Turning Lemonade into Lessons

You usually hear about turning lemons into lemonade, but some teachers and students at Adena Elementary recently turned lemonade into lessons – lots of real-life lessons.

It all started when Intervention Specialist Alyssa Moots read ‘The Lemonade War’ to her ELA students. In the book, a brother and sister compete to make the most money on their lemonade stand. “My students loved this story and came up with the idea to have our own lemonade stand for teachers,” said Moots. In the book the characters talk about donating the money to an animal shelter, so her five students brainstormed on where they could donate their earnings. They decided on the school’s food pantry because they wanted to help other kids at school when they don't have snacks.

Moots and her students then went to work creating their mobile lemonade stand and it was a huge success, raising $86.

“The highlight of the project for me was seeing my students so excited about a story we read and wanting to relate it back to our everyday life,” said Moots. “It was also amazing to see them so excited when counting our earnings.” But the highlight of the project according to Anthony (one of her students) was “getting to try the lemonade!”

And the lessons were just beginning. Math teacher Kim Marsh also works with the same group of students and used the lemonade stand earnings to work on identifying coins and counting money. Marsh had the students brainstorm snack ideas and then survey ten different classes to determine the most popular snack. After narrowing it down to five choices, the students went to the classes, introduced themselves, asked questions and made tallies on a chart to keep their data. “One of my student’s goals is to count to five so this activity was perfect for counting,” said Marsh. “And it didn't take long to determine that Cheez-Its was the most popular snack!” 

After taking the surveys, Marsh’s class used an online program to create a graph using their data. “I think this part was exciting because my students were able to take the tallies and see them in a bar graph,” said Marsh. “They had already guessed that Cheez-Its was the most popular, and it was confirmed when they made the graph.”  

Not only did the lemonade stand teach the students lots of lessons, but it helped stock the Adena food pantry with lots of Cheez-Its and granola bars.