Keystone Weekly
volume 4, issue 18        February 10, 2003

This week's Key Points: *Web Pick of the Week* and *New Classroom Experience*
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With Valentine's Day looming, your students' thoughts may be drifting towards chocolate. Why not seize the opportunity and make it educational?

This article from How Stuff Works walks you through the process of how chocolate is made, offering some interesting biological information about the cacao tree (the source of chocolate) and chemical information about the processes that take place to yield the different types of chocolate products. Perhaps you could bring in a variety of chocolate products--unsweetened baking chocolate, cocoa powder, semisweet chocolate, milk chocolate, and white chocolate--and let the students compare the tastes and think about how the addition or subtraction of fat, sugar, and cocoa can make a huge difference in flavor.

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We were delighted to be able to spend some time in Michael Podolsky's classroom at Finletter Elementary School in Philadelphia. Michael's sixth grade class was working with STC's Rocks and Minerals kit, and they were in the process of performing streak tests on a variety of minerals on the day of our visit.

Click on the link above to take a look. You can also find this page later by locating Michael's name in the sixth grade section of Classroom Experiences at http://www.keystone.fi.edu/experiences.shtml.

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This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 9819641.
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

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