Ms. Jefferson at Davis Elementary emailed me with a project idea she had for her class: “I would like for the kids to create menus. One of our language arts sols includes real world reading, so on Wednesday the kids will start creating menus for a pretend restaurant. We will also include math by using prices for items written correctly using the dollar sign and decimal point or the cent sign. When you come on Thursday, the kids should be ready to use their drafts to create on the computer.” This was a great idea, and I really like how it included elements of both language arts and math. I created a simple Google slides brochure template with a line down the middle of the slide for the menu fold. I gave a copy to each student on Google classroom, but only one student in each group opened the slideshow so they could all be on the same document. First I showed them how to add a Background image. I explained that the image shouldn’t be too distracting from the text. Food closeup photos work well, but images with lots of different types of food are distracting. Next the students added a title with the name of their restaurant and a subtitle with their names or a description of their cuisine. Davis is a multicultural school, so there were many ethnic restaurants. The second slide was the inside of the menu, so I showed the students how to add a table for the foods and the prices. They also added some images of the dishes they served. Finally, we published our menus to the web (File > Publish to the web) and pasted the links to Google classroom. You can see them all here.
