Three years ago after reading random Yahoo! articles, I learned that March 25 was International Waffle Day. Loving most breakfast foods, eggs NOT included, blah, I wondered how I could celebrate this delicious holiday and teach math at the same time. Capacity! In first grade before the common core standards, we had to learn all about cups, pints, quarts, and gallons. What a great way to teach it! I could measure out my ingredients in cups and show my students how it relates to pints, quarts, and gallons. Brilliant! (I was just excited that I could eat all day long. Ha!)
And that year the holiday was celebrated for the first time. Some of my first grade students had never eaten a waffle and if they had, it came from a yellow box in the freezer. After that day, I knew we'd celebrate every year.
And we did, even when I moved to 5th grade. I was excited because I could teach more with it than just capacity. I was able to teach multiplying and dividing fractions because we needed to either double or half a recipe. I was able to teach area! The main concept I taught that year was transformations! Yes. Flips, slides, and turns. Or in 5th grade language reflections, translations, and rotations. It was a stretch, but I could do it. After getting our waffle to eat, we took a bite or two then drew a picture of what it looked like. After eating the rest of the waffle, because we couldn't let it get cold, we drew our picture's flip, turn, and slide. Again, brilliant! (Again, I just wanted to eat waffles all day.)
This year was our first year teaching all common core standards. Going through the standards and looking at the calendar, I was worried that I wasn't going to eat waffles all day in math. But, alas, there was measurement: cups, pints, quarts, and gallons. I was also able to review multiplying and dividing fractions. Yes! International Waffle Day would be celebrated once again. And celebrate we did!
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