Who doesn’t love a themed week at school? First grade just finished up an amazing week filled with pizza themed activities. Pizza is an easy and fun theme that you can incorporate in your classroom as well!
Preparing For Pizza Week
To prepare for pizza week, I ordered I giant inflatable pizza from Amazon. I was thinking that I could also use the giant pool floaty in the classroom when summer arrives. Depending on your budget you can also purchase red and white checkered tablecloths. This year I skipped the table cloths and used red butcher paper from the school to cover my tables. I also called local pizza restaurants to see if they would be able to donate pizza boxes for our reading activity. When searching for activities I found some engaging and entertaining activities from Teachers Pay Teachers.
Book Review (Pizza Themed)
Print and Go Sub Packet for Secret Pizza Party
Pizza Fraction Center Activities – Halves and Fourths
Place Value Math Center & Craft Pizza Theme
How to Make Pizza Sequencing and Procedural Writing
All of these activities fit perfectly with our curriculum and theme for the week.
Math Activities
Pizza week first popped into our heads when it came time for us to introduce fractions to the students. A great book to use that revolves around pizza and fractions is Give Me Half. After the book, have your class discuss when they have shared half of something with a friend or family member. If you are wanting a visual for your students, bring an apple to school and start by slicing it into halves and then fourths. After introducing fractions to the class, I incorporated fraction games to our math centers.
My kids love to learn through games, such as bump, spin, or roll and cover. Our daily math stations consist of three games, one writing or cut and paste activity, fact practice, and teacher table. I found some very fun math games that fit perfectly in our classroom from Mr. L’s Classroom. My students played fraction bump with a spinner, fraction clip cards, and a fraction graphing activity with a pizza dice.
You do not have to be learning fractions, however, to do pizza week. I found great review activities for the students as well. Stephany Dillon has a great bundle of activities that revolve around the book “Secret Pizza Party”. From there I found so many great math games and writing prompts.
Reading Activities
My favorite activity was the Pizza Box Book Reviews! I collected 10 pizza boxes from local pizza restaurants and put a number on top on each box. Inside each box is a book from our school library. Student’s also created a cover for their “Book Review Book.” I found a great book review to use from Live, Love, and Teach. Students are then put with a partner and placed at a pizza box. I gave each group 7-10 minutes to read through the book and write a quick review about it. Writing a review with a partner brought up a great conversation about respecting one another’s opinion. Even though they are partners, they do not have to review the book the same. I did 5 books on Thursday and 5 books on Friday to break it up. When we finished students got to share their favorite books that they read during this activity.
Writing
For writing we did two super fun activities! The first activity went with “The Secret Pizza Party” book. After the story the students were able to create their own secret pizza party. Kids filled out a bubble map to plan out their secret pizza party. They had to decide where their party would take place, who’s invited, what pizza will be served, and what will everyone do at the party. All the stories were so creative and fun. I loved how the kids used their imagination to create their own “Secret Pizza Party.” We saved our how-to writing for Friday because that was the day we made our very own pizzas in class. I found a great how-to wiring piece from Printable Prompts. The product includes a cut and paste activity as well as vocabulary cards to put on the classroom word wall.
After our how-to activity we created our own pizzas. I had a parent volunteer help bring in supplies and assist with the pizza assembling. We decided to not use a toaster oven so she toasted english muffins before bringing them. The students got an english muffin, sauce, cheese, pepperonis, and bacon to put on their pizzas. The mom had a great idea to warm up the sauce and keep it warm in a thermos so it wasn’t cold when the kids ate their pizza. The kids had so much fun putting together their very own pizzas.
This week was so much fun for my kids and myself. I am already looking forward to next year!
