Hey Guys!
It has been a crazy year I can't believe that I haven't blogged AT ALL this school year. :(
This past summer, my boyfriend and I bought our first home and we got engaged, all within a month of eachother. So you can only imagine how hectic life has been since then.
In fact, our wedding is coming up very quickly. Only 62 days until we get married!! But aside from my personal life it is now at that point of the school year where there are a million and one things going on as summer is quickly approaching. Here in Knoxville we only have 9.5 school days left.
I think I can! I think I can!
I think I can! I think I can!
However, even with all of the end of the year craziness I needed to add some more fun into my life/classroom. So I decided to do a classroom tranformation for the last 3 weeks of school This classroom transformation was inspired by some AMAZING instagram teachers and of course one of my FAVORITE foods, PIZZA! That is how Papa Pepperoni's Pizzeria came about and had it's GRAND OPENING last week!
On Monday morning, my students came in to school to find Papa Pepperoni himself standing at our classroom door. He spoke in his very best italian accent and even had italian music playing. Students walked into our classroom to find pizzas hanging from the ceiling, pizzeria inspired table cloths, and hanging utensils.
The hanging pizza floats I found at Michaels for just $5.00 each. Which is such a better score than those huge pizza slice floats. I just couldn't justify paying $20 a float. So these $5.00 floats did just as well!! The red tablecloths, hanging red circle garland, and chef hat were from Party City.
To add to our pizza theme I created a class pizza to use as a whole class incentive. With the end of the year being so close it's been getting a little CRAY over in our room. So I hoped that a new incentive would help tone it down just a little bit and it did. By no means was it perfect but less CRAY then our new "normal" and that was good by me.
Throughout the week I incorporated the theme of pizza into all of our subject areas while continuing to provide my students with rigorous standards based lessons.
For reading we worked on main idea and details. We read a story called "So You Want to Grow a Pizza?" on a website called GetEpic. If you haven't heard of it it is a site that is FREE for TEACHERS and provides you with access to 100's of books! We read this story throughout the week and talked about how we can not in fact grow an entire pizza but we can grow the ingredients to help us make a pizza. Along the way we focused on the main idea of the story and how it was like the "crust of a pizza" and the details are like the "toppings of a pizza." Studnets jotted the main ideas and details of the story on their tasty pizza recording sheet.
All week in writing we spent the week writing, How to Make a Pizza. On Monday, students brainstormed the ingredients they needed to create a pizza. On Tuesday, students created their plan for how to make a pizza by drawing and labeling the steps they needed to take. On Wednesday and Thursday, students used their plan to begin writing their final copy of How to Make a Pizza while including transition words. Friday, was an exciting day because if we earned all 15 of our pizza toppings as a class we would create our very own pizzas to enjoy after math.
I'm not going to lie it took us to the very last few minutes before writing to earn all 15 of our toppings but WE DID IT! We earned being able to make real pizzas as a class. While making our class pizzas the students shared out the steps we needed to take in their correct sequence to make our pizzas. Each student came up one by one to help us complete a step in making our pizzas.
My little pizza chefs absolutely loved getting to help create our pizza. I'm not sure I've ever seen them wait so quietly and patiently all year. Oh the teacher struggle! I'm sure you know all about it.
When I was out at Target grabbing the pizza crust the day before I came across this adorable cardboard carton to grow different ingredients you'd need for a pizza. I was super tempted to buy it but it was $12.00 and I had already bought the rest of the pizza ingredients I needed. I was super suprised by my willpower because let's be real Target is my weakness and I am always picking up things I don't even need when I'm there.
The pizza fun did not end here. We kept the pizza fun up for the entire week in math. In math, we learned all about 2D and 3D shapes as well as partitioning shapes. After cooking our pizzas on Friday my students received a paper pizza and chose how they wanted to partition their own pizza. We started out partitioning our real class pizza into halves, then quarters, and so on. Each time we partitioned it I showed the students the pizza slices and we talked about what happens when we partition a shape into more shares. They ate it up! See what I did there. ;)
Next week my students are going to use their partitioned pizzas to create a shape pizza. They will add 2D shapes we have learned about onto their pizza and will then create a tally chart and picture graph to represent it's data. All week my students literally begged for more Papa Pepperoni activities it was absolutely precious. I can't wait to continue the pizza fun next week.
As you can see, you can take any FUN topic that gets you excited and make it educational and standards based. It doesn't have to be as extreme as a classroom transformation. Maybe it's just a printable hat or name badge. But whatever way you can spread a little magic into your classroom lessons will make your lessons memorable for your students. This magic and excitement will help your students to feel your excitement and passion and get them just as excited to learn. Ultimately if you're having fun teaching your students are going to be having fun learning.
How have you added "magic" into your lessons? Have you done a classroom transformation that your students begged for more activities? I'd love to hear about it in the comments below.
In the meantime check out some of my other classroom transformations & themed lessons/activities.
Place Value Construction TPT Pack
