A fourth grade class found out that learning about soil with delicious dirt is the way to remember concepts such as topsoil, subsoil, nutrients and bedrock.
The class at Cassens Elementary made edible layers of soil, concluding their study of soil in Gina Law’s classroom.
Law is in her sixth year of teaching at Cassens Elementary. She explained that the project which built “soil” out of Cheerios,broken graham crackers, chocolate pudding, crushed Oreos and mini chocolate chips was part of the science curriculum.
“We are in forests in science. We’ve studied the layers of the trees, and now we’re doing the layers of the soil. Then we’ll move on to the plants, roots and stems,” she said. “We try to do culminating projects at the end of units so that we can do cross curricular.”
The edible soil layers project included science, some math, and language arts. Law first approached the recipe for the soil.
“Looking at the layers of soil, what do you think we’d use to represent the bedrock?” Law asked the students.
The students decided that graham crackers were the bedrock, Cheerios were the parent material, chocolate pudding was the subsoil, crushed Oreos were the topsoil, and mini chocolate chips were the nutrients. “If this makes one serving and I wanted to make 25 servings, what would I have to do with each of the ingredients?” Law asked. “I’d have to do what math?” “Multiply,” a student responded.
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