2015-12-22 | Weihnachtsgeschenke wie "herbal salt" (Kräutersalz), "juniper vinegar" (Wacholderessig), "rosemary oil" (Rosmarin-Öl) stellten die Schülerinnen und Schüler der 3. Klassen in Biologie mit Englisch als Arbeitssprache selbst her.
3ab Herbs Project
In autumn we started our project by looking for herbs in our families‘ gardens and taking them to school.
There we had to find out their German names first, then their English ones. We wrote them on cards and put them next to our plants in the school corridor for a little living exhibition.
Next step was to get some information about the usage of herbs in cooking or medicine. We could do that easily because we were allowed to use our new school tablets. While doing that we learned that herbs not only add flavour to meals and dishes but that they also can have strong effects on our bodies. Rosemary, for example, can help you to wake up in the morning, like coffee but you should not use too much of it when you are pregnant.
When finding out about that we had an idea:
Why not going on with the project by making something out of our herbs for our families? Perhaps for Christmas?
So we decided to produce herbal salt, vinegar and oil. We picked and dried herbs, organised glasses and bottles and bought organic juniper branches carrying green and black berries from a gardener.
At school we put the branches into bottles and filled in vinegar. The closed bottles we put in a dark place to let them rest. For the herbal salt we pulverised different kinds of dried herbs in a mortar and mixed them with Austrian salt. We filled the mixture of salt, basil, bayleaf, chives, lovage, oregano, parsley, rosemary and sage into glasses and put labels informing about their ingredients on them.
Our Biology teacher brought pieces of rosemary from her greenhouse, which we also put into bottles. This time we added native olive oil from Greece. Then we had to wait some weeks for flavour to go into the oil.
In the meantime we played some memory games to remember the things we had learned about the herbs of our exhibition in our school garden.
Then it was Christmas time and time to finish our project: We were having a lot of fun when we were decorating our glasses and bottles!
Now we are proud of our products: The results of long and (sometimes) hard work are ready for Christmas:
Lovely presents for our families and friends. We are looking forward to a wonderful Christmas Eve. Merry Christmas!
