The Tucson Early Education Program is working with "orchestrated instruction," a cooking experience which is an experimental attempt to pull together the various components of early education. Individual subskills such as arithmetic and language arts are learned for a larger project that the children are interested in, and skills are developed as the need arises. The project discussed here is cooking stew in a third grade classroom. Preparatory discussion and a colorful, illustrated storybook prepared by teachers heightened the interest the children had in the project, and they cheerfully took on the various tasks involved in making stew, from buying the ingredients and collecting the utensils to following the recipe and tasting the fruits of their efforts (gratification). Post-stew exercises presented the opportunity for further learning as children wrote brief stories about the cooking experience using new "stew" vocabulary words. Skillful interaction by the head teacher and her aides weaves the substantive content of academic subjects into the turned-on group activity, and the children receive immediate and gratifying feedback for their new skills. (MH)