What’s the best way to cover challenging state standards like procedural writing and fractions? Use a theme, like pizza! With these cross-curricular pizza activities, your students will love learning about:

how to make pizza.
how to partition a pizza to make fractions
what time the pizzas will be ready.

How to make pizza and other pizza activities

Pizza Parlor Transformation

When I had my content decided, I brainstormed some items that I wanted to include in our pizza parlor. I created a Please Wait to Be Seated sign and printed it to hang next to the welcome sign. I printed some pizza slices to create the banner above the sign.

Next, I headed to the dollar store to see what else I could find to make our pizzeria come to life! I found some silver platters that I thought would be perfect for serving pizzas. I also found some glass salt and pepper shakers that I put folded up yellow paper inside and used for Parmesan cheese shakers.

Welcome sign for a pizza parlor classroom transformation

Pizza Day Activities

I greeted my little chefs into the classroom with a pizza welcome sign.

They sat at their tables, taking a look at the menu before we began the first activity of the day. We started off our day getting into character.

The students cut out and wrote their name on their chef hats.

We read the book Pete's A Pizza By William Steig.

When we were finished retelling the book, it was time to get started on some pizza math!

Pizza Fractions

We discussed that when we look at fractions, we are looking at the different parts of something.

I always like to use the example of sharing a pizza with their siblings. I asked them about the size of the pieces and whether they thought it would be fair if their brother or sister got a bigger piece than them.

It didn't go over well, which was the perfect way to explain that fractions have to have equal pieces.

After our lesson, the students did some independent practice. Then it was time to create their own pizza with shape toppings.

When their pizzas were all ready, they completed a class survey to find out what each person's favorite pizza topping was.

The toppings that students decided between were cheese, pepperoni, veggie, mushroom, sausage, and pineapple.

They were surprised that some people liked pineapple on their pizza.

They colored in a bar graph to match their tally marks.

Favorite pizza topping data collection activity

How to Make Pizza Writing Activity

The next pizza book that we read was The Little Red Hen Makes a Pizza by Philomen Sturges.

We talked about the lesson in the book, and also about how The Little Red Hen had to go through many steps to make the pizza.

Then, we reviewed the steps that we had been following to write a great how to.

I explained that they would be making their own mini pizzas and teaching someone all about how to make them.

I walked them through the steps of making their pizza bagels.

I brought my toaster oven to school so that I could bake their pizzas before they enjoyed them.

The chefs came to life as they added the pizza sauce to their bagels.

I was able to bake 4 pizzas at a time.

While the students were waiting for the pizzas to bake, they described the steps that they were following to make their pizza bagels.

They broke down the baking process into five different steps.

The students squealed when they heard the ding from the toaster oven and I delivered their pizzas.

Paying for Our Pizza

For the last activity, we reviewed the different kinds of coins and their amounts.

In our whole group lesson, we pretended to buy some pizza slices and worked together to find out how much the pizza would cost.

After our class discussion, my students completed independent money practice. It was a great way to make those real world math connections.

I loved getting to see my little chefs working so hard throughout the day. with this engaging theme, students didn’t even know that they were learning.