Paleta provides tasty lessons at Cleveland

Cleveland Elementary has a taste for learning. In honor of Hispanic Heritage Month, 2nd graders read “What Can You Do With Paleta?” by Carmen Tafolla and used it to inspire a host of activities covering several disciplines.

The book highlights the simple joy of eating a paleta, a Mexican ice pop treat, that is shared across cultures. In the story, a young girl strolls through her barrio and introduces readers to different frozen fruit-flavored treats.

During science, they investigated how heat affects frozen treats. Students observed a physical change as the frozen treats melted and transformed from a solid to a liquid. They also noted that some properties stayed the same, such as the color, but others, such as shape, changed. Finally, they enjoyed their yummy paleta!

Each class in math conducted a survey of their favorite paleta flavors and organized their data in a picture graph. Students then created questions about the data that could be answered from the picture graph.

Teacher Lisa Stowe saw her students really dive into the activities.

“My takeaway from it was that students would realize that, despite our different cultures, they would see there are simple things in life that we all have in common and make us happy.”