Wednesday: Sequencing & Pizza

Wednesday

As I write this I am suffering from a huge pizza craving and I already know that for tonight's dinner I'm making a beeline to the oven pizza I have stored in my freezer.

Wednesday we went over sequencing and I found no better way to make the lesson into a hands on activity than to practice sequencing by making paper pizzas. Sequencing means to arrange in a particular order. In the class's case I created task cards which broke down the process of making a pizza in a particular order. The students were given the cards in a mixed up order and asked to arrange them in the proper order. The entire class was able to perform this task without any help at all, and on my end I am very encouraged by these results. My hope in the future is that the trainees will be able to use task cards in their future jobs to help them remember their duties and how to carry out a task. What I stressed as we followed our task cards for making pizzas was that they start with crust, then meat, and then vegetables.

After placing the task cards in the proper order I distributed paper with pictures of pizza toppings which needed to be cut out and asked them to practice their hand eye skills by cutting out their own toppings. Only one student in the class had trouble completing the task, and he'll need more practice working with his hands. After cutting the toppings out the students were asked to separate the toppings: pepperoni, green peppers, olives, and mushrooms. Technically our green topping was actually broccoli but I called it green peppers. We briefly went over why it was important in the food industry to keep raw ingredients separate and through-out the activity I continues to stress that they separated their ingredients.

Once all ingredients were separated I passed out four "orders" the were asked to build. The order form presented four different ways to create a pizza slice and varied slightly each time. Sometimes the order would ask for 4 pepperoni pieces, 3 green peppers 2 olives, and 2 mushrooms. All trainees were able to complete the order form, about 2 needed help getting their first 2 orders started. The cards they used had their own sequence the trainees followed as they always went in this particular order: pepperoni, mushrooms, green peppers, and olives. See below for what the order cards looked like.



As soon as everyone had finished the order cards I asked them to practice their customers service skills by taking a partner's orders and then building the product to that customer's wants. One trainee took the activity too far as he adopted an accent as he placed his order and then insisted his partner take his order while attempting to understand his accent. All trainees did a good job following the dialogue we had created though and speaking respectfully to the "customer." Below is a copy of the order from they used.



Overall the activity was great, the only thing I regret is now I absolutely MUST go home and eat pizza for dinner or I'm pretty I won't be able to sleep at night. My favorite part about the whole activity was watching one trainee's imagination run wild as he worked to not only follow the order he was given but also manage to construct a face on the pizza. I'm attaching 2 of his creations below. You'll note that in the first picture, if you squint to read the order card, you will see that the pizza was made according to the requirements...