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Making pizza can be a functional and meaningful way to incorporate literacy skills. In her activity Setting up a Class-Run Pizza Parlor, Cindy O'Connell offers suggestions for using literacy skills, as well as math, social skills, and cognitive concepts. Using pizza-themed lessons will be a big motivator to many students, and provides a fun way to reinforce practical literacy skills for students who are blind or visually impaired, including those with additional disabilities or deafblindness.
This activity provides guidelines for setting up a weekly "ready to cook" pizza service, and the variations are endless! Use your imaginations to adapt it for your students and setting. Incorporate skills in the following areas:
- communication (making choices, working with others, share ideas)
- reading (follow recipe in braille, print, pictures, objects, tactile symbols, auditory input)
- writing (create a shopping list, make a menu, poster or flyer to advertise the business, write an experience story afterwards)
- auditory strategies (listen to others, follow oral directions)
- matching, sequencing (match ingredients or cooking equipment, sequence the steps in the recipe)
Materials:
- Prepackaged pizza crust
- Pizza sauce
- Toppings (mushrooms, peppers, scallions, pepperoni, broccoli, olives, cherry tomatoes, pineapple, etc.)
- Prepackaged shredded cheese
- Pizza boxes (optional)
- Assorted trays, plates, bowls, utensils, Baggies
- Latex gloves
- Moneybox (or money pouch) and money for change
Procedure:
- Create pizza-themed ELA lessons.
- Add pizza-related vocabulary to your monthly vocabulary words.
- Read stories about pizza.
- Create a poem, a rote script, or a catchy jingle to recite for offices, clinical staff and teachers (composition, communication).
- Follow up the activity with experience stories, using personal communication devices, switches and language support strategies as needed (e.g., open-ended sentences or phonemic cueing).
- Braille, type, or print up labels from a list of regular customer's names to label boxes.
- For fun, create pizza-related Mad-Lib stories to work on generating language.
- Research the history of pizza.
- Learn about where ingredients come from and how they get to the market. Study how cheese is made.
- Make tomato sauce and pizza crust (following directions).
Attached File(s):
Variations:
There are endless variations, both in what type of food can be prepared, as well as how to make the pizza. Here are a few ideas:
- Have an ice cream sundae party for fun or to earn money! Students can write posters and menus, follow written directions (using print, braille, pictures, symbols)
- Incorporate the shopping into the activity, so that students can practice composing a shopping list and following the list in print, braille, photos, symbols
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