Education Investigation

Every year the Year 6 (Grade 5s) do “Chocolate” as a unit of work. This was my first year teaching this age and unit so I was interested in seeing how it went. The motivation and enthusiasm I saw from my students was impressive!

The overal aim of this unit was for students to work co-operatively as a company to design and create a new type of chocolate bar and to produce a visual presentation outlining the process.

The following is a list of the activities the children had to complete:

1. In your chosen Company of 5 members assign the following roles: Co-ordinator, Recorder, Creative Arts Director, Communicator and Collator.
2. Design a Company name, logo and jingle.
3. Develop a timeline showing the history of chocolate.
4. Survey 60 people regarding:
   1. Their favourite chocolate.
   2. Time of day they enjoyed eating chocolate.
   3. How often they ate chocolate each week.
5. Sort, display and comment on the findings of the survey.
6. From these findings design a chocolate to enter into E3’s Chocolate competition.
7. Design a wrapper for your chocolate bar that includes your logo, company name and list of ingredients.
8. Make the chocolate.
9. Present your Company chocolate to the class and include in the presentation:
   1. Graphs displaying the survey and written comments.
   2. Description of the chocolate making process.
   3. Jingle.
   4. An advert for your chocolate eg: Newspaper, T.V or Radio.
   5. A timeline depicting the history of chocolate.
   6. Company chocolate ready for the taste test! (Of course I had the privledge of doing this part)

Green Hat Thinking (creative thoughts) If I was to do the unit again I would…

• Do it at the beginning of the Term when the students are less grumpy/tired. The co-operative nature of the unit was socially very demanding.
• Give the rubric out earlier in the process so students had a clearer picture of the expectations.
• Give more demonstrations and examples of the successful criteria set out in the rubric.

Overall it was a very successful unit as students worked through a motivating subject overcoming relationship issues to produce a tangible and tasty product :+)

Has anyone else taught a similar unit? What worked well for the students/teaching in your unit?

Picture Authors:
http://www.chocolate-world.net/images/Chocolate.png