Cooking according to 8-year-olds

This week my 2nd-4th grade bilingual classes are working on a writing assignment about their favorite foods. First, they have to describe their favorite food. What does it taste like? (Salty, sweet, spicy, sour, bitter, etc.) What is it made of? Then they have to write directions for making it. One of the langauge lessons they're learning is to distinguish the animal name from the food name. Cow meat is beef. Pig meat is pork or ham. Chicken meat is still chicken. It's very confusing. One of my boys said his favorite food is pig. "I like eating pigs," he said. Since we had just learned that pig meat is called pork, I pretended to be confused. "You eat PIGS?" I exclaimed. "You mean, like this?!" I drew this picture on the board.As you can imagine, the kids thought it was really funny. And now everyone remembers that we eat pork, not pigs.

Another highlight of the class was when Grace, a little fireball of a girl, gave me these directions for making her favorite food: duck. I wrote it down on the board exactly as she said it.
She's the only student whose recipe started with "kill the . . . "

There were some more funny recipes, but I don't have them here at home, so I'll have to post them later.

So far I've only had two criers this week. Not bad for a Tuesday at the beginning of the school year!