Yesterday I asked my students for the best place to get tacos. If you want to get third graders immediately engaged, talk about tacos I guess. Even in the 8:00 AM hour. They were into it!
I pointed out that our students whose parents were from Mexico were probably the experts. I have a girl whose parents are from El Salvador and another whose mom is Guatemalan. I asked them if they had tacos and it sounded like they had things that were taco adjacent, but I said our Mexican students were the experts. One of them said her abuelita's was the best place for tacos. Another said that "the taco truck by the building" was the best place. I said, "Oh, that one...."
The last one described a restaurant and it sounded familiar. I asked if it was Don Joaquin's. He got excited and said, "Yes!"
I said that I like their tacos and so did my brother-in-law Edgar, who is Mexican, so I thought they must be pretty good.
One of the white kids said, "How about Taco Bell?"
I can't even describe the look of sheer horror on the face of the boy who likes Don Joaquin's. The boy who told me about the taco truck said, "No. No, no, no, no."
I think Edgar might agree.
So I said, we will have our restaurant be Don Joaquin's. You all work at the restaurant. I put them in groups and said that the tacos come in orders of three tacos. We were talking about multiplying by 3 for math. I went around and placed orders at each restaurant for a different number of people and they had to figure out how many tacos it would be.
I am coming to the restaurant with Adam, Braeden, Anna, Emma and Mark. How many tacos is that? I am coming to the restaurant but Mark isn't, so there are just five of us. How many tacos is that? But why isn't Mark coming? He doesn't feel like tacos. Can my family come to the restaurant? Yes, how many orders do you need? Seven. OK. His family needs seven orders, how many tacos is that? And on and on.
They all got the correct answers.
Many of them said, "This is so fun!"
Sometimes I forget that they are little kids and pretending a little will make multiplication into a game.
Today we're going on a field trip.
May the odds be forever in our favor.
3 comments:
This is delightful!
What a fun teacher! And, surprisingly, Edgar loves Taco Bell. He doesn't consider it Mexican food, but he loves it. Yuck, his gringa wife says.
I love it Thelma, but if you all went except Mark, wouldn't that be 5 people. And of course if you count QE that would be 6. Some of us are accountants.
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