Students treated to Pop Tarts as teaching aids

WAGENER -- The question was rhetorical and Busbee Elementary School teacher Sarah Emerling clearly enjoyed asking it: "Wouldn't you really rather do math with a Pop Tart?"

About 500 kids surely agreed, and they got to eat the Pop Tarts, too, during a schoolwide series of math and cross-curricular activities.

Before the holidays, Emerling found on the Internet a Kellogg's promotion that offered 1,000 free Pop Tarts for the best ideas for using them. She posted a proposed school project and learned a week later that viewers of the site had voted her as one of the winners. The Pop Tarts eventually arrived in 18 boxes, Emerling said with a smile.

In her own class, she gave the kids a Pop Tart and asked them to take a small bite. Before they could finish them off, however, they had to create a graph as to where they had bitten them - the corners or the middle.

"We gave teachers some options like area and perimeter," Emerling said, "while the fourth-graders are doing patterns. Others are creating characters and stories, like 'The Pop Tart lost its spread.' It's all standards based."

In Tammy Swartz's fourth-grade class, the kids were coming up with creatures like Chester the Cheetah and were giving them character traits. John Michael Upchurch invented a robotic-looking character he called Pop Tart Yum-Yum.

Melissa Felkel's kindergarten students chose which flavor they preferred - strawberry or cinnamon brown sugar. They, too, put the data on graphs, learning about the concepts of greater than and less than.

"I'm excited when teachers think outside the box," said assistant principal Amy Margaret McDougall. "It's great when they look at different ways to engage children with everyday objects."

Contact Rob Novit at rnovit@aikenstandard.com.