My class and
I LOVE chocolate, so we were so excited to be part of the
Chocolate Stories Internet project! We first had a class
discussion about how much we like chocolate and then I asked my
class if they knew where chocolate came from. Did it come from a
plant? A seed? A bean? “It comes from the store!” My students
replied!
I then
asked them to think about what children did when there weren’t
any stores, how could they get chocolate? How was it made? We
read the story Cocoa Ice by Diana Applebaum. In this
story, there is a child from Santo Domingo whose family grows
cocoa beans and a child from Maine whose family harvests and
stores ice. The two enjoy chocolate in different yet similar
ways and are connected through the trade between cocoa and ice.
We then
became ‘pen pals’, pretending to be either character. Our first
draft was done on paper and then we transferred our work onto
the computer using KID PIX, illustrating our letter too! When we
were done writing our letters we then enjoyed eating some
chocolate bars ourselves! Read our letters and see what it would
have been like to be the characters in the book!
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