Pantry Wars!
How do you make an idea great? An idea grew during journaling when B.D. and E.B. began writing and designing characters called the Mustard and Ketchup Warriors. In their imagination, these tiny warriors defend the pantry from bad guys by shooting mustard and ketchup. With encouragement from their peers, they offered to share their idea and turn it into a collaborative game! At home students made observations of their pantries to share with the group. They used this research to create their own organized pantry game setting and to inform their discussion about the realistic bad guys who might try to invade the pantry - MICE!
Their game, appropriately named, Pantry Wars will require a team of Mustard and Ketchup Warriors to build a path to the mouse's entrance and board up the hole before the Mouse Invasion! Modified with exciting challenges, the game is loosely based on Race to the Treasure. In order to play-test their game, students created path cards. They discovered they did not connect as well as they should. Iteration and the use of graph paper will help standardize the paths so they can connect.
From the very beginning, it was important to the students to create their own warriors and to have special powers. In play testing, they realized the game would be too easy if they all shot mustard and ketchup. They created different role cards to be drawn randomly at the beginning of the game. These roles will enable them to work collaboratively to defeat the mice.
To create game pieces, students learned about 3D shapes! They created a miniature mustard and ketchup bottle using 2 cylinders and a cone. Along the way, they used the 3D printer to make 4 mice and learned about changing the colored filament!
Pantry Wars began with students' creative ideas and grew into another exciting opportunity for students to build their own learning. Come play our games next week at Exhibition! This week at a glance: Communication Literacy
Reading - using picture clues, finding repetitive text, decoding words by sound, identifying sight words
Word Study - short a rhyming patterns, short e and i review, introduction to digraphs
Sight word games
Collaborative Story writing
Read Aloud illustrations and Journaling
Patterns & Modeling
How can you compose and decompose a number?
Introduction to telling addition and subtraction "part-part-whole" stories
Measuring path cards for our game
Identifying 3D shapes such as cylinders and cones
Playing Uno, play-testing our game
