Tiki Room and Dole Whips

Today, we visited the world famous Tiki Room!  I love this little slice of heaven in Disneyland.  It is so cool and calm.  It is a great place to get away from the hustle and bustle of the crowds...and pick up a little snack too.  So my class virtually headed there for our lessons today.

We started by waking up Jose....everyone shouted out "Wake up Jose!"   And then I pushed play on  a video of the Tiki Room (which you can find here.)  I wanted them to hear the iconic song and learn the chorus.  So we did!  I had 24 kids singing the Tiki Room on Zoom!  It was fantastic!  Next, I showed them a still of Jose the bird and we did a directed drawing of him!  I didn't find the *actual* Jose to draw, but I found an easy parrot type bird, and we were all off drawing together.  The directions can be found here.

Then, we got into the exciting part of the lesson.....the Dole Whip.

This past week, Disneyland published it's world famous Dole Whip recipe and, boy, was my family excited!  They couldn't wait for us to get the three little ingredients (ice cream, pineapple chunks, and pineapple juice) and make it.

And since my own kids were excited, I knew my students would be too.   So I used this little recipe to create a multiplication math activity for them.

The recipe itself, which you can find on the Disneyland App, calls for 1 scoop of vanilla ice cream, 4 oz of pineapple juice, and 2 cups of frozen pineapple.  All of that gets blended together to create ONE SERVING of Dole Whip.   Which is great if you are single person living in your house all alone.  Not so great with a family of 5!

So I made a video of myself putting the ingredients together.  Then I had my own kids make a cameo (my students love when my own children show up somewhere!) They each, one by one, came up to me to ask for some of the Dole Whip.   We set up for the students that there just wasn't enough, and we would have to use math to figure out how much of each ingredient we would need.

Giving the students this lead in, I asked them how we would go about solving the problem of not having enough Dole Whip for my family.  They unanimously said we needed to multiply each ingredient by how many people we were feeding.

Together, we figured out how much of each ingredient we would need for my family.

1 scoop of Vanilla ice cream x 5 = 5 scoops
4 oz of pineapple juice = 20 ounces of juice
2 cups of pineapple chunks = 10 cups of chunks

I then told them that they would need to figure out how many of each ingredient would be needed for their family.   We went through a few examples together, using the family sizes of my students to work the problems.

Then, I set them off to figure out how much we would need as a class.   If we have 25 students, how much of each item would we need?  We needed to use the distributive property of multiplication to do this problem, but together, we were able to figure it out.

After all of this was done together, the kids set off using this digital recording sheet to work on more problems involving multiplication of serving sizes.  The kids were practicing their multiplication problems AND having a bit of fun (since the Dole Whip buy in was an instant hook.)

Since I teach third grade, this was as far as we went.  However, older grades could get into conversions of serving sizes (cups to gallons, 1/2 cup of juice instead of 4oz to use multiplying fractions)  There are so many possibilities!

And that is all we did for our trip to the Tiki Room.  What other things could you add to our trip there? (and if you thought you were going to get a pic of my Dole Whip....it went WAY too fast for that!!)


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