Trade Fair

This week we had a trade fair in my Social Studies method class for upper elementary.  For those of you who don’t know what a trade fair is, I was right there with you when I first heard about it.  A trade fair is when you bring objects into the classroom and trade with fellow students or the teacher.  In the end, you end up with a different object than you started with that now becomes yours.  The week before the trade fair, I was racking my brain trying to think of something that other would like that I could bring or make.  Well it wasn’t until my friends told me about the website pinterest.com that I found the perfect idea.  I ended up making rainbow cupcakes inside of mason jars.  Here is what I did…

1.Mix a white cake mix as directed. Separate into baggies and then add food coloring to them. Cut corner off baggie.

2. Take the baggies and layer each color until you fill the 1/2 pint jar halfway full of cake batter. If you fill it more than that, it will bake over and out of the jar.

3.Place on a baking sheet and bake at 325 for 45 or so minutes until your knife comes out clean.

4.Scoop the top of the cupcake off.

5. Add icing and decorate as you wish! : )

The next day in class, I ended up trading my teacher my rainbow cupcake for three books, The BFG, Matilda, and Loser.  We talked about how this activity could be used in the classroom to talk about the trading that went on between the French in the Native Americans.  Through this activity, we were able to see what the process of trading could have been like for French and Native Americans and how they may have felt.

Overall, I thought that this was a fun activity that students would have a blast with.  It allows students to actually take part is what is being learned rather that just learning about the topic out of the textbook.  You could also have the students’ journal about being a French or a Native American and the process they went through trading with each other or how they felt to integrate Language Arts into the lesson.