Delicious! Building Community With the Common Language of Story & Food Part 3

This is the final installment of the activities we did in conjunction with our town read, A Book Feast: Bridging Cultures and Building Community with the Common Language of Food.  Read about the introductory lesson here.

Celebrating My Family's Culture With Food: Day 1

When I read this page from Soul Food Sunday by Winsome Bingham, I just knew this was the book I was looking for to use with my 4th and 5th grade students. We were continuing our lesson "Celebrating My Family's Culture With Food."  

Granny's words echoed the feeling of the whole unit. Thanks, Granny!

Soul Food Sunday became choice #1

I like to give students choice in what they read (even during the lesson portion of our class), so this delicious read became choice #2.

Students chose a book to listen to and then moved on to the activity.

The Activity

The question presented to students was, "What is a food that your family makes or enjoys at a special celebration?" Students could show me in one of these ways:

The most popular choices were Pixton and a google slide (I provided a template)


Providing questions helped students focus their responses.

Students are always happy to respond with Pixton!


Celebrating My Family's Culture With Food: Day 2

To wrap up our unit, I had every student (4th & 5th graders) read Every Night Is Pizza Night. I usually like to provide a choice of books to read, but this was one of our official Community Read books, and they had plenty of book choices later in the class, so I kept it simple.

Read/listen to the book

The Activity

Next, students were invited to create and name their very own food truck.  They could choose between 

Designing a logo

Creating a menu (template provided)

Making an item from their menu with Model Magic.

Model Magic was hands down the favorite activity.  When students were done, they shared their creation with me and moved on to "choice time:"

Read/listen to a book about food

Students submit their words to me on google forms and I create wordles on https://flippity.net/ (WordMaster)

My takeaways

I was surprised that Model Magic was so popular with this group. I mistakenly thought it would have a bigger draw in the younger grades. For weeks after this lesson, students asked if we were using Model Magic.

Resources

Here I collected the various activities from our Community Read:

Delicious: A link to the Wakelet with all related tweets
Wakelet of activities from our Community Read


Location: Massachusetts, USA

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