Teaching and Eating

My two passions.

The fuel to my soul.

Teaching and eating.

 I wouldn't be who I am without these two things in my day. If you're new here, I am a middle school teacher. I also like to eat for pleasure as opposed to just for necessity. My ultimate dream job would be a food teacher but with elective classes on the chopping block (for shame!) I don't feel like that dream could be a reality right now. It'll have to wait.

So in the meantime, I find every opportunity to work food into my lessons. Language Arts Enrichment is the perfect place for that. We read awesome books and I find any mention of food and roll with it.

This month it is Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli.

I'll spare you the synopsis and steer you to where it mentions food. In the story, a popular food that the characters love is Zeps. In short, it's basically a sub sandwich. I rolled with it and transformed my classroom into a sandwich shop. I asked them all to bring in a sandwich ingredient and we built ourselves some stupendous subs.

My favorite part was naming our creations. I encouraged them to combine character names and important places with food names and they came up with creative labels.

Combo #1- Hamanda: ham, cheddar, lettuce and pickles.
Named after Amanda, one of the main characters.

Combo #2- Gobbles knot: turkey, Monterey jack, lettuce, pickles
Named after Cobbles knot, the town's impossible to untie knot.

Combo #3- Zepperoni: Pepperoni, mozzarella, Jalepenos
Named after Zeps, the name of the sub sandwich in the story.

Combo #4- The Maniac :All and everything listed above
Named after the main character, Maniac Magee.

So much fun!! The students enjoyed the lesson and I'm hoping they will always remember this fun activity and of course their amazing teacher. *wink*