Explorers Fun!

My boys love food. Pancakes make a great lesson tool. I have made them into all kinds of things, including plant and animal cells. But this morning, since we were reviewing Explorers, I decided to mark the pancakes with parallels and meridians.

Now before you go imagining some great creation, don't! They didn't look fabulous. But they didn't need to in order to get the point across. And I wish I had pictures to show you, but my boys ate them before I could even get the camera out!

This is a very simple project. I dyed the pancakes batter blue and put them on the griddle in simple circle shapes. When they were set but still a little "liquidy" (if you know what I mean), I used the food coloring as if it was a marker and wrote on them. I drew one red line across the pancake to be the equator. And green lines up and down.

The red line was to stick in their minds that the equator is "red hot". We talked about the parallels and how the equator is at 0 degree latitude. I told them, "Remember, 'lat' equals 'flat' for horizontal." Then I told them the reason that I used green lines for longitude or "long" ways. Is because those were the meridians and the Prime Meridian or 0 degrees longitude is also called the "Green"wich meridian.

If you have any other great ways to tie school into breakfast, I would love to hear them!