The first week back from winter break this year I was in for a grade 4 teacher the entire week. I had already assumed that there likely wasn't going to be a plan left for me so I took it upon myself to do a little planning over Christmas break... it started with an art project about hot chocolate and went from there...
So first, I found a hot chocolate art lesson on A Faithful Attempt
To go along with the theme of "hot chocolate" for the week I also read them a poem about hot chocolate called "The Perfect Cup of Hot Chocolate"
I had told them that when I taught in my grade 5 and 6 classroom that for every piece of art work that they did in that class I had them write a poem to go along with it. So the following day I taught the class hot to write a Couplet poem and they wrote some couplets about hot chocolate.
Then I wanted them to write about their own perfect cup of hot chocolate... but figured we could have a bit of fun making our own hot chocolate before that. So, I had them write out the steps to making hot chocolate (using the supplies that I had to make the hot chocolate which were cups, spoons, hot chocolate powder in a container, and a kettle). I told them that I was going to follow their steps exactly and had them face away from me as they read their directions. Needless to say, the first few hot chocolates that we made didn't exactly turn out. We had a bunch where the container of hot chocolate was "inside" the cup (we couldn't actually fit the container inside the cup so it just sat on top), some hot chocolates that had cold water in them, and one where we put 4 teaspoons inside a cup and that was it. I gave them a chance to edit their work to make it more detailed so that I might actually make a cup and after they edited their work we were making a steady stream of regular hot chocolates.
This wasn't the first time I did this... when I was teaching grade 8 ELA I had the students tell me how to make a sandwich
Lots of them complained that the hot chocolate wasn't chocolaty enough and that they make theirs with milk and why didn't I have any marshmallows. So, for the second part of their descriptive writing project I had them write about their own perfect cup of hot chocolate.
They were supposed to try to use up the entire page but some complained that their perfect cup of hot chocolate was nothing special and one said his perfect cup was the one he got at McDonalds. So I also had them describe the perfect cup to put it in.
Then, the following day I did a hot chocolate science experiment. The purpose of the experiment was that we wanted to know what the perfect temperature was for drinking hot chocolate AND how many degrees hot chocolate temperature would drop every 2 minutes.
I went through the scientific method with them for this and we filled out most of the page together. Here is our scientific results (the numbers on the far right show the number of students that thought their hot chocolate was at the perfect temperature for drinking then)
As you can see our results are a little inconclusive.
My best guess is that some students wanted for their hypothesis to be right that they just decided that temperature was right for them. A few also were out to lunch during this process and realized a little too late that we were doing more than just writing on a paper and enjoying hot chocolate and just voted for what their friend did.
For the record, the students that voted for the 90 degree temperature it was likely already closer to 75 degrees by the time they got it. Likely still a little too hot to be drinking but they forced it down I guess.
And there you have it folks, how to spend a week talking about hot chocolate
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