Making Icing: A Photojournal

I have a meeting at 4:15, so I will put up a longer post tomorrow. Overall a good day today, as we prepared for our next book reports and reviewed this week's spelling words. We also spent about an hour or more reviewing the critical elements of a story.

This transitioned into an exercise that had the students apply all elements of story writing to a simple sentence. The sentence was "The boy couldn't find his shoe anywhere". Students had to extrapolate this sentence applying what they knew about character, imagery, description, setting, plot, action, etc. So, they added details about where he lost his shoe, what colour the shoe was, why he only lost one, etc.

It was a great activity, and worth spending the time to make my expectations very clear. We will start writing a new story next week, so the page of terms and categories we developed in their Journals will be a good reference.

The afternoon was taken up by a fun activity. I asked the class on Wednesday what things they would like to do more of, and the feedback mostly centered around doing big projects, art-related activities, and food. So, that's what we did! I brought in chocolate chip cookies to decorate, and we made our own berry-flavoured icings. The idea was to create and follow a process and record data as we went along (consistency, flavour, colour, etc.)

The class created their own recipes, mashed berries, blended icing, made decorating tubes, named their flavours, and decorated cookies all afternoon. They also created colour-coded designs in their scrapbooks, and made extra cookies for the administration. I got a lot of pictures, so here is a breakdown of what we did. We will be turning the pictures into a photo-book that shows our process (including recipes).

Step 1 for Team "Mure Magnifique": Crush the berries!

Team "Bluet Belle" took berry-mashing to a whole new level.

Hey Team "Bluet Fusée"! What makes berries even better? "Icing!!!"

Team "Framboise Flamingo" was very shy...

Team "Fraise Supreme" told me they were inspire by Cake Boss.

A touch of "Mure Magnifique" for starters...

Et voila! Beautiful, tasty cookies.

We're not sure what it is, but does it ever taste good!

I will post some good links and give a few more updates tomorrow, but have a great weekend! Students have a question related to "The Witches" to ponder over the weekend, so no Journal de Lecture.

Good job, everyone!