Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Mrs. B's famous cookie bars SOL: 13 of 31

Slice of Life is sponsored every Tuesday by Stacey and Ruth from Two Writing Teachers.  For the month of March we are challenging ourselves to write a slice every day. 


It's a WOW party today in Room 104 during lunch.  Attendance is by invitation only.  How do you get this exclusive invitation?  You find one of our WOW (Words of the Week) in print.  You should encounter it accidentally, not by design.  No "googling" the word and bringing me an example you "found" on the internet.  Nope, this has to be authentic encounter with our weekly word of the week.  Once you encounter the word, you go public by posting the example on our discussion thread.  Posting words provides practice for citing sources.  You have to punctuate the example correctly (quotation marks around the sentence you found), and cite the source correctly (spelling and capitalization count).  If you make mistakes, you keep trying until you have an impeccable entry.

The party consists of playing games such as Catch Phrase or Bananagrams while eating lunch.   At the end of our game time, everyone gets one of my famous cookie bars.  Their fame lies in the fact that it's what I always serve to entice my students to search for our weekly words in the books, magazines, and newspapers they read.  You have to encounter a word many times before you "own" it.  Ownership is what I'm looking for as we explore these words all year long.  So as the year unfolds and our list of words grows, the list of eligible participants increases and the length between WOW parties decreases.  Parties are scheduled when the list on the board reaches critical mass, and I have time to make the cookie bars.

Now on to my famous cookie bars - it's a rather pedestrian recipe, and the preparation is never arduous.  I can recite the recipe verbatim.  Here's a step-by-step photo session from last night.

 Cream the butter and sugars together. 
Beat in the eggs and vanilla.
Fold in the flour, baking soda, and salt.
Add the bits of chocolate goodness. 
 All done, except for spreading in the pan, the hardest part.  
 Ready to pop in the oven for 20 minutes.
Cut into squares for the party!

Note to students:  No, you may not use any of the bolded words as "finds" for our next WOW party!

3 comments:

  1. Here I am, at my desk with a pile of writing folders to check...and all I'm thinking about are cookie bars! How awesome that you make words so much fun (not to mention delicious) for your kids!

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  2. Very cool idea! I will be passing this along to teachers. Love that note to students! Too funny!

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  3. Your cookie bars are SOOO good! You are such a fun teacher!

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