Oreo Overload

     For a while this year, I'm sure my students' parents thought I had a serious Oreo habit. It seemed like every week I was asking them to send in more packages of America's Favorite Cookie. While I'll admit I did sample a cookie or two (gotta maintain quality control) they really were for educational purposes, I promise!

    Our first Oreo encounter was our participation in the annual Oreo Project at ProjectsByJen. <--VERY cool site to check out.

      We experimented on those cookies as if they were a completely foreign object. We made estimations and predictions, logged, weighed, measured, rolled, stacked and sculpted them.

   It was torturous, but no Oreos that hit the floor or were handled by sticky kid fingers were eaten (at least not that I'm aware of, but I did see a few corner-of-the-mouth-crumbs that made me suspicious.)

As if that weren't enough, Oreo-palooza continued with our October Tasty Tuesday recipe - Spider Pudding Pie. Those most certainly were eaten. The Quality Control Inspector was on high alert that day making sure all of the ingredients were up to our rigorous standards.

  And just when you thought it was safe to bust out the Chip's Ahoy, we moved on to this crazy awesome science activity: recreating the phases of the moon with Oreos! We used some of the projects we already made as a reference, and then carefully twisted the Oreo apart and used plastic spoons and knives to scrape off the correct amount of creme filling to show each phase of the moon.  Then we placed them in order around the edges of a paper plate and labeled each phase. Seriously sweet science fun!

If you are studying the moon, you might like this FREE Anticipation Guide to gauge your students' prior knowledge and track understanding.

Although I did go through a bit of Oreo withdrawal after the moon phase activity, I found solace in the candy corn that started to appear for some other purely educational purposes soon after.