree or more) and name one job in each group.
2. (Mid) Given the cards, compare two careers on a day in the life, the pay range, and the education, and state which of the two better matches the student's own interests and why.
3. (High) On the Unit 1 test, apply the four topics of the unit (safety and sanitation; tools and measuring; nutrients and labels; planning and shopping) to twenty items including a label, a unit price, a doubled recipe, a scenario, and a written response.

## Vocabulary

Tier 2 (general academic): pathway, certificate, degree, suitability
Tier 3 (FACS): culinary arts, dietitian, food scientist, health inspector, food service director, career cluster (Hospitality and Tourism; Health Science; Agriculture, Food, and Natural Resources). See the unit vocabulary list for Turkish, Portuguese, and Spanish.

## Materials and setup

- Handout, one set per pair: `Handout 01.22 - Careers Card Sort.md` (ten career cards to cut apart, a sorting mat, and the "would I like this" self-check)
- Assessment, one per student: `Assessment 01.4 - Unit 1 Test.md` (student version; the teacher key is in the same file after the "Teacher key" heading and is not printed for students)
- Pencils, calculators (allowed on the two math items)
- Slides: `Slides 01.22 - Careers in Nutrition and Culinary Arts and Unit 1 Test` (outline in 05 Materials; the site renders it as a deck)
- Setup notes: Cut the card sets the day before. Print the test single sided so the label item and the math items have room to work. Allergy check: no food is handled today.

## Pre-assessment

The Unit 1 pre-assessment (Lesson 0.5) had three items that reappear on the test in changed form. Compare the pre-assessment to the test after grading; that is the unit's growth measure. For careers, the do now asks who already knows someone who works in food; most classes have several.

## Do now and hook (Time: 2 min)

On the board: "Name one person you know who works with food for a living (a relative, a neighbor, someone at a restaurant you go to). What is their job called?"

Debrief: five quick answers on the board. Then the hook: "Every job you named is on a card in this room. So are five you have never heard of. One of them pays more than a lot of doctors' offices, and you can start it in this kitchen."

## Procedure

| Step | Teacher will | Students will | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Direct instruction: the food career ladder | Show the ten careers on one slide as a ladder from dishwasher to food scientist, with the three education groups color coded. Say the rule that matters at fourteen: most of the ladder is climbable from the bottom; a dishwasher who shows up becomes a prep cook, a prep cook who learns becomes a line cook, and a line cook with a certificate can run a kitchen. The dietitian and the food scientist take a degree; the health inspector takes a degree and a state exam. Pay ranges on the cards are marked [update]. | Look at the ladder. Answer: "Which jobs on the ladder did you do a piece of in this unit?" (All of them.) | 3 min |
| 2. Learning activity: the card sort | Pairs sort the ten cards onto the mat three ways in ten minutes: by education needed, by "works mostly with food" versus "works mostly with people or data," and by pay range. Circulate; the card that moves the most is the food service director (a degree, mostly people and data, in a school). | Sort three times. Write the name of one job in each education group on the mat. | 10 min |
| 3. The "would I like this" self-check | Each student picks two cards and fills the self-check: the day in the life I would rather have, the education I am willing to do, the pay I would need, and one sentence: "I would or would not like ___ because ___." | Fill the self-check individually. | 3 min |
| 4. Unit 1 test | Hand out the test. Read the directions once. Calculators out for items 8 and 17 only. Twenty minutes; the timer is on the screen. Collect at the bell. | Take the test. | 20 min |

## Questions to ask

Monitor understanding:
- Which job needs the most school? Which needs none past high school?
- A health inspector and a line cook both care about the danger zone. How is their day different?
- Where does a school food service director fit: food, people, or data?

Deepen learning:
- Which of these jobs could a fourteen-year-old start in this town? What working papers would they need? [Sal: New York requires working papers for students under 18; the guidance office issues them.]
- Why might a dietitian and a food scientist earn more than a chef who works longer hours?
- If you had to take one of these jobs tomorrow, which one, and what from this unit would you use on day one?

## Check for understanding

During Step 2, a clipboard yes or no per pair on "education sort correct" (the key is on the handout) and "food versus people sort has a reason on the mat." The test is the summative check for the whole unit.

## Closure (Time: 2 min)

Collect the tests. As students leave, each says one word: the career they picked on the self-check. The self-check goes in the FACS folder; the same sheet comes back in Unit 2 (Topic 2.1, traits and interests) and in Unit 7 (careers).

