Loco for Cocoa

It’s California freezing!! Which means it’s a chilly 50 degrees. Brrrrrr….

We know some of you snow birds are knee deep in the stuff, relishing in school snow days. Meanwhile us California Girls scramble for closed toe shoes, long pants (those are longer than shorts and capris, we think) and traipse off to work in the bitter, BITTER cold…Up hill. In the pretend snow. Both ways.

We added that last bit.

For drama. 😉

So to warm us up a bit in this bitter 40 degrees (yes, it’s getting colder as we type), we served up some hot cocoa in class.

Our blogging buddy and fabulous first grade friend Traci over at Dragonflies in First posted a great class reward idea a few weeks back. You can read about it {here}. We absolutely adored her cute labels, so we printed them out to create a class “Hot Cocoa Station” for our kiddos. As she says, we cannot call it a “Bar”…that would entail all sorts of naughtiness. And, we will not be partaking in any of that tomfoolery until at least 3:15pm 4:15pm 5ish, or so…

We have to admit, in the cocoa craziness we weren’t able to snap a ton of pics, but here is the day before.

We went with blue and purple for winter and gathered some vases and glassware we had around the house to hold all the goods.

We added some ribbon and Traci’s cute labels, stuck it all on a tray and voila!

Our cocoa stewed in a crockpot all day. We were supposed to stir occasionally, but kinda forgot.

Teaching does get a little busy from time to time…

It didn’t seem to ruin anything.

Phewf.

Here’s the recipe we used:

Crock Pot Hot Chocolate

(Serves 8-10)

1 gallon water

1 cup cocoa mix

1/2 cup of marshmallows

1/2 cup semi sweet chocolate chips

Stir occasionally on low heat

The kids absolutely loved it!

We do believe you could probably keep it super simple and just throw the ready packs of hot cocoa mix and water in the crock pot. With all the toppings it tastes great anyways!

Afterwards, we wrote steamy stories titled “50 Shades of Grey” “How to Make Hot Cocoa” and stuck them on hand cut mugs. We added the steam with pulled apart cotton balls.

Here’s our Loco for Cocoa bulletin board.

The mugs were made out of construction paper.

We offered up 3 colors because it’s all about coordinating we wanted to give them a choice.

You’ll Need:

1 piece 9″ x 6″

1 piece 3″ x 6″

Cotton Balls for steam

Scissors

Glue Stick

Writing Page

Colored Pencils or Crayons

Round the bottom corners of the mug with scissors.

Cut the handle by rounding corners and cutting out a curve from the inside.

Glue the mug and handle together.

Gently pull apart the cotton balls to give it a steamy effect.

Glue them to the top of the mug.

For the writing, we found this fabulous descriptive writing over at Kindergarten Smiles.

It was a great conversation starter for our Firsties, and got them using steamy words to describe hot cocoa.

After we did some brainstorming, we sent them off to write stories about making hot cocoa. They cut the writing page out first so no words were cut off, then wrote their stories. That’s a first grade trick. 🙂 They used colored pencils to color the title, then glued them onto their mugs and voila!