Cross-curricular teaching with MoonPies!!! #Blog365

Jimmy Zangwow

This post was supposed to go up last week until the terrible bug attacked my ENTIRE class!  Anyhow...

I can't imagine not teaching cross-curricularly.  It is such a fun and effective way to tuck so much in and the kids make connections.  Last week, our states of study were Tennessee and Mississippi. Chattanogga is home to the Moon Pie factory, supporting the local economy.  So of course, we needed to eat Moon Pies!

To meet multiple standards, we started out by looking at a MoonPie package to see what information we could learn from it.  The students discovered that the Moon Pie is celebrating 100 years in 2017. We even did the math to double check.  We learned the location of the factory and checked for nut allergies for a classmate.  We then watched the Youtube video tour of the factory.  The kids had to listen for how many Moon Pies are made daily and what ingredients are in a Moon Pie.

We then transitioned to the carpet to do a poll checking to see how many students had tasted Moon Pies previously.  Only one out of the 23 there (yet more math).  My daughter was in this afternoon and read the great story, "Jimmy Zangwow's Out Of This World MoonPie Adventure" by Tony DiTerlizzi.  Such a fun story!

Our current writing focus is opinion writing.  The students are modeling their writing with the OREO model (opinion-reason-explain-opinion).  That a better opportunity to work on that writing than while sampling vanilla and chocolate Moon Pies.  They then added some facts from the video and an illustration from the story.  All in all, it was a rather grand afternoon of work!