## Differentiation and supports

- ELL: the career cards have a picture and a one-line "day in the life" in plain sentences; the education groups are color coded; the self-check has a sentence frame; the test is read aloud in a small group for any student with that support, with the item wording unchanged; the words career, degree, certificate, pay, and inspector are on the unit vocabulary card in Turkish, Portuguese, and Spanish. [Sal: a translated test is a decision for the school's ELL coordinator; the file is plain enough to translate.]
- IEP and 504 (general): extended time on the test (finish at the start of Unit 2 Lesson 2.1 or in a support period); the test can be taken in a separate location; calculators for anyone; the card sort is physical; the self-check can be dictated; the written-response item accepts a labeled drawing.
- Grade 6 support: six career cards instead of ten (dishwasher, prep cook, line cook, baker, dietitian, health inspector); the test omits items 19 and 20 and is scored out of 44 [Sal: or keep all twenty and give the extra time].
- Grade 8 stretch: the pair adds an eleventh card for a career not on the list (personal chef, food truck owner, sports nutritionist) with the education, a day, and a pay range they look up; the test's written-response item asks for two reasons instead of one.
- UDL checkpoint used: multiple means of representation (the ladder as a picture, the cards as text with images, the self-check as a form) and multiple means of engagement (a self-check about the student's own future, not a right answer).
- No-kitchen or no-machine alternative: not needed; paper only.

## Assessment

| Objective | Standards met | Learning task | Assessment (formative or summative; tool) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Sort careers by education and name one per group | N&W 4. a); CCO 2. a); National FCS 9.1.1 | Card sort, Step 2 | Formative; sorting mat checked against the key on the handout |
| 2. Compare two careers and state a personal fit | N&W 4. b); CCO 3. a); Std 3 PI E; CDOS 1; National FCS 1.2.1 | Self-check, Step 3 | Formative; self-check scored complete, partial, or missing; kept in the folder for Units 2 and 7 |
| 3. Apply the four unit topics on the test | N&W 1. b), c), e), f); N&W 2. a), c); N&W 3. a), b); HSW 4. b); FCL 4. f) | Unit 1 test, Step 4 | Summative; Assessment 01.4, 50 points, standard line per item in the key; topic assessments category in the grading plan |

## Homework

None. The unit is done. Unit 2 starts tomorrow with "who I am," and the self-check from today is the first thing it uses.

## Connections

Guidance: the counselor's career interest inventory and this self-check cover the same ground; share the ten careers so the counselor can add the food cluster to the school's list. Community: a fifteen-minute visit or a two-minute video from a local dietitian, school food service director, or restaurant owner turns a card into a person. [Sal: the King Kullen store manager or the Brentwood cafeteria manager are people you already know.]

## Sources

- NYS Middle Level CTE FACS Content Module 05, Nutrition and Wellness (nyctecenter.org, June 2018), lines 4. a) and 4. b). Copy in `02 Standards/NYS Module PDFs/`.
- NYS Middle Level CTE Theme Module 01, Career and Community Opportunities, lines 2. a) and 3. a). Same folder.
- NYS Learning Standards for Health, Physical Education, and Family and Consumer Sciences (1996), Standard 3, Intermediate. Wording per `02 Standards/STANDARDS CROSSWALK.md`, Part A.6.
- CDOS Intermediate Standard 1, per `02 Standards/STANDARDS CROSSWALK.md`, Part A.7.
- National Standards for Family and Consumer Sciences Education 3.0 (LEAD FCS Education, 2018), competencies 1.2.1 and 9.1.1, per `02 Standards/STANDARDS SOURCES - web research.md`.
- Pay ranges on the career cards are marked [update] and should be filled from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook (bls.gov/ooh) and the New York State Department of Labor wage data for the Long Island region. Education requirements for the registered dietitian credential come from the Commission on Dietetic Registration (a graduate degree has been required to sit for the exam since 2024). [Sal: confirm both before the site goes public.]
- Sal's own materials: the careers day placement from the scope and sequence and his resume workshop experience at Brentwood (87 students), which is the model for Units 2 and 7.

## Teacher notes

- If the careers activity runs long, cut the pay sort in Step 2 and do it as the Unit 2 Lesson 2.1 do now. Never shorten the test time; a student who needs more than 20 minutes finishes in a support period.
- The test is single sided on purpose; the label item needs the data visible while the student answers.
- Common mistake on the card sort: students put "chef" at the top of the pay ladder because of television. The cards say otherwise; let the numbers do the arguing.
- The self-check is not graded for the answer, only for being done. Say so; the honest "I would not like any of these" is a real answer and Unit 2 uses it.
- [Sal: if you have a former student or a friend who went from dishwasher to running a kitchen, that two-minute story is worth more than the ladder slide.]