Sweet Sampling: An Edible Lesson.

Never one not to knowingly flog a dead horse in the face of massive indifference, postmodern irony and mixed metaphors, I thought I’d do a Very Clever post on how you can teach sampling in a way that doesn’t rapidly drain the living essence from everyone in your classroom.

This, to be fair, won’t actually be that many if you somewhat foolishly decided to signpost the fact that “the next class is on sampling” (it’s at times like this you probably regret that pre-term rush of Ofsted Zeal when you created and distributed that year-long scheme of work so your students could understand what they’d be learning and when they’d be learning it – or not, in the case of sampling).

Anyway, I thought I’d take it upon myself to suggest a more-interesting way to teach basic sampling; one that combined my “luv-of-learning”™ with my legendary love of food (or at least tasty sugary morsels that, as luck would have it, look a lot like people. Albeit people from Mars, but what the heck).

It’s a teaching technique that I’ve seen suggested elsewhere (by which I mean Twitter. Probably. It’s usually Twitter) and involves a whole bunch of Jelly Babies (due diligence: other sugary products, such as M&Ms, are available, but they don’t look like little alien babies – despite what their frankly misleading advertising might have naively led everyone to believe) and a lot of self-restraint.

Unfortunately, much as I’d like to claim the credit for devising what follows, the truth is I actually made only two small – but I like to think useful – contributions:

The first was to check the price of Jelly Babies. Some quick mental arithmetic with a calculator revealed that 1 Jelly Baby weighs, on average, just over 1 gram. So a 200 gram bag (costing between £1 – £3 depending on how much you like your students) gives you 150 – 175 to eat play with.

The second was to Google “jelly baby sampling” and arrive at a page created by Molly Rose that had done all the hard work for me. It features a Jelly Baby Sampling PowerPoint lesson that takes you gently by the hand and walks you through everything you need to do to create the world’s first edible lesson.

And once you’ve worked your way through all the sampling stuff in the PowerPoint, you can end the lesson with this short revision film, a preview of which follows: the perfect excuse to turn down the lights, sit back in your seats and eat the evidence of your endeavours…