STEM Identity
“Do you know your snack as well as you think you do?”
Introduction
Get kids working together on a surprisingly challenging task. Kids will think critically,
stay engaged and even get a little silly! Enjoy bringing out the importance of careful observation, drawing and note taking with this yummy activity!
Learning Objective
Practice observation skills. Communicate clearly for a purpose. Write descriptively.
Materials
- Food that looks similar to itself. (M&M’s, baby
carrots, chocolate chip cookies, Nacho Chips) - One large Freezer bag
Setup
- Pass out snack to students.
- Instruct: Open your snack package and select your favorite chip or carrot etc…
- Kids can eat any other piece of their snack, but should keep that snack item separate.
- Instruct: Memorize everything that you can about the item that you set aside.
- Instruct: Draw pictures of the item and write down characteristics.
- Ask: “Get to know your item as well as you can.”
- Next take all of the observed items and put them into the freezer bag and mix them up.
- Ask: Find your own item, the one that you had observed. The item must match the hard evidence that you wrote down in your notebooks. Verbal reasoning does not count!
- Collect all of the snack items and put them back into the bag.
- Instruct: Exchange notebooks with another student. Everyone must find the item described in the notebook only based on the written information recorded by their classmate.
- Note: It will be difficult or impossible for students to find their exact item. That is okay. Get students discussing what other information they needed.
- Begin a discussion about why it was hard to find the snack.
- Try it again at another snack time to see if kids are more thorough with their observations.
Extend It!
Can you extend this? Write down the questions kids had:
What’s next?:
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