Mind Games

I saw on Kate’s blog that Monday the 9th is the anniversary of the founding of Hershey’s Chocolate.  Yum!  That sounds like a day worth celebrating to me.

I decided to hunt down some resources and ideas tonight.  In the past I’ve made a text document out of my ideas and links and then sometimes copied over the things we did use to blog about it later, but tonight I thought it would be easier to just do my planning right on the blog.  I always plan more than I’ll need so I’m sure we won’t get to all of this!

Learning About Chocolate

• Virtual Tour of the Hershey’s Factory – This one makes me drool… I loved the dorky tour at Hershey Park and I know that we’re overdue to take the kids there (yes, PisecoSis, we’ll try to visit this year!).
• Manufacturing Chocolate from Seed to Sweet – At the Field Museum website, kids can hack the seeds off the tree with a machete and more, to take part in the manufacture of chocolate.  JediBoy will love this!  The site also has some good Fun Facts about chocolate.
• About Chocolate – The Cadbury’s Australia website has some good information, including a nice map of Central America and the Mayan cacao production… proving why my daughter has an insatiable sweet tooth?

Chocolate Science

• Good Cocoa – A simple demonstration about the movement of molecules in hot and cold water – mix cocoa into hot water and then into cold, and see how the result is different.
• Could Chocolate Stop an Acid Leak? – A 1-minute MythBusters short about MacGyver’s use of chocolate to plug a sulfuric acid leak – would it really work?
• Chocolate for Your Heart – A 2-minute clip explaining that studies show chocolate reduces the clotting (or “stickiness”) of blood…  this one is my favorite, because I have a blood mutation that makes me clot too much, and I now have a great excuse to have a little chocolate every day!

Chocolate Social Studies

• Dirty Jobs: Candy Maker – A 5-minute video about how dirty it is to make peanut butter cups!
• The Chocolate Tree: A Mayan Folktale (On My Own Folklore) – We don’t own this book and it’s not in our library system, so I doubt I can get my hands on a copy by Monday, but I always am on the lookout for more Mayan/Guatemalan culture & history.
• I’d also like to find a kids’ biography of Milton Hershey – there are several out there, but none in our house or our library. I could request an inter-library loan but that might not be in before Monday.

Chocolate Math

• The Hershey’s Milk Chocolate Bar Fractions Book, Hershey’s Milk Chocolate Weights and Measures, and Hershey’s Milk Chocolate Multiplication Book – We have toyed with these but haven’t worked all the way through them – Monday would be a great day to read all of these!
• Chocolate Logic Puzzles and Chocolate Word Problems online
• Estimate, count, graph and average M&Ms by color – probably we’ll do a less-advanced version of the worksheets I linked to, maybe using this worksheet from HomeschoolShare.  If I feel guilty about using a Mars product on Hershey day, we could do the same thing with colors of Hershey Kiss wrappers in a bag, or types of Hershey Miniatures.
• A Pound of Chocolate and Chocolate Bar Math worksheets from HomeschoolShare

Chocolate Literature

• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
• Chocolate Fever by Robert Kimmel Smith
• The Chocolate Touch by Patrick Skene Catling
• Lilly’s Chocolate Heart by Kevin Henkes
• A Chocolate Moose for Dinner by Fred Gwynne
• Curious George Goes to a Chocolate Factory
• Chocolatina by Erik Kraft
• Cam Jansen and the Chocolate Fudge Mystery by David Adler
• The Mystery in Chocolate Town Hershey, Pennsylvania by Carole Marsh
• Thomas and Friends: Percy’s Chocolate Crunch

Chocolate Art

• Fingerpaint with chocolate pudding!  (I’ll have JediBoy work on his spelling a bit while we do this – he enjoys writing in shaving cream so I think he’ll enjoy the pudding just as much.)
• Edible chocolate playdough – I know there are great, long-lasting, scented chocolate playdough recipes out there (that you can make scat models from!) but I’d rather have an edible chocolate-peanut butter dough like Heather made.
• Make an M&M mosaic.
• Use empty candy wrappers to make a collage.
• Put melted chocolate in a squeeze bottle and let the kids pipe out designs onto wax paper.
• Design your own chocolate bar page from HomeschoolShare.

Other Chocolate Fun

• Have a Kisses hunt – hide them around the room & let the kids scatter to find them.
• Have a Chocolate Tasting – including milk, dark, semisweet, white & other chocolates.  (“I never met a chocolate I didn’t like.”  – Deanna Troi, ST:TNG)
• Sing and dance to the Latin American song Chocolate, a free MP3 download from Boca Beth.
• Watch one or both versions of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory / Willy Wonka.
• Chocolate Mystery – an online choose-your-own-adventure story about Willy Wonka.

As always, I’d love any suggestions!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009 at 10:05 pm and is filed under method madness, you could call this "school". You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.