Today, as I often do, I collaborated with a close colleague in offering to teach a lesson and celebrate Pancake Tuesday/Shrove Tuesday/Mardi Gras. I have taught the same type of lesson every year I have been teaching in the primary grades and it is always one that students remember.
Today's audience were 40 (yes 40!) grade 1 & 2 students. We gathered in our classroom just like we would for lunch and stack times, so the transition for the other class was seamless. I started today's lesson with a read a loud from a non-fiction text that was full of visuals to help get the learning across. Throughout the book, students made connections to themselves and previous learning as as a teacher, this got me more and more excited. Students were keen to learn and ask questions, thus making the learning more authentic and inquiry driven. We then started a simple, yet engaging task of creating our own Mardi Gras masks. Students were pumped to be doing art & design first thing in the morning. As students created and collaborated, I connected our current science unit of physical science and the focus of matter, solids and liquids to explore what would happen if we mixed a solid and a liquid. This heightened the senses because it was becoming an edible science experiment! We were able to make the connection from Mardi Gras to Pancake Tuesday to solids and liquids! For good measure, we talked a little about the math involved in making the pancake mix and how many pancakes we would have to make for each person to get 2. I retreated to my trusty griddle (that only ever gets used for Pancake Tuesday in my classroom ironically) and started mixing, scooping and flipping over 100 pancakes to feed the 40 students and a handful of staff members in the room. This is when I am always remembered about the simple things in life. I seem to always take it for granted that people eat food like pancakes on a semi regular basis and that me making them at school, is just part of what I do. And every year I am pleasantly surprised at how many children rarely, if ever, get to eat pancakes made from scratch. Today was no different. One student stands out to me and how many times they thanked me, told me they were the best pancakes they have ever had, how they wished we could do it more often and that it was the best day of the year. These comments went on all day. They just couldn't let go of the fact that they had pancakes at school. This made me really think of the learning experience and opportunity that I had provided my (and I include the other class as mine because we spend a lot of our time in a day together) students. Something so simple as making pancakes and sharing a common meal among everyone brought everyone together on a level field. Everyone had the same amount, the same type of plate, the same syrup. For once everyone was an equal in every sense of the word. There was no squabbles to help solve over who's snack was bigger or better, who wasn't eating their healthy foods first, and definitely no pleading to just eat rather than talk. Pancakes brought us together. Simple pancakes.
3 Comments
3/5/2019 09:25:39 pm
Your story reminds me of when I was in elementary school. I went to a teeny tiny rural elementary school and every year we had a sleepover in the library and our principal would make everybody pancakes in the morning. It was one of my favorite memories of school. (Incidentally, it was part of a yearly 'I Love to Read and Write Week' so maybe it is has contributed to why I love to read and write so much to this day).
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Natasha
3/5/2019 10:15:11 pm
What a great experience to be able to create for students!
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A snippet about me...I'm a grade 2 teacher; wife; mama to #TeamA & #TeamO; runner; chocolate lover and always wanting to learn. Archives
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