Memories of a grade 2 mall inquiry: “How do you make a mall?”

Why turn the classroom into just an ice cream shop when it could be a whole mall, with jewellery, food, pet, clothing, and toy stores?! Cross-curricular connections to language, science, drama, math (data management, money, measurement, number sense problem solving - and potential for patterning).

Read about our making-a-mall memories below.

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Memories of a mall inquiry: “How do you make a mall?”

In an unexpected move, I began a job at a new school teaching grade 2 in the winter of 2020. 

During my first week with the class, we were playing together outside so I could get to know the students. Several students were playing with snow and pretending that it was ice cream. To extend this play, I brought food colouring to school the next day and we made pretend ice cream. I realized an easy link could be made to the science curriculum about energy and states of matter, and I taught the students to make real ice cream in a bag, by using snow to freeze the liquid ingredients. We also practised measuring mass and capacity of ingredients and various containers. Some students said we should make a lot of ice cream and try to sell it to other people in the school, and I told the students that, if they wanted to, we could turn the classroom into an ice cream shop. They loved this idea and we got to work right away making plans. As we discussed our store plans, some students said they’d like to make other kinds of stores, too, and one girl exclaimed, “LET’S MAKE A MALL!”  So we did!

Indoors, we made plans and then designed cardboard store fronts and advertising posters. We had a pizza shop, McDonald’s restaurant, toy store, rock and crystal store, pet store, clothing store, book store, and a jewellery store. We made floor plans for our store and measured the areas and perimeters of our store spaces and the doors and windows on our storefronts.  Students were going home and eagerly collecting and making items for their stores, then bringing them to school each morning and begging for more time to do store work. We wrote letters to managers of real stores in a real mall to ask them questions and learn more about their stores - and one manager wrote back to us! Some parents emailed me to say they’d never seen their children so engaged and excited about school before. 

We learned about money - Canadian coins and bills, and their values - and practised buying things and making change. We also did lots of word problem math related to items we sold in our stores. 

Outdoors, we also made a mall, with individual stores set up at individual trees. Students used pine needles to mark the perimeters of their stores, and used items from nature, from the classroom, and from home as their merchandise, money, and receipts. They made up stories to act out about shopping at each others’ stores in the mall. They did additional money and measurement math outdoors as well.

We wrote letters to invite our Grade 7 learning buddies to come for the grand opening of the ice cream store, and had ice cream sundaes with them, which they bought with school money (the cost was equal to the mass of the sundae, measured in linking cubes). 

I decided we’d take turns doing special activities or experiments related to each of our stores, and I’d make specific cross-curricular connections (e.g. crystal store activities (measuring mass, solid/liquid experiments, procedural writing), jewellery store activities (number sense, patterning), food-store activities (measuring mass/capacity, writing procedures), toy store activities (media/design), etc.) We only got through a few crystal activities (see photos below) because sadly this inquiry - our first and only together - was cut short by the COVID-19 pandemic and school closure.